At around five o’clock on a winter evening in 2013, then college student Sam Forstag was driving through a snowstorm toward his third job of the day, making sandwiches at the Subway inside a Walmart.
“I was always late,” Forstag recalled with a laugh more than a decade later.
Halfway there, the gray sedan in front of him lost traction. It spun across the icy road and slid nose-first into a ditch. Forstag’s first instinct was to pull over. Growing up in a tight-knit community in North Portland, Oregon, and later in Montana, he had learned that when someone’s car ended up in a ditch, you stopped. You grabbed a shovel or you called a neighbor. You helped push the car back on to the road. That was simply what people did.
But he kept driving.
“I remember thinking, ‘I should stop – but I don’t have time,’” he said. He couldn’t afford to lose the job that helped pay his rent, car payment and groceries. He thought about it for the rest of that sandwich-making shift.
That memory has become part of Forstag’s political identity as a firefighter turned Democratic candidate hoping to flip Montana’s first congressional district in November’s midterm election. Once a scholarship kid at a Catholic high school, 32-year-old Forstag has built his campaign around a deeply personal argument: that the economic pressures consuming many Americans do more than empty their wallets. They leave people with less time and capacity to care for one another. That message has helped Forstag galvanize young and working-class voters in a district that has long favored Republicans.
Palestinians on Sunday held a mass funeral for 100 people, including 62 children, whose remains were recovered from the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli strikes in Gaza City.
Saif Abu Keshek, a Spanish-Swedish national of Palestinian origin, and Thiago Avila, a Brazilian national, were detained by Israeli authorities late on Wednesday and brought to Israel, while more than 100 other pro-Palestine activists aboard the Global Sumud flotilla were taken to the Greek island of Crete.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) has announced a new international effort to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, with ships sailing between European ports before a planned attempt to reach the besieged Palestinian territory in October. 
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to halt strikes on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv for a period of three days beginning at midnight on Saturday, Sept. 5, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced.
In a different Washington, under a different president, a return to the well-worn playbook of all-out sanctions to counter Iran might have been the signal for a publicity-hungry US secretary of defense to adopt a lower profile.
After recently gaining recognition as the first professional Santa Claus with Down syndrome in the US, Bradley Carlisle has already gotten a lot more than the traditional serving of milk and cookies that is usually left out for Father Christmas each year.
The U.S. military on Saturday said it struck three Iranian oil tankers after Navy ships were targeted by missiles.
