Good morning.
The US’s summer of weather misery is expected to escalate further this week as the south-west braces for record-breaking temperatures never seen before.
Over the weekend, the National Weather Service issued a warning about forthcoming further excessive heat in an already scorching month, even by typical US desert standards. The warning covers the entire Phoenix metro area and beyond in Arizona, and it will remain in effect until at least Sunday. It came after a week of record-high global temperatures in what is predicted to be the hottest month in the US ever recorded, accelerated by the ocean-atmosphere phenomenon known as El Niño pattern, as the climate crisis continues to spiral.
“We are still anticipating this current heatwave to continue through next week and likely beyond with it rivaling some of the worst heatwaves this area has ever seen. This week has been hot with temperatures on average five degrees above normal in the Phoenix area to a few degrees above normal across the western deserts, but there is very high confidence this heat will get even worse next week,” the National Weather Service (NWS) warned last Friday.
“Tuesday through the rest of the week, temperatures across the region may be some of the hottest we have ever seen,” the government agency added, often with little cooling at night.
What has the NWS said? “The atmospheric setup … also looks to have similarities to the conditions on July 28 1995, that led to Phoenix reaching 121 degrees and Yuma hit 124 degrees,” the NWS said, adding: “Even if we do not get quite that hot during this current heatwave, this should go down as one of the longest, if not the longest duration heatwave this area has ever seen.”
Twitter faces legal challenge after failing to remove reported hate tweets
Twitter faces a landmark legal challenge after the social media firm failed to remove a series of hate-filled tweets reported by users in what could be a turning point in establishing new standards of scrutiny regarding online antisemitism.
The California-based company, owned since last year by Elon Musk, was alerted to six antisemitic or otherwise racist tweets in January this year by researchers at HateAid, a German organisation that campaigns for human rights in the digital space, and the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS), but did not remove them from its platform despite the tweets apparently clearly contravening its own moderation policy.
Four of the tweets denied the Holocaust in explicit terms. One said “blacks should be gassed and sent with Space X to Mars”, while a sixth compared Covid vaccination programmes to mass extermination in Nazi death camps. All were reported in January but Twitter ruled that three of the tweets did not violate its guidelines and failed to respond to the other reports, the legal action claims.
HateAid and the EUJS applied earlier this year to a Berlin court to have the tweets deleted, arguing the tweets broke German law and that Twitter had failed to meet contractual obligations to provide a secure and safe environment for its users.
Has Twitter taken any action? Twitter has received notice of the legal action and has since acted to block some of the offending tweets.
Cluster bombs to Ukraine will damage US moral leadership, Democrat says
The decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine risks costing the US its “moral leadership” in world affairs, the influential California Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee said.
“We know what takes place in terms of cluster bombs being very dangerous to civilians,” Lee said. “They don’t always immediately explode. Children can step on them. That’s a line we should not cross.”
In 2001, Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan. She is running to replace the retiring Dianne Feinstein in the Senate next year.
Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, she added: “I think [Joe Biden] has been doing a good job managing … [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s aggressive war against Ukraine, but I think that this should not happen. [Biden] had to ask for a waiver under the Foreign Assistance Act just to do it because we have been preventing the use of cluster bombs since I believe 2010.”
What has Biden said? The president said: “Two things … and it was a very difficult decision on my part. And I discussed this with our allies, discussed this with our friends up on [Capitol] Hill. And we’re in a situation where Ukraine continues to be brutally attacked across the board by … these cluster munitions that have dud rates that are … very high, that are a danger to civilians, number one.”
In other news …
Six people have been killed and one injured in an early morning knife attack at a kindergarten in southern China. A 25-year-old man has been detained over a fatal incident in the town of Lianjiang, in Guangdong province, local police said. The victims included a teacher, two parents and three children.
A former CNN reporter is suing the news channel for unfair dismissal and racial discrimination after she was severely injured while on an assignment in Israel. Saima Mohsin was left disabled after an accident while reporting from Jerusalem on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Attempts by the Greek coastguard to tow a fishing trawler carrying hundreds of migrants may have caused the vessel to sink, according to a new investigation by the Guardian and media partners that has raised further questions about the incident, which left an estimated 500 people missing.
The leaders of Sweden and Turkey are to meet in a last-ditch attempt to bridge a diplomatic impasse over Stockholm’s stalled Nato membership drive, which has been held up by Ankara. Today’s high-stakes talks between the Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will take place on the eve of an alliance summit.
Authorities have identified the six California residents who died on Saturday when the small plane they were traveling in crashed after after taking off in Las Vegas. Lindsey Gleiche, 31; Riese Lenders, 25; Alma Razick, 51; Ibrahem Razick, 46; Abigail Tellez-Vargas, 33; and Manuel Vargas-Regalado, 32 all died.
Stat of the day: US food agency called on to investigate Prime energy drink, which contains six Coke cans’ worth of caffeine
An influencer-backed energy drink that has attracted viral popularity among children is facing scrutiny from lawmakers and health experts over its potentially dangerous levels of caffeine. Advertising itself as zero sugar and vegan, the neon-colored cans are among a growing number of energy drinks with elevated levels of caffeine; in Prime’s case, 200mg per 12 ounces, equivalent to about half a dozen Coke cans or nearly two Red Bulls. On Sunday, Senator Charles Schumer called on the Food and Drug Administration to investigate Prime, a beverage brand founded by the YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI that has become something of an obsession among the influencers’ legions of young followers. “One of the summer’s hottest status symbols for kids is not an outfit, or a toy – it’s a beverage,” said Schumer, a Democrat from New York. “But buyer and parents beware because it’s a serious health concern for the kids it so feverishly targets.”
Don’t miss this: She performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim. The right vilified her
“If the United States was a country that valued women and girls, or that understood the moral gravity of misogyny, then there would be statues to people like Caitlin Bernard,” writes Moira Donegan. “The Indiana doctor has long been a champion of reproductive rights; she joined a 2019 lawsuit challenging her state’s Roe-era ban on dilation and evacuation abortions, or D&E procedures; she’s long been outspoken, in her very red state, about her faith that women and girls are worthy of control over their own bodies. So maybe Indiana Republicans, like the attorney general Todd Rokita, already thought of her as an enemy in July 2022, when, just days after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe and threw an anti-abortion trigger ban into effect in neighboring Ohio, Bernard performed an abortion on a patient who had had to travel to Indiana to get her procedure: a 10-year-old girl, the victim of rape.”
Climate check: ‘What are we willing to sacrifice?’ A journey down America’s most endangered river
Our small metal boat glides through the current as it snakes between steep sandstone cliffs, writes Gabrielle Cannon. Tucked between America’s two largest reservoirs, the stretch of the Colorado River that lies north-east of the Grand Canyon is cool and calm. As the water glimmers in the early morning light, it is easy to forget this serene waterway has been named the most endangered in the US. But as we round a bend, a shadow envelops the boat and Glen Canyon Dam comes into view – 4.9m cubic yards of concrete ominously arching 710ft into a cloudless sky. “This is as close as we can get,” says Ted Kennedy, a biologist and one of my guides for the day, as he cuts the engine.
The Colorado River has long been caught in a delicate balancing act – part resource, part wilderness. Now, the stakes are rising. As the climate crisis creates new challenges, tensions between states and the increasing needs of those who hold rights to this water are pushing the riparian ecosystems into dangerous new territory.
Last Thing: What is a TikTok ‘girl dinner’ and should I eat one tonight?
In the last seven days more than 1,000 of the food videos on TikTok (viewed a collective 14m times) have been about girl dinner: an assemblage of no-cook snacks eaten as a meal. Cheese and bread? That’s a girl dinner. Want to add crudites and charcuterie? Still a girl dinner. Scones, applesauce, pickles and goldfish? Yes. Many of these girl dinners, however, are “suspiciously low cal” as noted by many TikTok users – and over the weekend both Today and the New York Times. The pro-girl dinner faction argue that highlighting what women choose to eat when they are alone (something that requires very little labour) serves as an antidote to diet culture and the mental load traditionally required to get food on the table. The girl dinner’s critics argue that given how overly aestheticised and nutritionally impoverished many of the meals being shared as “girl dinner” seem to be, it is just perpetuating diet culture and performed femininity.
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