Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. 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.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
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Chicago Sun-Times: Battle over Illinois' assault weapon ban will continue after Supreme Court declines to get involved by Jon Seidel
The U.S. Supreme Court will not consider challenges to Illinois’ controversial assault weapons ban, for now.
That doesn’t mean it’s not headed to the nation’s high court one day. In fact, a federal judge in southern Illinois has been preparing for a Sept. 16 trial in which he could more fully take on the question of whether the weapons ban passes constitutional muster.
Whatever that trial’s result, it could soon put Illinois’ law back on track to the Supreme Court, which Justice Clarence Thomas says must offer more guidance “on which weapons the Second Amendment covers.”
Thomas made his comment Tuesday as the Supreme Court declined to hear challenges to the assault-weapons ban enacted in January 2023. The news came days before the two-year anniversary of the Highland Park Fourth of July parade shooting, which inspired the law.
The Supreme Court’s order noted that Justice Samuel Alito would have heard the case. And it included a three-page statement from Thomas, who noted that the matter landed before the justices only in the form of a preliminary injunction challenge.
NBC News: Hurricane Beryl reaches record winds of 165 mph as the powerful storm barrels toward Jamaica by Phil Helsel, Mirna Alsharif, and Patrick Smith
Hurricane Beryl, the record-setting, powerful storm that has claimed at least six lives in the Caribbean, weakened slightly Tuesday as it makes its way toward Jamaica, but is still a major Category 4 with life-threatening winds and storm surge.
The storm, which was expected to hit Jamaica directly or pass near it Wednesday, had been a Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 165 mph — making it the strongest July hurricane ever recorded, beating Emily from 2015, according to the National Hurricane Center.
By Tuesday night the storm was a Category 4 with 150 mph winds, but it will be still a major hurricane when it passes by or over Jamaica, forecasters warned.
“Beryl is still a very powerful Category 4 hurricane,” National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan said in a video briefing Tuesday.
Washington Post: Obama shares concerns after shaky debate, offers Biden his advice by Tyler Pager and Michael Scherer
Former president Barack Obama has privately told allies who have reached out to him that President Biden’s already-tough path to reelection grew more challenging after his shaky debate performance on Thursday — a harsher assessment of the presidential race than his public comments, according to several people familiar with his remarks.
Obama separately spoke directly with Biden by phone after last Thursday’s debate to offer his support as a sounding board and private counselor for his embattled former vice president, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. It is unclear how directly Obama addressed Biden’s performance and his path to reelection on the call.
“President Biden is grateful for President Obama’s unwavering support since the very start of this campaign as both a powerful messenger to voters and a trusted adviser directly to the president,” Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement. A spokesperson for Obama declined to comment.
New York Times: Northwestern Law School Accused of Bias Against White Men in Hiring by Anemona Hartocollis
A conservative group filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University’s law school on Tuesday, claiming that its attempts to hire more women and people of color as faculty members violate federal law prohibiting discrimination against race and sex.
The complaint, coming just over a year after the Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions, is expected to be among the first in a wave of new legal challenges attacking the way that American universities hire and promote professors.
The lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Chicago, calls that process “a cesspool of corruption and lawlessness.” It says Northwestern has deliberately sidelined white male candidates for faculty positions at the law school, giving preference to candidates of other races and gender identities.
Jon Yates, a Northwestern spokesman, said the university would defend its hiring practices in court. “Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is among the top law schools in the country, and we are proud of their outstanding faculty,” he said in a statement.
BBC News: Chris Mason: We stand on the threshold of a landmark election by Chris Mason, Political editor
The general election campaign is all but over.
In the last few weeks, recent precedent suggests up to one in five voters have already voted, by post.
Tomorrow, it is the big moment for everyone else.
It is six weeks to the day since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got a drenching in Downing Street and this roadshow of persuasion began.
So, what has changed, what hasn’t changed and what does this tell us about where we find ourselves?
The stand-out fact at the heart of this campaign is that for all the noise and hullaballoo over the past month-and-a-half, the colossal gap in the opinion polls between Labour and the Conservatives has barely budged.
Conservatives, from the top down, are braced for defeat - and a potentially catastrophic one at that.
DW: France: Candidates exit runoff in tactic to stop far-right
Over 200 opponents of France's National Rally (RN) party on Tuesday withdrew as candidates from next Sunday's second round of voting as they seek a so-called "republican front" against the far-right.
President Emmanuel Macron's centrists and the broad NFP left-wing grouping hope to stop the far-right from taking power in the lower house of parliament after it won roughly 33% of the vote at the first round last Sunday.
Roughly 210 pro-Macron and left-wing candidates withdrew from competing in Sunday's second round for the 577-seat national parliament by a Tuesday evening deadline.
Macron's camp has started cooperating with the NFP, hopeful that tactical voting will prevent RN and certain aligned candidates from winning the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority.
The tactical withdrawals would be accompanied by cross-party calls for voters to back whichever candidate is best placed to defeat their local RN rival.
El País in English: The planet’s vision is getting worse: 50% of the population will have myopia by 2050 by Jessica Mouzo
In some classrooms in China, a type of railing anchored to the desk separates the child from the table and keeps their view of the book at a safe distance. In other schools, students wear a hat with a ball that balances on the brim: if the ball falls off, it means that the kids have lowered their heads too much and have gotten too close to the notebook. All these initiatives are designed to combat the rise of myopia, which is especially rampant in some Asian countries and expanding throughout the globe. Experts warn that, fueled by the overuse of screens and the decline in outdoor activity, half of the world’s population will have myopia by 2050.
This condition is a common disorder of visual focus due to an enlargement of the eye. “It’s an eye that grows larger than its age. The axial length, which is the distance between the cornea and the retina, increases and the focusing point is in front of the retina [and not on it],” explains Silvia Alarcón, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Vall d’Hebron Hospital in Barcelona. The axial length of a healthy eye is usually around 23 millimeters, but in a myopic eye it can reach 30 or 35 millimeters. In practice, this deformation of the eye causes light rays to refract incorrectly and the point of focus to be deviated, resulting in blurred vision of distant objects.
There are different degrees of myopia, but the experts who spoke to EL PAÍS point out that after three diopters “it is difficult to lead a normal life” without correction, such as glasses, for example. And the greater the degree of myopia — such as magna myopia, when a person has refraction of more than six diopters —, the greater the risk of developing pathological ocular changes that can cause irreversible vision loss, such as cataracts, glaucoma, retinal detachment and myopic macular degeneration. In 2010, uncorrected refractive error was estimated to be the most common cause of distance visual impairment and the second most common cause of blindness worldwide.
Have the best possible evening everyone!