• Mahmoud Abbas, the 82-year-old Palestinian president, was examined by doctors at a West Bank hospital over the weekend because of exhaustion and stomach inflammation, aggravated by stress, according to Palestinian officials and doctors.
• U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., will perform community service, part of his sentence for assaulting a reporter the day before Gianforte was elected to Congress, with a Bozeman nonprofit that builds custom wheelchairs for children, according to a court official.
• Bridget Cast, 31, of Longview, Texas, faces charges on top of the drunken-driving count on which she was being arrested after, authorities said, she slipped her handcuffed hands in front of her and drove off with the patrol car in which she'd been placed.
• Mayor Megan Barry of Nashville, Tenn., said her only son, 22-year-old Max Barry, died of a drug overdose in Denver, where he had recently moved after graduating from college, in an incident that authorities said was not considered suspicious.
• Keith Brown, Scotland's economy secretary, wrote asking U.K. officials to legally define whisky to protect Scotland's industry, since European Union laws that define the drink won't apply after Britain leaves the bloc.
• Cindie Roussel, whose son died in 2011 while diving in the Gulf of Mexico, worked with the families of some of the men who died in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig fire to commission a 16-foot-tall statue of a mermaid to be installed in Port Fourchon, La., as a memorial to all who have died at sea.
• Phyllistone Termine was sentenced to 4½ years in prison for identity theft and fraud, with investigators who searched his Miami-area home saying they found him writing a to-do list that included a reminder to buy credit card information from the "dark web."
• Van Shields, the executive director of the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts, defended auctioning off 40 works of art, including two Norman Rockwell paintings donated by the artist, saying the museum's trustees "knew we were going to be pilloried," but that it was necessary to ensure the museum's existence.
• Edward Hanania of Oak Lawn, Ill., was sentenced to five years in prison for animal cruelty for posing as the owner of two small dogs, paying a reward to the person who found them, and then throwing them off the top of a five-story parking garage, killing one of them.
A Section on 07/31/2017