Evening Wrap

Not every departure is voluntary. In Nebraska, a high school English teacher was asked to resign after helping her students compose a letter asking administrators to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Nebraska Examiner reported.

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday confirmed that he’d directed several House committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, once again bowing to the far-right faction to which he traded his soul in exchange for becoming speaker. The probe will focus on unfounded allegations that Biden profited from his son Hunter’s business dealings during the Obama administration, among other fanciful claims, our D.C. bureau reported.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide which of these stories to lead with, which is dumb because they are all equally exasperating. (In a way, then, a fitting exercise!) I decided to solve this nonproblem by going alphabetically, so we’re going to kick things off in Colorado, where lawmakers continue to warn of rising crime rates even though crime rates have been decreasing since 2022, Colorado Newsline reported.

Here’s the big important news of the day: Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz on Friday referred to fetuses as “human beings” and described Roe v. Wade as an “abomination” during arguments in a legal challenge to the state’s 15-week abortion ban, signaling the conservative-majority panel’s willingness to uphold a policy that opponents say is forbidden under the state’s constitution, the Florida Phoenix reported.

Take, for example, our national epidemic of gun violence. Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers. That rate has worsened dramatically in recent years, jumping from 1,732 gun deaths in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021 — a 50% increase. School shootings have risen concurrently, more than doubling from 2019 (24) to 2022 (51). Since 1999, more than 366,000 children have experienced gun violence at school.

Also feeling the heat: Ocean life off the coast of Oregon, where a growing “blob” of warm water is expected to head inland in the next month. The mass, kept offshore for months by northern winds and colder water, will likely spike ocean temperatures by as much as 15 degrees within days of nearing land, experts told the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

Of course, thanks to climate change, oppressive heat is no longer a regional problem. Last month in Wisconsin, days of extreme heat prompted multiple schools to close down for days at a time. Prolonged drought and scorching heat waves have increased wildfire activity across the state, officials said. On Labor Day, temperatures across the state neared 100 degrees, accompanied by unusually high levels of humidity, experts told the Wisconsin Examiner.

It’s Labor Day, 2023. If you were off of work today, we hope you enjoyed it. If you didn’t get the day off, thanks for your labor on a day dedicated to all the people who do an honest day’s work.

In some kind of idealized world, government is supposed to stick up for the Little Guy, promote the well-being of all, and give comfort to the afflicted and downtrodden. Back here on Planet Earth, meanwhile, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” is still the same corny work of fiction that it always was.

What should have been a routine meeting of the trustees of the Ozark-Dale County library in Alabama turned into a three-hour argument over LGBTQ+-themed books and the constitutionality of banning books from the shelves, the Alabama Reflector reports.

The first clear reference in the scientific literature to climate change appears to have come in 1896, when Swedish physicist Svante Arrheniu, building on nearly a century of atmospheric research, calculated that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise the world’s temperature by up to 6 degrees Celsius — almost 43 degrees Fahrenheit.

Our theme today is schools. And it just so happens that our new team in Oklahoma has much to say on this topic on their inaugural day. In Tulsa, parents and administrators say the state is putting them in an impossible situation: Telling them to get better (or else) while failing to give them clear goals to meet to avoid a possible state takeover, the Oklahoma Voice reports.