Florida & Beyond, and All Opinions

Federal Chevron deference is dead. On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old legal tenet that when a federal statute is silent or ambiguous about a particular regulatory issue, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s reasonable interpretation of the law.

Sovereign citizens have long been active in the U.S. and other countries. At the core of their beliefs is the denial of the government’s legitimacy. They commonly do not register their vehicles, acquire driver’s licenses or car insurance, or pay taxes. And they pose a significant threat to the public.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against an estimated US$6 billion Purdue Pharma bankruptcy plan on June 27, 2024, that would have shielded the Sackler family – which owned and controlled the company – from legal liability. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from opioid-related overdoses since Purdue rolled out OxyContin in 1996. The company helped spur a public health crisis through its deceptive marketing and aggressive sales of OxyContin, a prescription opioid painkiller.

The indictments – and in some cases, the convictions – of hundreds of people charged with participating in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, will have to be reconsidered, and possibly dropped, because of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 28, 2024. Among those charged using a broad interpretation of the obstruction law now narrowed by the high court: former President Donald Trump.

The earliest-ever general election debate featured a lot of bitter personal attacks. Joe Biden’s universally acknowledged poor performance surprised and even panicked Democrats; Donald Trump gave a more forceful – if not truthful – performance.

In what has been dubbed “one of the biggest shocks in cricket history”, the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup co-hosts USA beat Pakistan in a pulsating game on June 6. With seven runs needed off the last ball of a “super over” tiebreaker, Pakistan could only manage a single. Cricket is also hardly a mainstream sport in the US. Indeed, the New York Times suggested that many Americans were “oblivious to the magnitude” of the victory.

A peculiar desire seems to still haunt some white people: “I wish I knew what it was like to be Black.” This is a presumptive, racially imaginative desire, one that covets not just the rhythm of Black life, but also its blues. Canadian-American journalist Sam Forster is one of those white people.

After Editors of Columbia Law Review, a prominent journal run by students from the prestigious university’s law school, published an article critical of Israel, the board, which includes Columbia Law School faculty members and alumni, had the law review’s website taken down. The board soon relented and allowed the website back online on June 6, including the article in question. But it issued a statement accusing the student editors of failing to properly review the article prior to publication.

French president Emmanuel Macron told French citizens he had “decided to give [them] back the choice of our parliamentary future through the vote”. These words, pronounced in reaction to the historic surge of the far-right National Rally at the European elections, triggered the dissolution of France’s parliament and snap elections on 30 June and 7 July.

Machine learning has pushed the boundaries in several fields, including personalized medicine, self-driving cars and customized advertisements. Research has shown, however, that these systems memorize aspects of the data they were trained with in order to learn patterns, which raises concerns for privacy.

Blue whales are fascinating animals. At 24-30 metres in length (longer than a basketball court) they are the largest creatures on Earth. They are also among the rarest. Estimates suggest that there are only around 5,000 to 15,000 blue whales left in the world.

President Joe Biden condemned the ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants for Israel’s and Hamas leaders as “outrageous” and accused the ICC of drawing false moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. just a year ago, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another Russian official for alleged international crimes in the Ukraine war, US officials were full of praise for the court. Biden welcomed the action, calling it “justified.”

Radical doubt or scepticism was famously articulated by the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Realising that many of his previous beliefs were mistaken, Descartes suggested that an all-powerful “evil genius” could be systematically deceiving him about his most basic beliefs – much like how the supposed deep state is apparently deceiving those who believe in QAnon.

The Israeli military is reported to have signed off on a major offensive against Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militia, prompting fears that the situation could spiral into a full-blown war. The two sides have been exchanging fire since the conflict in Gaza began with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. But in recent weeks this has escalated considerably.

Immigrants living in the U.S. without legal status but are married to U.S. citizens, will now have protection from deportation, President Joe Biden announced on June 18, 2024. In order to qualify, they must have arrived 10 or more years ago and be married to a U.S. citizen. Those who meet these criteria will be able to get work permits and can get on the pathway to citizenship while working and living in the U.S. legally.