The Guardian
Over 50 million Americans remain under a heat advisory in one of the hottest summers ever recorded, and a heatwave continues to affect vast parts of the country.
Nasa recently confirmed June was the hottest June ever.
The hot and dry weather in the south-west of the US has set off a wave of wildfires. California and Nevada are currently battling a major fire that is uncontrolled. Another out-of-control fire that originated in Washington state has spread into Canada, forcing residents in the town of Osoyoos, British Columbia, to evacuate.
Sunday marked the 31st consecutive day where temperatures reached at least 110F (43.3C) in Phoenix, Arizona. The city’s previous record was 18 days in June 1974.
Doctors in the region reported a rise in first-, second-, and third-degree contact-burn cases, some fatal, amid extreme heat conditions.
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.
NY Times (subscription not needed)
When Bailey Thomasson first spotted the coral, she felt a jolt of relief. She was diving for samples off the Florida Keys, and the thicket of elkhorn coral below looked brown, not the stark white that would indicate bleaching from the record-breaking sea temperatures in the area. But as she swam closer, she realized the situation was far worse than she’d considered possible.
“The coral didn’t even have a chance to bleach, it just died,” said Ms. Thomasson, who works for the Coral Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit group based in the Keys. The brown color was not healthy coral but dead tissue sloughing off the skeleton, almost as if it had melted.
“It just felt like, ‘Oh my God, we’re in the apocalypse,’” she said. “What’s happening?”
With climate change ravaging Florida’s beloved reef, people who’ve devoted their careers to restoring coral in the sea are now racing to get it out of the water, to tanks on land. They’re pushing through feelings of grief and fear over the future to save what genetic material and young corals they can. But in the background, an existential question looms: How can they restore reefs if the ocean is getting too hot for coral to live there?
BBC
The Taliban have burned musical instruments in Afghanistan, claiming music "causes moral corruption".
Thousands of dollars worth of musical equipment went up in smoke on a bonfire on Saturday in western Herat province.
Since taking power in 2021, the Taliban have imposed numerous restrictions, including on playing music in public.
Ahmad Sarmast, Afghanistan National Institute of Music founder, likened their actions to "cultural genocide and musical vandalism".
“The people of Afghanistan have been denied artistic freedom… The burning of musical instruments in Herat is just a small example of the cultural genocide that is taking place in Afghanistan under the leadership of the Taliban," Dr Sarmast, who is now based in Portugal, told the BBC.
BBC
A British man freed by a Cypriot court after being sentenced for killing his seriously ill wife has said he could not find words to describe his release.
David Hunter was convicted of the manslaughter of his wife Janice, 74, in an assisted suicide at their Paphos home in 2021 and jailed for two years.
The ex-miner, 76, from Northumberland, was freed after spending 19 months in custody awaiting trial.
Outside court Hunter thanked his colliery "family" for their support.
He had told the trial his wife had "cried and begged" him to end her life as she suffered from blood cancer.
Al Jazeera
A food delivery driver has been suspended after a video of him eating from an apparently cancelled order went viral on Twitter.
In the video, the driver was seen with his motorbike for the Talabat delivery service parked on the side of a road as he proceeded to open the delivery carriage and eat out of a meal.
When the Gulf-based newspaper Khaleej Times reached out to the delivery company to enquire about the incident, Talabat responded in a statement by saying that the clip was taken in Bahrain and the driver had been punished.
“We recently became aware of a video showing a rider poorly handling an order, which is against our health and safety policies,” the statement said. “Even though this has been confirmed as [a] canceled order, the rider has been immediately suspended, pending further investigation.
Al Jazeera
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser says the road to normalising ties with Saudi Arabia is “still long” as members of his far-right government rule out concessions to Palestinians as part of any deal.
United States officials have sought for months to reach what would be a historic agreement that Netanyahu has said would be a huge step towards ending the Israel-Palestine conflict, but Riyadh has signalled a deal would rest on Palestinian statehood.
“I can identify with what the United States president said in an interview a few days ago, where he said that the road is still long but that he thinks there will be a possibility of progress,” national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told public broadcaster Kan on Monday, adding that Israel is not involved in the US-Saudi discussions.
“I can say that Israel will not give in to anything that will erode its security,” he said.
Deutsche Welle
Efforts to limit tobacco use globally were showing results and smoking rates have fallen, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.
The WHO published a report on tobacco-control measures introduced 15 years ago.
It said 5.6 billion people were now living in countries that implemented at least one of its recommended measures to reduce tobacco use.
This led to a decline in smoking, without which there "would be an estimated 300 million more smokers in the world today."
The rate of worldwide prevalence of smoking had dropped from 22.8% in 2007 to 17% in 2021.
"Slowly but surely, more and more people are being protected from the harms of tobacco," WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Deutsche Welle
The "Islamic State" militant group claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing that targeted a political rally. The EU condemned the attack as "an attempt to weaken democracy."
The families of the victims of a massive suicide bombing buried their dead on Monday, as the death toll from the attack continued to riseThe Associated Press news agency cited police putting the death toll at 54. Other sources have said at least 47 people were killed.The "Islamic State" militant group claimed reponsibility for the attack in a statement on its Telegram account.
The bombing targeted a Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI-F) party rally on Sunday ledprTaliban cleric in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that bordersAfghanistan.
The Guardian US
A huge wildfire burning out of control in California’s Mojave national preserve is spreading rapidly amid erratic winds and high temperatures.
Back in the Mojave desert, wind-driven flames that reached as high as 20ft (6m) in some spots charred tens of thousands of acres of desert scrub, juniper and Joshua tree woodland. The fire had scorched 120 sq miles by Monday and was at zero containment.
The Guardian US
Police in Memphis said they had likely prevented a mass shooting after they shot a man who earlier was reported to have opened fire at a Jewish day school in the Tennessee city.
In a statement and news conference, local police said they had responded to a report of a white man with a handgun shooting outside the Margolin Hebrew Academy and trying to gain entry to the building.
The main failed to enter the school as he was unable to get past the double security doors. “Thankfully, that school had a great safety procedure and process in place and avoided anyone being harmed or injured at that scene,” said Dan Crow, the assistant police chief.
The assailant then fled the scene in a maroon pick up truck before police arrived. However, the truck was then located nearby after an alert was put out.
The Guardian UK
Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.
Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.
Rebecca Pow, the minister for environmental quality and resilience, said the policy had “helped to stop billions of single-use carrier bags littering our neighbourhoods or heading to landfill”. The government claimed the average person in England now bought just two single-use carrier bags a year from major retailers.
The Guardian Australia
Julian Assange’s supporters in the Australian parliament have implored the US government to “get him the hell out of a maximum security prison” regardless of diplomatic friction over the WikiLeaks founder’s eventual fate.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has pushed back at the Australian government’s complaints that the pursuit of Assange had dragged on too long, with the top diplomat declaring that the WikiLeaks founder is alleged to have “risked very serious harm to our national security”.
Reuters
July 31 (Reuters) - The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on Monday on behalf of Oklahoma residents asking a state judge to block the creation of the nation's first religious public charter school.
Oklahoma's Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, one of the defendants in the suit, in June approvedthe Catholic Church's application to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would use millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to operate.
"Allowing St. Isidore to operate as planned would transform Oklahoma's public schools into tools of discrimination and religious indoctrination," the ACLU said in a written statement.
Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, rejected the accusation and said that "Catholic schools accept all comers, so the claim that St. Isidore will discriminate is entirely unfounded."
NPR
With the 2023 Women's World Cup taking place on the other side of the world in Australia and New Zealand, it's not easy to sort out what time the teams are playing.
The U.S. has a crucial game against Portugal on Tuesday and it's particularly challenging to determine when the teams take the field. Why? The U.S. broadcaster Fox Sports touts its coverage begins at 1 a.m. ET — two hours earlier than the kickoff — but doesn't explicitly tell viewers what time the game actually begins.
Fox Sports paid a lot of money for the rights to broadcast the tournament and obviously wants as many people watching for as long as possible.
CNN —
President Joe Biden has decided that the headquarters of US Space Command will remain in Colorado and not move to Alabama, two US officials told CNN on Monday, reversing a decision by then-President Donald Trump.
US Space Command, which is a joint command and separate from the US Space Force military branch, is currently housed in Colorado Springs, but the Air Force recommended near the end of Trump’s presidency that the command be moved to Huntsville, Alabama.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recently recommended to Biden that the headquarters be moved to Alabama in line with the initial Air Force recommendation, according to two US officials. Former Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett also chose Huntsville as the preferred location for SPACECOM headquarters in 2021.
But Biden ultimately followed the advice of the head of Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, who argued that the headquarters should remain in Colorado because it will be fully operational in August and moving it now would jeopardize military readiness, one official said.
NPR
Pee-wee Herman, the comic creation of actor/writer Paul Reubens, would often toss taunts of the schoolyard into his casual conversation. It was one of the character's go-to bits.
"Why don't you take a picture? It'll last longer!"
"That's my name! Don't wear it out!"
And, most iconically,
"I know you are, but what am I?"
Of course, when it came to Pee-wee himself, with his tight gray suit, red bow tie, crew cut, rouged cheekbones and ruby-red lips, "What am I?" was the real question – it was the one he posed merely by existing.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, 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.