U.S. and world news for July 23

Secret Service: Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned today in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Yesterday, when she testified before Congress, she said that the event represented the most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades. In her resignation announcement today, she took full responsibility as head of the agency for the security failure. Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced this morning that they are forming a joint task force to conduct a nonpartisan investigation into the Secret Service’s apparent failures that allowed the attempted assassination to take place.

Harris’ delegate count: The Associated Press reported this morning that a survey it has conducted shows that Vice President Kamala Harris has enough delegate votes to be nominated as the Democratic candidate for president. The AP said that Harris had 2,668 delegates and only 1,976 are needed to secure the nomination. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut’s delegates are among those who have pledged support to Harris. However, the AP said it was not ready to name Harris as the nominee since delegates are free to change their minds.

Trump appeals conviction: Lawyers for Donald Trump have filed an appeal of the conviction of Trump and co-defendants on business fraud and claim that the $454 million judgment in the case is excessive. They repeated some of the arguments they used during the trial before Judge Arthur Engoron including a claim that some of the crimes for which Trump was convicted had no victims and no losses. They also charged that New York State Attorney General Letitia James lacked standing to bring the case against Trump.

Vance comments: CNN reported today that a spokesperson for Republican vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance is trying to distance Vance from comments he made several years ago in which he said that he believed the women who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting them. In a post on Twitter, Vance had asked what percentage of American women has Trump assaulted. That post was later deleted. The spokesperson for Vance said that what Vance said years ago does not reflect his views on Trump today.

Delta cancellations: Delta Air Lines continued to try to recover today from the software update issue that caused a worldwide computer meltdown last week. Delta CEO Ed Bastian said it will take another couple of days for the airline to completely recover. Thousands of Delta passengers continued to face delays and cancellations. Other airlines that were affected have almost completely recovered. Delta had canceled about 700 flights yesterday with more than 5,500 flights canceled since the computers started failing due to a defective software update.

Spotify financials: Spotify, the digital music, video and podcast service, reported today that its second quarter revenues grew by 20% over last year’s second quarter revenues, reaching $4.09 billion. The operating profit was $289 million. Spotify had 626 million subscribers in the second quarter of the year, up 14% from the same period last year. It reported having 246 million subscribers to its premium service who pay a fee to avoid having advertising fed to them.