The Supreme Court on Friday killed off a judicial doctrine that has protected many federal regulations from legal challenges for decades — delivering a major victory for conservatives and business groups seeking to curb the power of the executive branch.

The 6-3 decision divided the court along ideological lines. Its fallout will make it harder for President Joe Biden or any future president to act on a vast array of policy areas, from wiping out student debt and expanding protections for pregnant workers to curbing climate pollution and regulating artificial intelligence.

Known as Chevron deference, the Reagan-era doctrine required judges to defer to agencies’ “reasonable” interpretations of “ambiguous” federal laws. Now, judges will be freer to impose their own readings of the law — giving them broad leeway to upend regulations on health care, the environment, financial regulations, technology and more.

THE SENATE SELECT Committee on Intelligence submitted its 6,700-page “torture report” about the CIA to the White House in April 2014. More than 10 years later, the full report remains secret after a federal appellate court dismissed a lawsuit I filed in the hopes of forcing its release.

The document “includes comprehensive and excruciating detail” about the CIA’s “program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques,” the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Senate intelligence committee at the time, wrote in a 2014 summary.

For years, there have been calls to release the full report, including from human rights watchdogs, one of its authors, and even Feinstein and some high-ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee.

“The full report details how the CIA lied to the public, the Congress, the president, and to itself about the information produced by the torture program,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has fought to obtain CIA records. “We need to know our real history so we don’t repeat its crimes.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10954294

WHERE ABORTION IS concerned, it appears there is at least one thing on which ideological opposites Justices Samuel Alito and Ketanji Brown Jackson agree: The Supreme Court’s decision this week to avoid ruling on whether federal law protects abortion care in emergency situations was the wrong one.

Their differences immediately reemerge, however, as to why. For Alito, the answer is that there is apparently no federal law that protects abortion access, and the court should have said so. For Jackson, the reason is opposite: Federal law clearly protects patients who need abortion care, and failing to say so puts people in harm’s way.

“How long must pregnant patients wait for an answer?” Jackson wrote in a fiery dissent. “Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is delay.”

The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.

The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a landmark 40-year-old decision that gave federal agencies broad regulatory power, upending their authority to issue regulations unless Congress has spoken clearly.

One House Democrat said he spoke for others in the wake of the president’s stunningly feeble debate performance on Thursday: “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real.”

The House member, an outspoken defender of the president, said that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should consider “a combined effort” to nudge President Joe Biden out of the race.

Crestfallen by the president’s weak voice, pallid appearance and meandering answers, numerous Democratic officials said Biden’s bet on an early debate to rebut unceasing questions about his age had not only backfired but done damage that may prove irreversible. The president had, in the first 30 minutes of the debate, fully affirmed doubts about his fitness.

A second House Democrat said “reflection is needed” from Biden about the way ahead and indicated the private text threads among lawmakers were even more dire, with some saying outright that the president needed to drop out of the race.

The library and its 27 branches continue to struggle through a ransomware attack that has disabled its networks, rendered its hundreds of public computers useless and turned its normal operations upside down.

Book checkouts are being done by spreadsheet. Column A: the library user’s account number. Column B: the book’s bar code number. The low-tech inventory will be integrated with the library’s normal account system at some future, unknown date.

With its computer networks down, the library has no way to check books back into its system, making it more convenient for everyone if you just hold onto your books for a little while. In normal times, the library says it loans out more than 1.1 million books and other items each month.

You can search the library’s catalog, but only from home, or from your phone, not from any of the computer terminals in libraries. The shutdown, which library officials have attributed to a ransomware attack, has now lingered for four weeks, with no solid estimate on when full library services may return.

The downtown library’s fifth-floor computer lab — often the most crowded space in the library — is empty. Dozens of computers, normally available for free to anyone who walks in, sit idle, cordoned off as if physically infected, rather than just virtually. Bringing your own computer won’t help: Wi-Fi networks are down too. (I initially sat down in the Greenwood library to write this story about the library’s broken computer network, before remembering that I couldn’t work there because the library’s computer network was broken.)

Bypass paywall: https://archive.is/yVa8c

Demanding a ransom from a public library system- people can be such scum.

The Supreme Court on Friday made it harder to charge Capitol riot defendants with obstruction, a charge that also has been brought against former President Donald Trump.

The justices ruled 6-3 that the charge of obstructing an official proceeding, enacted in 2002 in response to the financial scandal that brought down Enron Corp., must include proof that defendants tried to tamper with or destroy documents. Only some of the people who violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, fall into that category.

The decision could be used as fodder for claims by Trump and his Republican allies that the Justice Department has treated the Capitol riot defendants unfairly.

It’s unclear how the court’s decision will affect the case against Trump in Washington, although special counsel Jack Smith has said the charges faced by the former president would not be affected.

Nearly 200 people have been charged in a sweeping nationwide crackdown on health care fraud schemes with false claims topping $2.7 billion, the Justice Department said on Thursday.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the charges against doctors, nurse practitioners and others across the U.S. accused of a variety of scams, including a $900 million scheme in Arizona targeting dying patients.

In total, 193 people — including 76 doctors, nurse practitioners, and other licensed medical professionals — were charged in a series of separate cases brought over about two weeks in the nationwide health care fraud sweep. Authorities seized more than $230 million in cash, luxury cars and other assets. The Justice Department carries out these sweeping health care fraud efforts periodically to help deter other potential wrongdoers.

In another scheme targeting Native Americans, phony sober living homes were set up promising addiction treatment. Claims were then submitted for services that were never actually performed, officials said.

A giant sinkhole has swallowed the centre of a soccer complex that was built over an operating limestone mine in southern Illinois, taking down a large light pole and leaving a gaping chasm where squads of kids often play.

But no injuries were reported after the sinkhole opened Wednesday morning.

"No one was on the field at the time and no one was hurt, and that's the most important thing," Alton Mayor David Goins told local paper The Telegraph.

Security video that captured the hole's sudden formation shows a soccer field light pole disappearing into the ground, along with benches and artificial turf at the city's Gordon Moore Park.

The first presidential debate is done and the aftermath has not been good for the incumbent, Joe Biden.

Some Democrat politicians and operatives reportedly texted CNN commentators with hopes that Mr Biden, 81, would step aside. Some floated the possibility of going to the White House and publicly stating concerns about him remaining as candidate.

But if Mr Biden were to drop out, it would be a free-for-all. There is no official mechanism for him or anyone else in the party to choose his successor, meaning Democrats would be left with an open (Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago from August 19-22.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17019315

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/259213

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/259212

British authorities must reconsider whether to open an investigation into imports of cotton allegedly produced by slave labour in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a London court ruled on Thursday, allowing an appeal by a Uyghur rights group.

The World Uyghur Congress, an international organisation of exiled Uyghur groups, took legal action against Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) after it declined to begin a criminal investigation. Rights groups and the U.S. government accuse China of widespread abuses of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the western region of Xinjiang, from where the vast majority of Chinese-produced cotton emanates.

Beijing vigorously denies any abuses and its embassy in Washington has previously described allegations of forced labour as "nothing but a lie concocted by the U.S. side in an attempt to wantonly suppress Chinese enterprises".

"The Chinese government has made it very clear that the allegation of 'forced labour' in Xinjiang is nothing but an enormous lie propagated by anti-China elements to smear China," a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in London said. In its legal action, the World Uyghur Congress argued that the NCA wrongly failed to investigate whether cotton from Xinjiang amounts to "criminal property".

Last year, a judge at London's High Court ruled there was "clear and undisputed evidence of instances of cotton being manufactured ... by the use of detained and prison labour as well as by forced labour". But the legal challenge was dismissed on the grounds that the British authorities' approach to the law – which was that there has to be a clear link between alleged criminality and a specific product – was correct.

The Court of Appeal overturned that decision, ruling that "the question of whether to carry out an investigation ... will be remitted to the NCA for reconsideration".

Rahima Mahmut, UK Director of the World Uyghur Congress, described the ruling as "a monumental victory and a moral triumph". "This win represents a measure of justice for those Uyghurs and other Turkic people who have been tortured and subjected to slave labour," Mahmut said in a statement.

A spokesperson for the NCA said: "We respectfully note the judgment of the Court of Appeal and are considering our next steps."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

All undecided voters in a U.S. swing states focus group hosted by pollster Frank Luntz said President Biden should be replaced as the Democratic nominee after watching his first presidential debate against former President Trump.

A Chinese woman who tried to shield a Japanese mother and her child from a knife attack has died.

Hu Youping was working as a school bus attendant in Suzhou city when a man attacked a Japanese woman and her child at a bus stop outside a Japanese school.

She suffered serious injuries while trying to restrain him.

Tributes for her have poured out online and the local government has said she will be given the title of "Righteous and Courageous Role Model".