The first full Moon of summer will rise across UK skies this week

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After nearly a year of controversy and several lawsuits, the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center in Florida is officially shuttering. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ explanation for why it’s closing is disingenuous.  

At a news conference on Thursday, the governor said Alligator Alcatraz has “fulfilled the role it was designed to serve.” He also said the facility was always meant to be temporary and that its function was merely to expand space for detaining undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation.

“We set it up as an assist for the federal government, which didn’t have the wherewithal to house and stage illegal aliens prior to deportation,” DeSantis said. “The bottom line is that they have the resources, they have the capability now to execute this mission on detention space. We were never going to make that a permanent facility.”

DeSantis’ account makes it sound as if Alligator Alcatraz was simply a standard detention center meant to temporarily help the Trump administration with space for detainees. In reality, it was designed to degrade immigrants and deter future immigrants from entering the country. However — like so many projects of the MAGA right — it was likely too impractical and politically costly to keep running, and it appears DeSantis has decided he’s had enough of it.

All indications point to Alligator Alcatraz being set up last summer for the purpose of creating a spectacle of domination of undocumented immigrants. It’s not just some coincidence that it was constructed sloppily in just eight days, deep in Everglades swampland teeming with alligators and pythons. Nor is it casual oversight that the facilities packed detainees into cages in reportedly overcrowded tents without adequate sunlight or sanitary facilities, and detainees were forced to put up with maggot-filled food and poor air conditioning. (A former employee at the detention center likened the center to “an oversized kennel.”) 

The Trump administration made it clear that the site should be viewed as a form of punishment; former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned immigrants that if they did not self-deport, “you may end up here.” 

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This isolated swampland dungeon was praised by Trump and helped inspire spin-offs. But it came at a steep price: it was under constant legal scrutiny and cost a ton of money.

As Politico reported, “Continuous backlash and lawsuits from civil rights groups, environmental advocates and the Miccosukee Tribe have plagued the facility, which has been accused of violating detainees’ rights and subjecting them to inhumane conditions while harming the surrounding environment.”One of the environmental groups, Friends of the Everglades, told Politico that even with the operation shutting down, its legal challenge will remain active and it will “demand full remediation of the harm.” 

Democratic senators also began investigations of allegations of torture at the facility tied to detainee interviewees, in which detainees described being shackled into stress positions in a small box. It’s possible that this factored into DeSantis’ decision.

But another issue — and perhaps the most influential one — is that Florida was bleeding money, spending more than a million dollars a day on the facility. DeSantis had requested a roughly $1.5 billion grant from the federal government to cover the cost, but federal reimbursement has been slow and incremental, and vendors were having trouble fronting costs. According to a May report in The New York Times, which cited a federal official, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official and a person close to the DeSantis administration, DHS officials had “concluded that it is too expensive to keep operating the center.” (DHS and DeSantis’ office did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.) 

The financial inefficiency of Alligator Alcatraz was, of course, entirely predictable. Running the facility in such a remote location meant trucking everything in and out, including power generators. 

Did the facility serve its purpose in the sense that it sent a message — to U.S. citizens and immigrants alike — of how far MAGA would be willing to go to punish undocumented migration? Perhaps. But much like the infamous prison it’s named after, the spectacle was impractical and expensive, and eventually, even its champions seemed to think it wasn’t worth the hassle. 

It’s not a good reason for a morally repugnant detention center to be shut down, but if the outcome is less suffering, that’s ultimately a good thing.

The post What Ron DeSantis’ closure of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ reveals about MAGA appeared first on MS NOW.

Odds are that Serena Williams won’t win Wimbledon.

But then, Williams has beaten the odds — and most of her competitors — for the better part of three decades, which is why millions will be watching her return to competitive singles at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club this week.

At 44, Williams hasn’t played a competitive singles match in nearly four years. The tournament announced last weekend that the 23-time Grand Slam singles winner would take a wild-card entry into the singles competition. Serena and her sister, Venus, had already received wild-card entries into the women’s doubles tournament, which they have won six times, most recently in 2016.

Speculation about her return to singles action abounded after Williams announced that she would play doubles in grass tournaments that lead up to Wimbledon. The question was less if than when — whether she would wait until the hardcourt U.S. Open, which she has won six times, or resume her career on the grass at Wimbledon, where she has won seven singles titles.

To those wondering why, or why now, Williams offered an intriguing comment during a press conference earlier this month: “I don’t need to win,” she said. “I’ve won more than most people have in their whole lives. I don’t have anything to lose. Everything is just a gain.”

Is this next chapter of her legendary career really about her children, ages 8 and 2, seeing her play, or is one of the game’s greatest competitors driven to take one last stab at tying or surpassing Margaret Court’s record for the most women’s singles Grand Slam titles?

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Either way, Williams’ timing is likely an indictment of the current crop of women’s tennis stars.

After all, if Williams thought the women’s game had produced a dynasty-level force in her absence, she might have stayed on the sidelines. But no single player has dominated the landscape in recent years. Champions come and go with remarkable frequency.

Thirty-six Grand Slam tournaments have been played since Williams last won a slam (the 2017 Australian Open, when she was pregnant with her first child). There have been 18 different winners in those 36 events. Some would call that parity. For Williams, it’s an opportunity. Yes, Iga Swiatek has won six and Aryna Sabalenka has won four, but that would hardly signal invincibility to someone with Williams’ competitive spirit.

Speaking of Swiatek, Williams could face last year’s Wimbledon women’s champion if she reaches the third round. But first, Williams will face the world’s 53rd-ranked player, Maya Joint. For perspective: Williams won her first seven slams before the 20-year-old Australian was even born.

For all the adjectives that could aptly describe Williams’ competitive dominance, there are realities of mortality that simply can’t be ignored. Williams is trying to become the oldest winner ever of a singles slam event. The last such winner was 35 years old. That someone? Serena Williams.

There is a reason Novak Djokovic’s last slam title was in 2023. Certainly, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz burst onto the men’s scene, but the physical limitations that come with being in his late 30s began to catch up to Djokovic. At 39, he is still one of the world’s best players, but he, too, has found the passage of time impossible to ignore. And Williams is five years older.

To win Wimbledon, Williams would have to win seven consecutive matches. As of Friday afternoon, she was a 55-1 long shot on FanDuel. For a 44-year-old who hasn’t played competitive singles since 2022, those are surprisingly respectable odds. They speak to the esteem with which she is held even at such an uncertain stage.

There are some positives for Williams going into the tournament: She is far slimmer than she was at the U.S. Open in 2022. (She announced last year that she was taking the GLP-1 drug Zepbound, managed through Ro, a telehealth company for which Williams is a paid ambassador and her husband is an investor.) She’s going to need the ability to chase down balls as opponents try to test her endurance. Another positive? Women’s tennis is best two out of three sets, less taxing than the men’s best of five.

Another data point to watch in this comeback quest: How often we see her play this summer could be a clue as to how seriously Williams is trying to regain her top form. If she takes wild-card entries for other top-tier WTA tournaments leading into and beyond the U.S. Open, it would suggest this isn’t just a lark.

Ultimately, there is no downside for tennis in a Williams comeback. An enormous fan favorite, she’s going to draw crowds wherever and whenever she plays.

That said, the smart money says Williams won’t win Wimbledon. She didn’t win a Grand Slam in the five years after her 2017 Australian Open win. She didn’t reach a slam final in her last three years playing competitive singles. But this is about more than whether she bucks the odds of one slam. How many of us would have killed to have one extra season with Kobe, Gretzky, Jeter or Montana? We salivate when we think Tiger Woods might tee up again in a golf major.

We’re getting that now with Serena. We should enjoy this run for whatever it is and however long it lasts.

The post Count me in for the Serena Williams comeback — however long it lasts appeared first on MS NOW.

As I always say to my students, you may or may not like a Supreme Court decision as a matter of policy, but you need to understand it. It is impossible to effectively argue for or against anything without that crucial first step. Accordingly, the key to truly comprehending the Supreme Court’s big Second Amendment decision this week is reading Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s concurrence. 

This week the Court voted 6-3 in Wolford v. Lopez to strike down a Hawaii law that placed new limits on concealed-carry permit holders. Simply put, the law required that gun owners seek permission from private property owners before exercising their Second Amendment right to bear arms in places like hotels and restaurants. With Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, the four other states that similar laws will now also see theirs’ fall.  

Given the Court’s recent rulings on gun control measures, Hawaii’s law was almost certainly doomed. Four years ago in New York v. Bruen the Court held that there is a Constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense. It also created a new, more stringent, standard for evaluating gun control measures. Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion ruled that gun control laws will only be upheld if they are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This is a much more difficult test for the government to satisfy than the previous standard, which balanced public safety needs against the right to bear arms. 

In the wake of that decision, Hawaii sought a way to reduce the number of guns carried in public that fit within the new legal landscape. The resulting law turned the default rule in most states on its head. In most cases, people who have concealed-carry permits can enter private property open to the public unless they are specifically prohibited from doing so. 

Hawaii argued that this was a case primarily about the rights of property owners, not the Second Amendment. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent, argued that “Hawaii’s law does not implicate the Second Amendment because there is no right to carry a gun onto private property without consent (as all agree), and the Constitution does not dictate the form of that required consent.” This argument has initial appeal. 

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But Barrett’s concurrence lays bare the legal problems with Jackson’s argument. Barrett notes private property owners are free to prohibit gun owners from carrying guns onto their property. But this case doesn’t address the ability of a hotel owner to kick a gun owner off his property, it deals with a state action, bringing it squarely under the second amendment’s purview.  

As Barrett also pointed out, states can’t be the one prohibiting people from exercising their constitutional rights on private property, even if it’s open to the public. Barrett rhetorically asked: “What if a State made it a crime to wear religious head garb (say, a hijab) onto private property open to the public without obtaining express authorization? Could that statute evade constitutional scrutiny?” The answer has to be “no,” as this hypothetical law would raise serious First Amendment problems. 

The point is not that guns and religious clothing are the same. The point is that a state cannot avoid constitutional scrutiny simply by routing a burden on a constitutional right through property law.

Because the Bruen test now asks whether a gun control measure is “analogous enough” to “historical precursors,” Hawaii also had to search for a “historical analogue” for its new law. This put Hawaii in the suboptimal position of relying, in part, on an 1865 Louisiana law that was part of the so-called, “Black Codes” for support. That law prohibited people from carrying “fire-arms on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor…” (In its brief, Hawaii was forced to concede that “most of the 19th century laws were understood not to address the carry of guns in general but to curtail the freedom of blacks in particular.”)

States cannot go on a historical scavenger hunt, find a law motivated by discrimination and say “this is close enough.” Beyond being part of an ugly history, the law Hawaii selected had a different  purpose than the one it was defending in court. Accordingly, Barrett wrote that “it is beyond me why Hawaii would claim that these vile laws can justify its present-day restriction.” 

In the end, this decision doesn’t cleanly tell us what the justices think about gun control as a policy matter. Barrett acknowledges that “the right to bear arms is misused in other ways that were unknown to our forebears but pose an equivalent risk to persons or property.” In providing a concurring opinion, though, she does two things. First, she makes clear that  the Court isn’t going to make Second Amendment rights second class rights. And second, it shows the narrow path forward that states have to regulate guns. States wishing to impose gun control regulations must now focus on laws aimed at specific places where firearms present specific risks. 

The post What Amy Coney Barrett can tell us about the future of gun control appeared first on MS NOW.

Bigger is better or so the mantra goes. There’s an exception to be made though when it comes to the huge growth in SUVs. Expanding vehicle size is a part of a systematic push from auto manufacturers to sell their most profitable models — but the costs don’t end on the sales lot. Instead, the surge in both in size and quantity in pickup trucks and SUVs pose substantial risks to life, to the environment and to our wallets.

 As reported by Bloomberg’s CityLab, while road deaths across high-income countries have been significantly falling over the past few decades, the United States has become a road safety anomaly. From its position as a road safety leader in the 1970s, now, only Saudi Arabia and the Bahamas have less safe roadways in the high-income group — and a Swedish road user is around seven times safer than an American.

Pedestrian deaths in the U.S. have risen by 75% since 2009, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. A new analysis from the IISH and The New York Times found that pickup trucks and SUVs growing larger over that period are a significant contributor to that rise. Massive changes in vehicle shape, increases in weight and decreases in driver visibility are all also contributing factors to this worrying trend.

First, longer, higher hoods can extend blind spots to more than 14 feet, two to three times larger than the front blind zones of most sedans and compact cars. Stellantis’ Ram TRX pickup truck’s hood, for example, is taller than the average 9-year-old, compared to the now-discontinued VW Golf, which offers a clear line of sight to an average 4 1/2-year-old standing in front of the hood. A recent investigation from NBC News4 in Washington found that it took 10 sitting children lined up one after the other for the last one to be seen by a driver at the wheel of a typical SUV.

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In a crash, the design of larger vehicles plays a massive role in whether a vulnerable road user, such as a pedestrian or cyclist, will survive. Higher-fronted cars typically strike adult pedestrians above the center of gravity, first hitting vital organs and are then more likely for the victim to be knocked under the car, rather than pushed to the side. According to one recent study, just a 4-inch increase in front-end height was associated with a 22% increase in the odds of fatality for pedestrians. The Times likewise recently estimated that up to 400 more pedestrians would have survived each year if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century.

And where America leads, the rest of the world follows. The appetite for larger vehicles globally has increased, with SUVs accounting for more than half of new car sales. In Europe, there has been year-on-year growth in SUV’s popularity since 2000, with road deaths predicted to be 2,600 higher by 2040 due to increasing car sizes. This growth also poses a particular challenge for urban spaces with older cities struggling to deal with the space needed by these vehicles.

Supersize SUVs aren’t just bad for public safety, but as energy drains, larger, heavier vehicles need more energy to move, costing consumers more at the pump, creating more air pollution and contributing more to our growing climate challenge. In the past year alone, SUV drivers have seen fuel costs skyrocket by up to $630 annually, according to the Global Fuel Economy Initiative, in part thanks to major spikes in oil prices. Further, the shift to larger vehicles has damaged progress on climate action as energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions could have fallen 30% more between 2010 and 2022 if, globally, vehicles had just stayed the same size.

According to the Institute for Traffic and Development Policy, adopting policies that would limit continued growth in private passenger vehicle size would save consumers up to $130 billion a year at the gas pump by 2050. At the same time annual greenhouse gas emissions would decrease by up to 48 megatons, PM2.5 emissions would decrease by up to 1 kiloton (4%) and annual road deaths would decline by up to 11%.

However simply telling people that their car choice poses a risk to others in a range of ways does not appear to lead to changes in buying choices, at least not in the United Kingdom. Instead, a mixture of incentives and regulation is needed to help quash the unmitigated growth of these automotive behemoths.

Tackling vehicle size at a city level, where pedestrians and cars are more likely to mix, and the need to move across rugged terrain is limited, is an increasingly popular option. In 2025, Paris voted to triple parking costs for SUVs, which, complemented by massive investment in safe cycling infrastructure, more pedestrianization, and robust public transport, is reshaping how people move in that city. The new policy is also, as with the ultra-low emission zone in London, helping to shape the vehicle purchase choices of consumers —but it is not enough on its own.

In short, bigger cars cost more to run, put more pressure on our energy supplies, take a toll on our air quality, contribute to the climate crisis and contribute to more deaths in road traffic incidents than would be the case with smaller vehicles. Accordingly, everyone from policymakers to consumers needs to think bigger about the challenges that this supersizing presents. It will take bigger ambitions, bigger policy changes and a bigger resolve to place safety and sustainability over style and profits to bring the monsters lurching through the streets back down to a more manageable size.

The post America’s giant SUV addiction has become a global problem appeared first on MS NOW.

Communities around the U.S. are putting on epic fireworks shows for America’s 250th birthday — but that spells trouble for dogs and cats. Here’s a guide to help the animals in your life.

(Image credit: Joseph Prezioso)