This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, eeff, rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
The hundreds of wildfires burning in Canada are continuing to cause poor air quality conditions for millions of residents in the U.S.
On Wednesday, the National Weather Service issued air quality alerts for at least 20 states from Minnesota and as far south as Georgia. The unhealthy air quality alerts even extended to the Northeast including all of New York state and New Jersey.
The smoke will linger over Minnesota to Washington, D.C., and down to Carolinas on Wednesday afternoon. Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis remained in the top five places for worst air quality in the world on Wednesday, according to IQAir, which monitors air quality worldwide.
Nearly five months after Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville announced his hold on Department of Defense nominees, the tactic has become a major flashpoint within the US Senate as institutionalists inside the body are voicing concerns the hold could have long-term repercussions and are openly warning an overhaul of the nominations process could be needed.
Despite efforts from Republican colleagues, Tuberville’s been resolute, holding up the nomination of roughly 250 military nominees – many promotions that would typically be fast-tracked through the Senate. The dramatic impasse is forcing senators to openly question if it’s time for the body to consider changing the rules or at the very least limit the number of nominations that require Senate confirmation.
“Maybe we need another gang to come up with a set of rules changes, but the vast majority of us who understand these tools should be used sparingly, I think we need to raise our voices,” Sen, Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said.
The 2024 presidential hopeful hosted a panel with some of the loudest vaccine skeptics in the nation
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t limiting his anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories to the COVID-19 vaccine. In a bizarre panel discussion last week on Rumble, a streaming platform that often hosts far-right content, he falsely suggested that a whole host of historic diseases can trace their origins to “vaccine research,” according to Rolling Stone. HIV, Lyme disease, the 1918 Spanish flu—Kennedy pinned them all on vaccines. “It’s just a disaster, it’s given us no benefits,” Kennedy said of vaccine development. “RSV, which is now one of the biggest killers of children, came out of a vaccine lab.” Kennedy, who has maligned vaccines for years, is now making conspiracy theories against them a focal point of his presidential campaign.
The insurance industry is increasingly wary of the risks presented by climate and natural disasters, prompting major firms to scale back their presence in more vulnerable states.
In June, Farmers Insurance announced in a company memo it will no longer write new property insurance policies in Florida, citing “catastrophe costs … at historically high levels.” Earlier in the month, AIG stopped issuing policies along the Sunshine State’s hurricane-vulnerable coastline.
Those followed State Farm, California’s largest homeowners’ insurer, which in May announced a moratorium on new policies in the state, blaming “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” The decision came after years of devastating wildfires have sent insurance rates in California skyrocketing.
For decades, the Supreme Court has gifted corporations with the ability to dodge lawsuits in states where they do business—often extensive and lucrative business—in the name of “due process.” Actual humans receive no such benefit; we can be sued in any state where we step foot. Corporations manipulate this privilege to ensure that they are sued only in states whose courts are favorable to their interests. These artificial people get a windfall. Real people get screwed.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court threatened to topple this regime in a decision that struck fear into the heart of every corporate lawyer in the land. Its 5–4 ruling in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern threatens to revoke corporations’ shield against lawsuits in states where they’re more likely to lose. This sleeper case has emerged as one of the most important decisions of the term. It is a doubly rare bird: a surprising blow to the business bar that is rooted in an unusually rigorous application of originalism.
...On Tuesday, Justice Neil Gorsuch—joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—shot down the railroad’s defense, finding no due process violation. Gorsuch’s opinion rested on three basic points. First, the Supreme Court already upheld a law roughly identical to Pennsylvania’s, which ordered corporations to consent to jurisdiction as a condition of doing business in the state. True, that decision was in 1917. But the court’s more recent rulings, like International Shoe’s “fair play and substantial justice” morass, did not overrule that precedent; they merely supplemented it.
The bill, to be signed by the California governor, requires drawing up a conservation plan and creates a fund to protect the species
California lawmakers have voted to permanently protect the iconic western joshua tree, delivering a hard-won victory for environmentalists who have warned that the climate crisis has imperilled these fixtures of the high desert.
The Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act was passed Tuesday, as part of the state’s budget agreement. It prohibits the unpermitted killing or removal of the trees, requires the development of a conservation plan and creates a fund to protect the species. It appears to be the first California legislation focused on protecting a climate-threatened species.
“It’s been a long journey to get here,” said Brendan Cummings, the conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity, who has led efforts to list joshua trees as an endangered species for years. “We can finally move on from the debate over whether joshua trees should get protection, to focusing on actually implementing measures to help ensure that they get through the very difficult decades ahead.”
Documents obtained by Grist reveal the sweeping changes that the EPA was negotiating before giving in to GOP pressure.
Pastor Philip Schmitter waited more than 20 years for the Environmental Protection Agency to do its job. In 1992, he’d filed a civil rights complaint to halt the construction of a power station that would spew toxic lead into the air of his predominantly Black community in Flint, Michigan. Decades passed without a response, so he joined four other groups around the country in a lawsuit to compel the agency to address their concerns.
The case hinged on the EPA’s duty to enforce Title VI, a provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI allows federal agencies to take action against state policies that discriminate by disproportionately harming groups protected by the Act — the discriminatory policy being, in this case, Michigan’s permitting of a plant that would pollute Black neighborhoods. After the EPA lost the suit in 2020, agency officials finally began timely investigations of civil rights complaints and made some of the EPA’s first-ever findings of discrimination.
That progress, however, could be short-lived.
This week, the EPA abruptly terminated three of its highest-profile open civil rights complaints. The move deals a major blow not only to the majority-Black communities that filed them but also to the EPA’s own authority to enforce Title VI in places with some of the nation’s worst air quality. The cases originated in the region widely known as “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor in southeast Louisiana, and were voluntarily closed after the state’s Republican attorney general sued the federal government for alleged abuses of power during the complaint negotiations.
The Biden administration proposed bringing back rules to protect imperiled plants and animals on Wednesday as officials moved to reverse changes under former President Donald Trump that weakened the Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it would reinstate a decades-old regulation that mandates blanket protections for species newly classified as threatened.
The blanket protections regulation was dropped in 2019 as part of a suite of changes to the application of the species law that were encouraged by industry, even as extinctions accelerate globally due to habitat loss and other pressures
More than 300 actors including many big names have signed a letter to SAG-AFTRA leadership urging them to take a hard line in the negotiations for a new film and TV contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
“A strike brings incredible hardships to so many, and no one wants it,” reads the letter addressed to the SAG-AFTRA leadership and negotiating committee. “But we are prepared to strike if it comes to that. And we are concerned by the idea that SAG-AFTRA members may be ready to make sacrifices that leadership is not.”
The guild is in what could be the final week of bargaining before the June 30 expiration of its current contract, and the letter comes days after SAG-AFTRA’s leaders told their members that negotiations have been “extremely productive” and that they “remain optimistic” that a fair deal can be reached with the AMPTP.
“This is not a moment to meet in the middle,” the letter adds, “and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the eyes of history are on all of us. We ask that you push for all the change we need and protections we deserve and make history doing it. If you are not able to get all the way there, we ask that you use the power given to you by us, the membership, and join the WGA on the picket lines. For our union and its future, this is our moment. We hope that, on our behalf, you will meet that moment and not miss it.”
The famed National Geographic magazine has become the latest victim of those painful Disney cuts: several writers of the already picked-over publication were laid off Wednesday.
Roughly 19 editorial staffers were notified in April that the job cuts were coming, reported The Washington Post. The newspaper went on to report that freelancers will end up picking up the slack at the magazine, which is still the most read periodical in America.
This is the fourth round of layoffs since ownership of the title changed in 2015. Disney took over in 2019 after the Fox deal; the National Geographic Society remains a minority partner.
What are you watching tonight? Let us know in the comments!