Born in US? You're a citizen

 NBC News -  Delivering a major blow to President Donald Trump, the Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked his contentious attempt to limit citizenship at birth for those born on U.S. soil. The court, divided 6-3, ruled that the executive order Trump issued Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, was unlawful. Five justices said the order fell foul of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which has long been interpreted to bestow birthright citizenship on almost anyone born in the United States. One justice, conservative Brett Kavanaugh, said the order violated federal law but not the Constitution.

It is the third significant Supreme Court loss for Trump in recent months, following the February ruling that invalidated his sweeping tariffs and Monday’s decision that barred him from immediately firing Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve.

Supreme Court upholds transgender athlete bans

The Hill -   The Supreme Court ruled states can bar transgender girls from competing on girls' and women's school sports teams, upholding bans in Idaho and West Virginia on Tuesday in a decision set to impact similar laws passed in more than half the country.  Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected arguments that transgender athlete restrictions unconstitutionally discriminate on the basis of sex or gender identity.  

Meanwhile . . .

NPR  - Clergy sexual abuse survivors reached a nearly $400 million settlement with the Archdiocese of San Francisco, advocates announced. The agreement affects around 530 individuals who have filed abuse claims against current or former members of the city's Catholic clergy. (via KQED)

Murders

NPR - The national murder rate in the United States is nearing a record low. Crime data analyst Jeff Asher says that the country in 2025 likely experienced the lowest murder rate ever recorded. Asher shared this prediction in late May, using data he collects from about 600 police agencies for his site, The Crime Index. This nationally representative sample indicates that murders dropped by 18.7% in the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year. All violent crime decreased by 6.4%. An important caveat is that this would be the lowest murder rate since the FBI started publishing national murder numbers in the 1950s. There are some older records of national rates of homicide (a larger category than criminal murder) kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Middle East

NPR  - The United States and Iran have sent delegations to Qatar, after exchanging attacks in recent days. The White House said that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff were on their way there for talks about a long-term peace agreement. Iranian officials have made it clear that they will not meet with them. For Iran, this meeting appears to be more focused on discussing with Qatari officials the release of approximately $6 billion in frozen assets. The release of this money, which is about half of the assets frozen in Qatar, was included in a memorandum of understanding signed by the U.S. and Iran.

 Both countries' haste in these talks seems to stem from a lack of trust, NPR’s Ruth Sherlock says. Iranians, in particular, are concerned that the Trump administration might go back on its commitments, especially given the history of failed talks. Iran is also furious about a separate deal brokered by the U.S. between Israel and Lebanon on a road map to end the war. Israel is still fighting the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. The Israel-Lebanon deal stipulates that Hezbollah must disarm, and it makes Israel's withdrawal from the large areas of land it occupies contingent upon Hezbollah disarming first. Hezbollah, which was not part of the agreement, has rejected the deal outright, calling it a “surrender of Lebanese sovereignty.”

Climate change

PBS - A new online tool out of the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health (YCCCH) strives to provide hyperlocal information about the range of extreme weather risks on mortality, including the potential impact on older adults.  Researchers used peer-reviewed mortality data from 2007-2020 for the XToll climate dashboard. It visualizes how each relevant weather extreme in the county compares to all the others in the U.S. For example, Hartford County has a heat ranking of nearly 67%, while The Bronx, which has some of the highest heat vulnerability in NYC, has a ranking of almost 95%.

Newsworthy News -  Several European countries recorded their hottest day ever during the June 2026 heat wave. World Weather Attribution said the event would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. Researchers said high nighttime temperatures are about 100 times more likely today than two decades ago. Europe has warmed faster than the global average, adding pressure to power grids, health systems, and public trust.

A former Maine chief justice explains how to do it

Sam Smith -  Your editor has noted  how different his mornings and early afternoons feel next to the hours that follow. Starting in the morning I report the grim story of where America is going these days. But when I’m done I soon realize that I’m living in Maine and how different that feels. Which is why this piece by a former Maine chief justice struck me.

Daniel Watham, Maine Morning Star -  As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth reflecting not only on what the Founders rejected, but on what they tried to build. They objected to arbitrary power, to laws imposed without meaningful representation, and to courts dependent on political authority rather than justice. In the Declaration, they accused King George III of undermining colonial legislatures and making judges dependent on his will alone.

Those grievances were not historical footnotes. They were warnings. The Founders understood that liberty requires more than inspiring words. It requires institutions, laws, checks and balances, and citizens willing to defend them.

Our system has never been perfect. The promise of equality and self-government announced in 1776 was denied to many Americans for far too long. But the genius of the American experiment is that each generation has been called to make the country more faithful to its founding principles.

That work continues today.

Here in Maine, the institutions of self-government are not abstractions. They are made up of people in our own communities: local officials who administer elections, judges who apply the law, clerks who maintain public records, lawyers who help resolve disputes, jurors who weigh evidence, and citizens who participate in civic life. These institutions may not always make headlines, but they are the backbone of our republic.

Our republic depends on trust — not blind trust, but earned trust. Citizens have every right to ask questions, demand transparency, challenge decisions through lawful means, and expect accountability from those who serve the public. But our republic cannot endure if every institution is presumed illegitimate simply because it produces an outcome we dislike.

As a former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Court, I have seen this work up close. During nearly twenty five years on the bench and thirty four years in private practice, I saw firsthand how much our constitutional system depends on the steady, often quiet work of people who serve their communities. Our republic is sustained not only by founding ideals or public speeches, but by citizens and public servants who take their responsibilities seriously: following the law, respecting established procedures, weighing respecting established procedures, weighing evidence, correcting mistakes when they occur, and accepting lawful outcomes even when they are disappointing or politically inconvenient.

The rule of law is what separates self-government from raw power. Courts do not exist to favor one party, one candidate, or one public official. Judges do not serve a political cause. Election administrators do not serve a political cause. Public servants, judges, and local officials swear oaths not to personalities, but to constitutions, laws, and the people they serve.

New study finds insects greatly undercounted

Time -  The generally accepted figure for the number of insect species on the planet is about six million. Or at least that was the number. According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, that head count is also likely an undercount, with the actual number of insect species topping out at anywhere from 14 million to 20 million—or more than three times the current estimate. Within that census there are still local collapses: populations of pollinators like bees and monarch butterflies are declining precipitously, and climate change and habitat loss are claiming other insect species, disrupting the food chain, which is built in part on those tiny creatures at the bottom. The tripling of the overall known species count has implications not only for basic entomological research, but for efforts at conservation as a whole.

Donald Trump

Alternet -   "Trump is essentially beyond the reach of the law in terms of actions,” Jonathan Swan, who with Maggie Haberman co-authored the book “Regime Change,” told Peter Slen from C-SPAN on Monday. “Trump has told senior advisers in the Oval Office that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. I don't think they feel any real concern about illegality."

Trump has undertaken a number of actions that cause people to worry he plans on becoming a dictator. The Atlantic assistant editor Marc Novicoff explained in April that Trump has acted like a dictator in that he “prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants … to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.”

Trump has renamed government buildings and institutions including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the U.S. Institute of Peace, Trump Coin, Trump Accounts, TrumpRX, the Trump Gold Card and future U.S. paper currency. He has also unfurled banners with his image over the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor and urged lawmakers to pass a bill to carve his image onto Mount Rushmore.

"Dictators, once they've secured their grip on near-absolute power — and often once they start to get older — have a tendency to lose touch with reality, which often manifests in the form of grandiosity," UK-based i Paper journalist James Ball said in April. "Stalin was still relatively young when he renamed the city of Tsaritsyn as 'Stalingrad,' but building monuments and renaming things is very much the stereotypical out-of-control dictator move: Saddam Hussein had endless statues and monuments built in his image, while Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan renamed months, animal breeds, days of the weeks and cities…. The combination of endless flattery from courtiers, unbridled ego, lack of restraint from constitutional processes — and, quite often, the effects of an increasingly superannuated brain — drives many despots in this direction.

Trump Was Indicted Under the Espionage Act. Why Can’t We Read the Report?

NY Times -   Three years ago this month, the Justice Department indicted Donald Trump under the Espionage Act for concealing and refusing to return classified documents after his departure from the White House. Mr. Trump hasn’t had to face trial, and he hasn’t had to fully account to the public for his actions, either.

The Justice Department abandoned the case against Mr. Trump after he won the 2024 election, citing a longstanding departmental policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. Since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, the Justice Department has worked hand in glove with his current lawyers to suppress the department’s report about its investigation of his actions. Judge Aileen Cannon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, a Trump appointee who presided over Mr. Trump’s case, has issued an order prohibiting the Justice Department from disseminating the report — and effectively prohibiting Jack Smith, the special counsel who wrote it, from speaking about it publicly or even testifying about it to Congress.

Housing

Heat

Nautilus -   With blistering heat waves on the rise , scientists are pondering the pressing question: Exactly how much ambient heat can the human body tolerate? The conventional belief among researchers has been that humans can withstand temperatures up to 35 degrees Centigrade (or 95 degrees Fahrenheit) without suffering major consequences like heat strokes or heart attacks.

But in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Penn State University researchers challenge that limit. They say it doesn’t take into account factors that amplify heat’s effects. For example, many such estimates rely on the dry heat-tolerance level. Dry heat—that is, heat with little to no moisture in the air—is easier for humans to withstand. That’s because humidity—the level of water vapor in the air—affects how human bodies cool off, says graduate student Qinqin Kong, one of the study co-authors. Our bodies regulate temperature in a few different ways. Our skin naturally releases some heat into the air, for one. And wind or a light breeze on a hot summer day can whisk even more heat away. But sweating is best, Kong says.

NYC politics

The Guardian - The New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, said on Sunday that he and a slew of Democratic socialist allies who prevailed in recent primary elections were carrying a “national message” to struggling working Americans hungry for a new kind of politics “coast to coast”. His endorsed candidates won Democratic nominations in three races for New York congressional seats, as well as for five state legislature positions in Albany.

He said collectively they were carrying a “New Deal understanding” of Democratic politics to Congress and on to the “national stage”. It spoke, he said, to Americans feeling exhaustion at struggling to make ends meet “every single day”. Mamdani said: “We don’t have to nationalize that message. That is a national message – it’s a national crisis.

Donald Trump

Two Major Trump Corruption Plots Revealed in Just 24 Hours

Supreme Court cases

The Guardian -   The US supreme court has ruled that Donald Trump’s firing of a Federal Reserve governor was unconstitutional, in a landmark ruling that limits a president’s authority over the central bank. In its opinion, the court said that Trump does not have the constitutional authority to fire a Fed governor without cause.

The case was centered on Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee whose 14-year term on the Federal Reserve board of governors is scheduled to expire in 2038. Cook is the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s board.

Last August, on social media, Trump abruptly fired Cook. The president claimed he had evidence that Cook committed mortgage fraud, an illegal practice where a homebuyer lists a second property as a primary resident to get a better mortgage rate. Cook denied the allegations and sued the Trump administration, saying it fired her without cause.

The justices’ protection over the Fed decision is a departure from how the court has handled Trump in his second term, allowing the president broad power to carry out his agenda without congressional approval.

The Hill -  The Supreme Court strengthened President Trump's control over independent agencies in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, overruling 91 years of precedent that allowed Congress to insulate certain executive branch officials with firing protections.  

In an expansion of presidential power, the ruling gives Trump the right to sack Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee who took center stage in his quest to set aside constraints on his removal authority.

It formally overturns the high court's 1935 landmark decision, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, which laid the groundwork for certain agencies across the executive branch to enjoy a degree of independence from the White House. These agencies regulate vast swaths of American life, including labor disputes, federal employee rights, workplace discrimination, credit unions, product recalls, plane accidents and more.  

"If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

ABC News -   The decision gives Trump and future presidents more control over the government and effectively ends the bipartisan, independent nature of regulatory agencies that oversee many aspects of American life.

President Trump, in a post to his social media platform, called the Supreme Court's decision  a "BIG WIN" and "one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers."

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, accused her colleagues of endorsing a theory of "total executive control" unimagined by the nation's founders.

Election laws

NBC News -  ­ Rejecting a Republican National Committee challenge, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that elections officials may count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day if they were postmarked beforehand

The court, divided 5-4, held that the Mississippi law challenged by the RNC does not unlawfully conflict with the federal law that sets Election Day in early November.

The ruling, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is a setback for President Donald Trump, who has frequently criticized mail-in voting, claiming without offering evidence that it is rife with fraud. Two of the court’s conservatives were joined by the three liberals in the majority.

The decision avoids an election-year upheaval of state election laws. The Mississippi law and similar measures in 13 other states will remain in effect ahead of November’s midterm elections, when voters will decide which party controls the House and the Senate.

Weather

Time - Weather forecasters warn of a prolonged and dangerous heat wave set to blanket large swaths of the U.S. this week and into the Fourth of July holiday weekend, with temperatures possibly reaching extreme levels and posing a risk to public health. The National Weather Service said on Sunday that the “potentially historic” heat wave will cover most of the central to eastern U.S. 

France Recorded 1,000 Excess Deaths During Heat Wave, Officials Say…First estimates published by the national health agency listed hundreds more deaths per day compared with the daily death rate in previous months.

Supreme Court won't hear appeal of civil judgement against Trump resulting from sexual abuse charges

NY Times -   The Supreme Court on Monday declined a request by President Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.

The announcement by the justices did not include any reasoning, and no public dissents were noted.

A second case that arose out of Ms. Carroll’s allegations also could be headed to the Supreme Court. In January 2024, a separate jury ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defaming her in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old rape. Lawyers for Mr. Trump have said they plan to ask that the justices also hear that case.

Tales from the Attic: Tips for progressives

Word

Via Nitish Alodia

Incarcerating women has increased 600% since 1980

The Guardian -  Two new reports raise questions about the economic tradeoffs of incarcerating women - a prison population that has grown more than 600% in the United States since 1980.

Imprisoning women costs as much as 75% more than incarcerating men, but some of those costs could be offset by halving the amount of time women spend in prison with minimal impacts to public safety, according to new reports from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan thinktank.

"Incarceration for women is very expensive, and we are using this very expensive tool, prison, on what is, on average, a relatively low-risk group compared to men," said Dr Stephanie Kennedy, the council's policy director.

Kennedy and her colleagues found keeping women in prison cost roughly $87,000 to $122,000 per woman each year, compared with $70,000 for men. Women's specialized healthcare needs, including pregnancy care, and smaller populations translated to higher per-person costs. The studies found that female incarceration could cost as much as $34bn per year by 2035.

Word

Jon Ossoff: “They worked harder burying the Epstein Files than they ever worked to lower your grocery bill. And while you pay more for everything, the Trumps are raking in billions.

Word

Via Just Saying

Polls

The reality of our first 250 years

Nikhil Pal Singh, Guardian -   Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.

 In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations in the country’s history, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence would seem to affirm this judgment. Our moment, defined by the mobilization of market frenzy, machineries of war, deportation deliriums and nativist passions, echoes Bourne’s; it is a time of social fracture, moral failure and hegemonic collapse, with cynical reason ascendant.

 In the days ahead, the US origin story will be told again with fanfare and at great expense, dressed in the garb of Christian nationalism and gaudy militarism, but drained of its narrative power as a world-making event – the idea that “the cause of America”, in the words of Thomas Paine’s 1776 revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, “is the cause of all mankind”. It is easy in the current context to forget that not long ago, this redemptive idea still resonated. On the night of his election to the presidency, Barack Obama framed his victory as an event that decisively narrowed the gap between the nation’s democratic ideals and its often flawed reality: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

Saving Anuri

Democratic Conservation Alliance - There are less than 900 Arctic polar bears left. And every day their habitat is shrinking, food becomes more scarce, and their chance of survival diminishes. Donald Trump has now put the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - home to the majority of the remaining polar bear population – up for sale. Now, Big Oil is about to move into the only safe place bears like Anuri call home, with full permission to poison their food and even crush their dens under drills and thumper trucks.

Iran threatens ‘complete halt’ to talks with US

The Hill - Iran on Sunday launched retaliatory strikes on Kuwait and Bahrain as it threatens to enforce a “complete halt” to all negotiations that would end the conflict with the U.S. Kuwait’s military said it detected and intercepted Iranian drones and two ballistic missiles. Strikes in Bahrain destroyed the top floor of an 8-story building near the airport, according to the country’s Interior Ministry. No deaths were reported. Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry called the attack “a dangerous escalation that reveals that what Tehran is doing is not a passing act, nor an isolated incident, but rather a deliberate approach and a systemic pattern of repeated aggression.”

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for the Gulf state attacks and accused the U.S. of violating the ceasefire agreed to in the recently signed memorandum of understanding (MOU) between both countries. The IRGC stated that any more U.S. strikes “will result in the complete halt of all diplomatic processes

Donald Trump

The Guardian - On Friday, Trump was addressing religious conservatives at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton hotel – his first appearance there since April, when he was rushed off stage after an assassination attempt at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

“I remember this place not so long ago,” he quipped. “Hopefully, we’re going to have a little more pleasant experience.”

Trump hit some familiar themes in his address, defending his war in Iran, making false claims of election rigging and stressing the importance of Republicans retaining control of the House of Representatives and Senate in the November midterms.

He focused on Tuesday’s Democratic primary election results in New York, where three leftwing candidates endorsed by Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who is the city’s first Muslim mayor, upset incumbent or establishment rivals.

The radical left “want to resume the transgender mutilation of children, they want to restart the war on Christians and churches, and as you saw with the communists elected in New York recently … they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” Trump warned.

“Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it is very easy. And I’ll be honest – I think I’d be the greatest communist in history.” Mockingly, the president said as a communist he could give free rent, houses and food, but the country would inevitably fail after two or three years. He said: “Everyone will suffer or die. That’s what happens.”

Heather Cox Richardson - Observers are noting that the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.

But a report by Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about Trump’s remodeling of the West Colonnade is perhaps an even better representation of the Trump presidency. In March, Trump tore up the light brown Tennessee flagstone that paved the walkway in the West Colonnade that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office and replaced it with polished black African granite carved in Italy. When a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the remodeling, Trump answered: “Paid for by me.”

But, as Scherer discovered, that was a lie. He examined National Park Service budget documents showing that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, all part of a $1.3 million project that includes new hardware for nearby doors. Last year, Scherer reports, the National Park Service spent $347,503 to replace the stucco on the colonnade wall so Trump could hang pictures of the U.S. presidents alongside plaques featuring his own opinions of them. Documents say the project was a “Rush project at request of POTUS.”

Scherer explains that Trump has redirected taxpayer money from national parks around the country to his own projects, leaving the parks unable to make needed repairs or hire staff. Expected funding for more than 900 Park Service projects never arrived—including $424,000 to replace a guardrail on the edge of a cliff in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park that National Park Service employees identified as “a significant safety hazard for visitors.” For some parks, nearly 70% of approved funds have been pulled back.

Trump has also pulled National Park Service staff to Washington, D.C., for his Freedom 250 events, a crisis because the Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office. In his 2027 budget, Trump calls for cutting staff by another 3,967 full-time employees, or 31%.

That budget also asked for another $10 billion to beautify Washington, a sum that Scherer notes is nearly eight times as large as all the money spent on National Park Service projects in 2025. The Senate Appropriations Committee stripped that request out of its marked-up version of the president’s budget.

 

Meanwhile. . .

Time - California billionaires will appear on the state’s ballot this fall after Gov. Gavin Newsom failed to reach a deal with the union backing the measure. Supporters say the tax would help fund health care, education, and food assistance, while Newsom and other opponents argue it could drive wealthy residents out of the state.

NPR - The U.S. was once the leading force in the world's research engine, but it is now losing ground to China. The country may be taking the dominant role due to significant investments and a disruptive year for American universities under the Trump administration. This year, Harvard University lost its top position in a global ranking measuring academic output to a Chinese university. In fact, seven out of the top 10 institutions on the list, compiled by Leiden University in the Netherlands, are located in China. 

The Congressional Insider- A stubborn Boyle Heights cold storage warehouse fire has burned for nearly a week, sending smoke across much of Los Angeles and forcing repeated shelter in place orders and air quality warnings. Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom declared emergencies to unlock state resources, even as officials admit the exact cause of the blaze remains undetermined and walls inside the facility are unstable. Firefighters have battled flames fueled by roof top solar panels, foam insulation, an ammonia leak, and possible lithium ion batteries, while 85 million pounds of spoiling food now pose a major biohazard and cleanup challenge.

Earthquakes

Time - Two powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela this week, killing at least 1,400, injuring thousands, and leaving tens of thousands of people unaccounted for. Humanitarian groups are mobilizing emergency relief as rescue teams search collapsed buildings and officials warn the toll is likely to rise. e.