News in brief for June 3

SCOTUS turns down challenge to semiautomatic rifles

WASHINGTON (NYT) — The Supreme Court announced Monday that it would not hear a major Second Amendment challenge to a Maryland law banning semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15. As is the court’s practice, its brief order gave no reasons.

The move, over the objections of three conservative justices, let the ban stand and reflected the court’s intermittent engagement with gun rights. It has issued only three significant Second Amendment decisions since recognizing an individual right to own guns in 2008.

The Maryland law was enacted in 2013 in response to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut the previous year. It banned many semiautomatic rifles and imposed a 10-round limit on gun magazines.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the court should have considered the question, which the justices have repeatedly declined to resolve.

“I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America,” he wrote. “That question is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners throughout the country. We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they too would have heard the case but did not provide reasons.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who could have supplied the fourth vote needed to add the case to the court’s docket, issued a statement saying the question was significant and could soon warrant review but that he hoped additional opinions from lower courts could assist the justices on the issue. He wrote that the Supreme Court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next term or two.”

That eventual case will require the court to apply its recently minted test for assessing constitutional challenges to gun control measures, one that requires judges to strike down such laws unless they are “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

A giant plume of Saharan dust is headed to Florida

(NYT) — A giant cloud of Saharan dust the size of the continental United States floating over the Atlantic Ocean was expected to spread across the Gulf Coast region this week. By the time the thick plume reaches Florida, it will have traveled over 5,000 miles from North Africa.

The National Weather Service office in Puerto Rico warned of poor air quality and advised people with respiratory issues such as asthma to wear masks.

The plume will have lost some density by the time it reaches South Florida and other Gulf Coast states by the middle of the week, but residents may still notice that the world outside appears different as dust high in the atmosphere scatters sunlight.

“Typically we have nice blue skies, but with the dust, the whole sky looks soft and warm because the particles themselves are red,” said Joseph Prospero, professor emeritus at the University of Miami Center for Aerosol Science and Technology.

The transport of dust from the Sahara in North Africa to far-flung places across the globe is one of the great wonders of the weather world. And we’re right at the start of the season when dust most commonly moves across the Atlantic.

The dust headed toward the United States left Africa last week and drifted into the Caribbean over the weekend.

The plume was stretched across the central Atlantic on Friday and started filtering into the Caribbean over the weekend.

After overtaking the Caribbean, the dust is expected to push into the Gulf of Mexico and then into the nearby states, from Florida to Texas, with hazy skies expected in the region potentially through Friday.

Trump to open Alaskan wilderness to drilling, mining

(NYT) — The Trump administration said Monday that it planned to eliminate federal protections across millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness, a move that would allow drilling and mining in some of the last remaining pristine wilderness in the country.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the Biden administration had exceeded its authority last year when it banned oil and gas drilling in more than half of the 23 million-acre area, known as the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The proposed repeal is part of President Donald Trump’s aggressive agenda to “drill, baby, drill,” which calls for increased oil and gas extraction on public lands and the repeal of virtually all climate and environmental protections.

“We’re restoring the balance and putting our energy future back on track,” Burgum said in a statement.

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska is an ecologically sensitive expanse of land about 600 miles north of Anchorage, bounded by the Chukchi Sea to the west and the Beaufort Sea to the north. It is the largest single area of public land in the United States. It covers crucial habitat for grizzly bears, polar bears, caribou, thousands of migratory birds and other wildlife.

Created in the early 1900s, the reserves were originally envisioned as a fuel supply for the Navy in times of emergency. But in 1976, Congress authorized full commercial development of the federal land and ordered the government to balance oil drilling with conservation and wildlife protection.

Burgum accused the Biden administration of prioritizing “obstruction over production and undermining our ability to harness domestic resources at a time when American energy independence has never been more critical.”