South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Thursday tried his best not to directly attack the 2020 race's frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden. But he did offer some criticism of his record and argued that he hasn't earned the nomination just yet.

Buttigieg during a live interview with The Washington Post was asked about those who say that Biden has "earned the nomination" because of his experience, to which Buttigieg rebutted, "I think you earn the nomination by winning it. Nobody's earned the nomination in 2019."

He went on to say that to earn the Democratic nomination, each of the candidates must not only present a vision for the party and for America, but also prove that they can beat President Trump. He later cautioned that Democrats could "very well lose again" in 2020 if they're perceived as "replicating a system that let people down," although he insisted that he's "not talking about any one of my competitors" in particular.

Buttigieg during this interview also offered some subtle criticism of Biden's record. When asked if Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was right when she said that the former vice president was "on the side of the credit card companies," Buttigieg responded, "I have a difference of opinion with anybody who favors credit card companies over consumers." He also criticized the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that Biden worked on, and when asked if those who supported the bill should be held to account, Buttigieg said, "that's what elections are for."

Still, Buttigieg multiple times avoided more directly attacking Biden, at one point telling the reporter, "I can't help but get the impression there's more interest in one of my competitors than any of the others." Brendan Morrow

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called President Trump on Sunday morning to urge him to support a House-passed bill that would expand background checks on firearm purchases. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says he won't allow a vote on any gun measure Trump hasn't committed to signing, and Trump has gone back and forth on background checks.

Pelosi and Schumer said in a statement Sunday afternoon that they "made it clear to the president that any proposal he endorses that does not include the House-passed universal background checks legislation will not get the job done." To sweeten the deal, they promised if Trump "endorses this legislation and gets Sen. McConnell to act on what the House has passed, we would both join him for a historic signing ceremony at the Rose Garden."

The 11-minute call took place while Trump was at his golf course in Northern Virginia, a Democratic aide tells The Washington Post, and the Rose Garden gambit was Schumer's idea. White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said Trump "made no commitments" on specific gun measures in the "cordial" phone conversation but is interested in "working to find a bipartisan legislative solution on appropriate responses to the issue of mass gun violence."

A historic Rose Garden signing ceremony was also reportedly daughter/adviser Ivanka Trump's pitch to get her father to support universal background checks. The National Rifle Association appeared to have talked Trump out of the idea, and Pelosi and Schumer resurrecting it "was a bit of public posturing," The New York Times reports. They know it's unlikely Trump will embrace a measure opposed by the NRA, even though polls show that roughly 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks. Peter Weber

"Immigration is the subject that [President] Trump campaigned on the hardest, and as president, his tone hasn't exactly softened," John Oliver said on Sunday's Last Week Tonight. But Trump "and his political allies will tell you they love" legal immigration, and that's a large category, he said. About 13 percent of the people in the U.S. are immigrants, and 77 percent of those are here legally.

"So tonight let's talk about our legal immigration system, because there are a lot of misconceptions about a process that, to be fair, most Americans have never experienced," Oliver said. "And a key misconception is captured in a phrase you hear all the time, both from politicians and from ordinary voters": Get in line. "The truth is, for those who want to come here, there is no one 'line' to get in, the lines that do exist can be prohibitively long or have sudden dead ends, and for many people — and this is really important — there simply isn't a line at all."

There are essentially four paths to a green card or U.S. citizenship now, Oliver explained: Family, employment, good luck — you won the visa lottery — or bad luck, meaning you're a refugee or seeking asylum. He ran through all of them and described the extremely complicated, stressful, and expensive path he took to permanent resident status. First lady Melania Trump's parents had it considerably easier, he added, with a disturbing side note about the president's mother-in-law.

"The point here," Oliver said, is that "for all of their talk about how fine they are with legal immigration, this administration has worked hard to reduce it as much as possible across the board," including slashing refugee numbers and tweaking the system to gum it up or put other bricks in Trump's "invisible wall." "If you are going to say 'Get in line' to people, you should at least make sure they actually have a line to stand in," he added. Because "for many people there is literally no way to come in 'the right way.'" Parts of the video are NSFW. Watch below. Peter Weber

Dr. David Fajgenbaum couldn't wait for someone else to come up with a treatment for Castleman disease, the rare autoimmune disorder he was diagnosed with during his third year in medical school.

Fajgenbaum, 34, was hospitalized four times due to the disease, which caused his immune system to attack his organs. He had to go through chemotherapy in order to survive, and he came so close to death that a doctor once told him to write down his living will. "You learn a lot by almost dying," he told CNN.

Fajgenbaum's mother died of cancer while he was in college, and wanting to find a treatment in her honor, he studied at Oxford so he could learn how to conduct scientific research. Upon enrolling in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, he decided he would become an oncologist. That changed after Fajgenbaum's diagnosis and his most harrowing hospitalization, six years ago. At the time, he noticed there were red spots on his skin, and when he questioned his doctors, they said they were nothing.

Once he recovered and graduated from med school, he formed the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, inviting the best doctors and researchers to work with him. They needed to come up with some sort of a treatment, he decided, and fast. While looking at his medical charts, Fajgenbaum saw that a protein known as VEGF spiked every time he had a flareup of his disease. This protein controls the growth of blood vessels and gets the immune system going, and he wondered if this was linked to the red spots once on his skin. He asked his doctor to prescribe an immunosuppressant, and that did the trick — he's been in remission for five years. Now married, a new father, and a medical professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Fajgenbaum is thrilled to see the treatment working on other patients. Catherine Garcia

"The Fake News is saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, 'No Conditions,'" President Trump tweeted Sunday night. "That is an incorrect statement (as usual!)." Where would the news media get such an idea?

Here, for example, are Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin saying Trump is willing to meet with Iran with no preconditions just last week.

Well, maybe Pompeo and Mnuchin just misunderstood Trump? Here's Trump in June.

And last year:

Assuming there isn't some esoteric difference between "no conditions" and "no preconditions," it appears that the "incorrect statement" came from the president himself. Add any parenthetical accentuation you see fit. Peter Weber

Talks between Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's government and the country's opposition party are officially done, six weeks after Maduro's representatives stopped attending the discussions.

Opposition leader Juan Guaidó made the announcement on Sunday. The talks, mediated by Norway and held in Barbados, were called as a way to try to end the escalating political crisis engulfing Venezuela. Millions of people have left the country, due to poverty, inflation, and food and medicine shortages. Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela's National Assembly, said Maduro was not fairly elected in 2018, and he is the legitimate president, an assertion backed by the United States and dozens of other countries.

The opposition tried to launch a military uprising in the spring, but it failed, and Maduro has retained power, refusing to step down. In August, his representatives left the talks, citing President Trump's new sanctions against the country. When talks were still taking place, the opposition called for a new, free election, but Maduro's representatives would not even broach the subject, Reuters reports. Catherine Garcia

Purdue Pharma, the drugmaker accused of playing a major role in the opioid epidemic, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York on Sunday. The move was expected after the company and its owners, the Sackler family, reached a tentative settlement with 24 states and thousands of local governments last week. Under the settlement, the Sacklers would wash their hands of Purdue, putting up $3 billion of the family's estimated $13 billion fortune and turning Purdue into a trust, with profits from OxyContin and other drugs going to the plaintiffs.

This isn't the end of the road for Purdue yet, though, as The Associated Press explains.

The thousands of plaintiffs who have not yet signed on to the settlement, including about half of U.S. states, will likely object to the settlement in bankruptcy court, and there are open questions about whether the proposed settlement is really worth $12 billion and how the money would be distributed. Purdue and the lawyers representing the parties that agreed to the settlement argue that nobody is served by long, costly litigation.

Recent court filings suggest much of the Sackler wealth has been stashed offshore since 2008, making it likely out of reach of U.S. plaintiffs, especially if the company dissolves without admitting wrongdoing or being found guilty in court. "The Sacklers are going to be left with plenty of money after this,'' Adam J. Levitin, a bankruptcy expert at Georgetown Law, tells The Washington Post. "There is a desire that the Sacklers pay some blood money, but it's never going to be enough to make everyone happy.''

OxyContin accounts for only a slice of the opioid drugs sold in the U.S., but Purdue's aggressive and misleading marketing is blamed for helping spark the opioid addiction crisis. Since 1999, more than 200,000 people have died from overdoses of prescription opioids. Peter Weber