Former US Vice-President Kamala Harris has delivered her sharpest criticism yet of her former boss, calling Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term “recklessness” in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir.

“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in her book. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”

In an extract for her book 107 Days, published by The Atlantic on Wednesday, Harris also describes moments where she felt sidelined or denied credit for her work by Biden’s team.

The BBC has contacted Biden’s office for comment.

Harris wrote that as vice-president she was in the “worst position” to tell Biden not to run for president again.

“I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run,” she wrote. “He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.”

The Atlantic published a 3,000-word excerpt from Harris’s book – the title is a reference to the length of her failed presidential campaign. The book will be published in full later this month.

Biden withdrew from the 2024 race following a dismal debate performance against then Republican candidate Donald Trump.

The debate performance fuelled questions about Biden’s age and mental fitness to lead the country. Harris eventually lost the election to Trump.

Harris wrote that 81-year-old Biden’s choice to run for re-election “should have been more than a personal decision”.

“The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition,” she wrote.

She denied that there was a “big conspiracy” to hide Biden’s frailty and described the former president as “a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president”.

“But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles,” she wrote.

Harris also alleges the White House failed to adequately respond to her critics.

The former vice-president recalled securing billions of dollars in investment commitments from private companies for Latin American countries to help tackle the root cause of migration.

Despite this, Harris wrote, Republicans “mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar'” – a description that dogged her during her presidential campaign as the number of illegal border crossings spiked.

“No one in the White House [communications] team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” she wrote.

Harris also described a trip she made to Texas in July 2024, in the wake of a devastating hurricane, and listening to a televised address by Biden while in a hotel room in Houston.

“It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it,” she wrote. “But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.”

Biden and Harris both ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and Biden chose his former rival as his running mate. Their ticket defeated Donald Trump and Mike Pence in November of that year.

Despite suggestions from critics that he was too old to serve a second four-year term, Biden launched a re-election bid in 2023.

Harris plans to go on a book tour of 15 cities, including in the United Kingdom and Canada, for 107 Days. The book is expected to go on sale on 23 September.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison became the richest person in the world Wednesday morning, with shares of the tech giant he co-founded surging more than 40%.

As of 10 a.m. ET, Ellison’s wealth was nearly $400 billion. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who had occupied the top spot, currently has a fortune of about $385 billion, according to Bloomberg. The news outlet keeps tabs on the world’s wealthiest people with its billionaires index.

Behind Ellison and Musk in the rankings sit Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The rapid rise in Ellison’s wealth comes as he and his family push into artificial intelligence, media and politics.

Oracle’s stock move Wednesday was fueled primarily due to the company announcing a $450 billion-plus backlog for cloud services and multibillion-dollar computing contracts with major AI players Nvidia and ChatGPT backer OpenAI.

“Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers,” Oracle said. It expects that backlog of business will likely soon “exceed half-a-trillion dollars.”

The Ellison family further expanded its empire when Ellion’s son, David, recently completed an $8 billion takeover of CBS and MTV owner Paramount Global. That transaction was funded in part by $6 billion from the Ellison family fortune, CNBC reported.

Larry Ellison, a major backer of President Donald Trump, also recently visited the White House, announcing a massive datacenter project with Softbank’s chief Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

That project promised to use Oracle technology in creating the $500 billion network of datacenters.

Ellison, 81, co-founded Oracle more than 40 years ago. The company’s stock market value closed in on $1 trillion during Wednesday’s trading.

Congress did not extend President Donald Trump’s Aug. 11 order that federalized the Washington, D.C., city police force and launched a surge of law enforcement into the city. The takeover will end at midnight, according to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office, but in practical terms, what citizens see might not change much. D.C. guard members’ orders have been extended through December, and they are under the president’s direct command, unlike in the states where governors command their National Guard contingents.

This measure of control the city may be regaining comes the same day a House committee begins debating 13 bills that, if approved, would wrest away even more of the city’s governing ability.

Trump’s takeover of the capital’s policing and Wednesday’s discussions by the House underscore how interlinked the nation’s capital is with the federal government and how much the city’s capacity to govern is beholden to federal decisions.

In practical terms, what citizens see might not change much.