Weekly News Roundup - 6/28/24
Dems look for alternatives to Biden after debate // Unrest rattles Kenya and Bolivia // Supreme Court dismisses Republican social media case claiming censorship "coercion"
Welcome to the 25th Weekly News Roundup of 2024. The archive for all weekly news roundups is here. If you notice stories or issues you’d like to see mentioned in these roundups, let me know. In 2024, the Border Stalkers Substack is featuring one news update a week, and one book a month, with weekly posts on each book. The book of the month schedule is here.
These weekly dispatches are designed for people who may not have time to do more than glance at the headlines, or who want to stay informed without becoming obsessed by politics and news. These roundups are a targeted way to get a sense of the shape of the past week on the national level. Without such a map, we can be disoriented, not knowing where we have been over the past several days, or where we may be going.
But by spending concentrated, limited time thinking about the big picture, we can devote more of our time to where “agency and justice begin and end,” as Karen Swallow Prior put it: “on the ground, bodily, in community and real relationships, in flesh and blood.”
This will be a somewhat truncated note this week, since I'm on the road Thursday and Friday for some vacation. Hope everyone has a great Fourth of July!
Quotes of the Week
"Shifting from informal and school-based sports to expensive pay-to-play leagues has landed us in a pretty dysfunctional place, where parenting is unnecessarily complicated, society is unnecessarily inegalitarian, and communities are unnecessarily weak ... Ultimately, people just need to opt out of the craziness. Unless you have some kind of good faith belief that your kid has the makings of an elite athlete, just chill out and be normal!" - Matthew Yglesias
"The true and only greatness of humanity depends on finding the middle between extremes and knowing how to remain attached to it." - Aurelian Craiutu
"One reason secular countries like the United States have robust legal protections for freedom of conscience and expression is the Enlightenment tradition of resistance to Christian domination ... And no wonder: the Enlightenment was in large part a response to centuries of religious oppression, dogma, and violence in Europe ... Today’s religious believers (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and so on) in Western societies enjoy the freedom of conscience and expression which are hard-fought legacies of opposition to religious tyranny during the Enlightenment." Matt Johnson
Big Stories This Week
The heat wave that crested over the eastern United States last weekend was part of a global heat wave that broke over 1,000 heat records.
Ruling governments in Kenya and Bolivia both experienced unrest that saw the seat of the government under violent attack. But neither government fell.
President Biden and former President Trump debated on Thursday night, the first of two agreed upon showdowns between the duo of aging politicians. Biden’s performance was so shaky that the Associated Press headline, on the front page of its website, said that the debate had stirred “Democratic panic about his candidacy.”
The Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by Republicans that claimed the Biden administration had “coerced” social media companies into censoring material online.
The Surgeon General declared gun violence to be a public health crisis.
Week In Review
Friday, June 21
Auto dealers are forced to use pen and paper to fill out paperwork as they deal with the fallout from a hack two days earlier of CDK Global, a software company that serves 15,000 car dealerships in North America.
Four people are killed and 10 are wounded when a man opens fire inside a small town Arkansas grocery store.
Saturday, June 22
Washington D.C. hits 100 degrees, breaking the previous record of 99 degrees on this day, previously set in 1988. Much of the country endures extreme heat, with temperatures around 100 along much of the East Coast, as well as on the West coast. Meanwhile one town in Iowa is evacuated due to flooding after days of rain. Parts of Minnesota, South Dakota and New Mexico also experience flooding.
Sunday, June 23
Washington DC breaks its heat record for the second day in a row, and Philadelphia hits 98 degrees, breaking its previous heat record for June 23 of 97 degrees, previously set in 1888. It is just one of hundreds of heat records broken over the previous week in the U.S. alone, and the early summer heat wave is a global one. More than 1,000 heat records are broken around the world over the previous week, with sometimes fatal results. In Saudi Arabia, over 1,300 people are dead after succumbing to heat stroke during the hajj, a pilgrimage for Muslims.
A bankruptcy court trustee says the Infowars website will be shut down and liquidated to help pay families of shooting victims from the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who are owed $1.5 billion by Infowars founder Alex Jones after he was ordered in 2022 to pay restitution for falsely saying on multiple occasions that the shooting was staged.
President Biden condemns a brawl that took place outside a Los Angeles synagogue between groups supporting Israel and the Palestinians.
Two people are killed and almost 40 injured in five different shootings at large gatherings around the country. There are nine wounded by gunfire at a party in Montgomery, Alabama. Ten people are injured, one critically, when gunfire breaks out on a busy downtown street early Sunday morning in Columbus, Ohio. Six people are wounded in Rochester, New York, when someone starts shooting into a crowd after an argument. In St. Louis, one man is killed and six are wounded when a brawl escalates into a shootout. And late Sunday crossing into Monday morning, a 22-year old woman is killed and seven people are injured by a drive-by shooting at a house party in Dayton, Ohio.
Monday, June 24
100-degree temperatures migrate to the south of the U.S.
The ceasefire deal in Gaza pushed by President Biden is in peril of falling apart, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects an agreement that would end the war in exchange for the release of all the remaining hostages.
The Florida Panthers win the NHL Stanley Cup, defeating the Edmonton Oilers 2-1 to win the best of seven series by four games to three. No Canadian team has won the professional hockey championship since 1993.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange agrees to plead guilty to a single felony charge of obtaining and disclosing national security material, and is granted a release from prison in Britain to appear in U.S. federal court. He is expected to receive a five-year sentence and be released, given that he has already been in some form of confinement for 14 years, including 5 years in a British prison. Assange and Wikileaks have specialized in releasing large tranches of private documents to the public. In 2010 they published thousands of government documents related to the war in Iraq. And in 2016 they released thousands of email records showing communication among members of the Democratic party.
Tuesday, June 25
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declares gun violence a public health crisis, and calls on Congress to pass laws banning automatic rifles, requiring universal background checks, restricting the use of guns in public spaces, penalizing those who do not safely store their weapons, and regulating the gun industry.
Israel's Supreme Court rules that ultra-Orthodox Jews must be eligible for the draft into military service, reversing a policy that has held in Israel for decades in which the country's most religious members have been exempt from the mandatory military service that applies to all other young citizens. The ruling threatens to topple Netanyahu's ruling coalition.
Police open fire on protesters in Kenya and kill at least five, wounding another 30. The protesters had stormed into Parliament in Nairobi, burning parts of the government complex in an outrage after several days of protest against a new finance law that would raise the cost of basic goods.
Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-NY, loses the Democratic primary to a centrist candidate. “The pendulum has swung back. It’s a clear indication that the Democratic Party has moved toward wanting common sense solutions, common sense governance and wants to favor those candidates, rather than those from the extreme," says Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York Democratic Party.
Wednesday, June 26
The Supreme Court rules that the Biden administration has not "coerced" social media platforms to moderate, restrict or take down content. By a ruling of 6-3, the court rejects a ruling by a Louisiana judge a year ago, who ruled that there has been “a federal regime of mass censorship” targeted at conservatives. Justice Amy Coney Barrett's decision for the majority says that Judge Terry Doughty's findings of coerced censorship by the government "unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous."
An apparent military coup in Bolivia appears to fizzle.
Thursday, June 27
President Biden’s debate performance is so shaky that instead of calming fears about his age, it turns them into an existential crisis for many Democrats. “Parties exist to win. The man on the stage with Trump cannot win. The fear of Trump stifled criticism of Biden. Now that same fear is going to fuel calls for him to step down,” one Democrat told The New York Times.
Interesting Reads
Congress passed a clean energy bill and no one noticed, by Gabe Fleisher for Wake Up to Politics
High-pressure youth sports is bad for America, by Matthew Yglesias for Slow Boring
Trump campaign seeks to head off convention revolt from its right flank by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Isaac Arnsdorf for The Washington Post