Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 135

The Brexit Referendum Results

—Follow the developing story below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).

10:54 p.m.

The leave campaign is leading in England and Wales while the remain campaign is winning in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here’s what that looks like.

This map shows how the nation has voted so far #EURefResults pic.twitter.com/d4ppzM2BtJ

— Press Association (@PA) June 24, 2016

It’s worth noting that not all the results from the southeast, home to London, are in yet. That area is expected to vote to remain in the EU, though it’s unclear if there will be enough votes to close the gap.

10:40 p.m.

ITV News is now predicting an 80 percent probability of a victory for the leave campaign. Meanwhile, leave has taken a lead nationwide:

State of play at 3.30am, with 164 results in. #EURefResults pic.twitter.com/orb3tvvNCp

— Ian Jones (@ian_a_jones) June 24, 2016

10:35 p.m.

The effect of a possible leave victory is roiling the pound, which is down 6 percent.

GBPUSD through 1.40

— World First (@World_First) June 24, 2016

GBP is behaving like the jig is up

— World First (@World_First) June 24, 2016

Stock futures are showing a similar effect:

*FTSE 100 INDEX FUTURES DROP 4.3%

— lemasabachthani (@lemasabachthani) June 24, 2016

10:31 p.m.

The remain camp have suffered a major loss in Sheffield, a city they were expected to win.

#Sheffield votes to #LEAVE (51% / 49%) https://t.co/2d9GH7Y7ew

— BBC Radio Sheffield (@BBCSheffield) June 24, 2016

This is a huge loss for the remain side, as the city was a bastion of the Labour party.

10:24 p.m.

The Press Association still has the two sides neck and neck, at 3 a.m. GMT (10 p.m. ET):

It's remarkably close with 100 areas of 382 areas declared #EURefResults https://t.co/E7mp7z3uBV

— Press Association (@PA) June 24, 2016

But the BBC is quoting John Curtice, the polling expert, as saying the leave campaign is the favorite to win.

10:06 p.m.

The remain side was boosted by its performance in Wandsworth, the London borough. It performed much better than expected, winning 75 percent to 25 percent, with a 72 percent turnout.

Wandsworth result now in; 118,463 remain, 39,421 leave #EURefResults pic.twitter.com/AuYJ2FLTiG

— Wandsworth Council (@wandbc) June 24, 2016

9:57 p.m.

However tonight ends, the vote is going to be extremely close. That’s possibly why British politicians are making it a point to say they will start listening to the electorate. John Mann, a Labour MP, says the party is “out of touch” on issues like immigration, prompting many of its traditional voters to vote leave. EU membership allows citizens of member states to freely settle and work in any of the bloc’s 28 countries. That can be a boon if you’re a job-seeker, but not so much if you’ve had your wages undercut. Indeed, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, says he doesn’t think Labour has “been listening enough” to its supporters.

If you’re wondering why we’re focusing on Labour voters, it’s because the party’s members are mostly supportive of EU membership. This isn’t true of the ruling Conservatives, who have a large Euro-skeptic bloc—even if David Cameron, the prime minister, has championed the remain side.

9:45 p.m.

The Press Association reports that the remain side now has a slight lead over leave.

The state of play at 2.30am. #EURefResults pic.twitter.com/zLeictMFC1

— Ian Jones (@ian_a_jones) June 24, 2016

It’s important to point out that this is still early in the counting phase. Indeed, the BBC has lower numbers, and has the leave side leading: 1,292,762 votes versus 1,144,509 votes.

9:35 p.m.

The Remain side appears to be performing better than expected in their stronghold London, but is it too late?

Large numbers for Remain in the London boroughs may just give them the edge. Whether it's too late is yet to be seen.

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) June 24, 2016

But in Wales, the leave side is performing well. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, the remain side is expected to win.

9:30 p.m.

The bettors giveth, and the bettors taketh away. Labrokes now has remain is favored to win. Here are the odds:

BREAKING: LEAVE now into 5/2 from 9/1 after Newcastle declare votes... https://t.co/ZBc74ulSWc #EURef pic.twitter.com/bZLeyKM5C5

— Ladbrokes Politics (@LadPolitics) June 23, 2016

9:23 p.m.

The leave side has reached the 1-million vote mark before the remain side, according to the BBC.

#Leave campaign is first to 1 million votes, but a long way still to go...https://t.co/K6pbNnkHr0 #EURef pic.twitter.com/JXvEGyd11l

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) June 24, 2016

9:08 p.m.

Here are the results so far:

Results so far: pic.twitter.com/vp1VrjoTbl

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) June 24, 2016

John Curtice, the polling expert, estimates to the BBC that 16.8 million votes are needed to win referendum. At this stage, he says, the leave side has a slight edge—though it’s still early days.

8:54 p.m.

Broadly speaking, so far this evening, England is voting to leave the EU while Scotland is voting to remain.

The story so far...

England is voting to #Leave

But Scotland is voting to #Remainhttps://t.co/UjmmdHNacp pic.twitter.com/60jM1XeiXt

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) June 24, 2016

Also, as in any campaign in which a side is doing worse than expected—in this case the “remain” side—the recriminations have begun: The Guardian quotes Chris Bryant, a Labour leader in the House of Commons, as saying of Ed Miliband, the former party leader: “I might go and punch him because he’s a tosspot and he left the party in the state it’s in.”

Both men support the remain side—as does a broad majority of the Labour party.

Kate Hoey, another party member, said Labour risks losing many of their traditional voters because of its pro-EU position. Hoey, who backs leave, told Sky News:

We will find thousands and thousands of Labour supporters abandoning the Labour view on this because we’ve known for a long time, being out there, that Labour supporters, the Labour Party view on this, is out of step with Labour supporters and ex-Labour supporters, who I'm afraid we'll probably find will not come back to us after the way the leadership have fought this campaign of staying in.

8:35 p.m.

The betting markets are often a more accurate predictor of election results. Here’s Betfair’s latest:

Latest #Brexit betting figures according to #BetfairPredicts.https://t.co/NifJBpGEMd pic.twitter.com/6KPv00R7xj

— Betfair (@Betfair) June 23, 2016

Separately, the fall in the British pound is the third-biggest on record, after the great recession of 2008 and 1992, when the currency left the European exchange-rate mechanism.

8:27 p.m.

The Press Association has a useful map of results to look for:

Here's a reminder of the key #EUref results to look out for tonight pic.twitter.com/9iXXEkZwqW

— Press Association (@PA) June 23, 2016

8:03 p.m.

Several results have come in, including from Sunderland, where the leave campaign won by a larger-than-expected margin: 61,745 votes to 51,220. And here are the results from Swindon:

Swindon votes to #Leave, 55% to 45%.https://t.co/K6pbNn362q #EURef https://t.co/72JdffiIis

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) June 23, 2016

In Newcastle, where the remain campaign was expected to perform well, it won by a much smaller margin than expected: 65,404 votes (50.7 percent) to 63,598 votes (49.3 percent).

The results have caused the British pound to plummet:

Sunderland in graph format #EUref pic.twitter.com/eqNW6MMkSV

— World First (@World_First) June 23, 2016

But the BBC points out, both the leave and remain sides are performing better than expected in their areas—making the overall results hard to predict. Remember, a simple majority will determine the winner.

7:58 p.m.

Turnout in the City of London was  73.58 percent, the returning officer there said, with 4,405 out of 5,987 eligible voters casting their ballots. The area or about 1 square mile roughly corresponds to the British capital’s financial heart.

7:52 p.m.

There were questions about Prime Minister David Cameron’s future if Britain voted to leave the EU. Cameron, who campaigned for the U.K. to remain in the U.K., had first promised a referendum—a move for which he has since been criticized—and had staked his political reputation on its results. But Boris Johnson, a fellow Conservative, and 84 other MPs, in a letter, urged Cameron to remain prime minister regardless of the results.

The letter was signed by 84 MPs, two-thirds of those who publicly supported the Vote Leave Campaign list attached pic.twitter.com/CvKYCWyZJz

— Robert Syms MP (@robertsymsmp) June 23, 2016

6:58 p.m.

Counting is under way across the U.K. after millions of people voted in a referendum on the country’s membership in the European Union.

Polls conducted before Thursday’s vote suggested the outcome was too close to call, but an online poll conducted today by YouGov pointed to a slight edge for those who want the U.K. to remain in the EU.

YouGov on-the-day poll: REMAIN 52, LEAVE 48 pic.twitter.com/TFlAcGcYIR

— YouGov (@YouGov) June 23, 2016

Indeed, Nigel Farage, the head of the U.K. Independence Party, who has championed Britain’s exit from the EU, told the Press Association that his “friends in the financial markets who have done some big polling” say the country has voted to remain.

The first results from Gibraltar, the British overseas territory near Spain, were overwhelmingly in favor of staying.

#Breaking First declaration: Gibraltar votes for UK to #Remain in European Union, by 19,322 to 823 #EUref pic.twitter.com/ttgrz52Qzg

— Press Association (@PA) June 23, 2016

The result, which is likely to be made final Friday morning local time (overnight in the Eastern time zone), could have far-reaching implications for the EU, the 28-member bloc that is post-war Europe’s most ambitious experiment.

Initial figures from the country’s Electoral Commission said 46.5 million people had registered—a record in Britain for what is only its third referendum ever. Polls opened at 7 a.m. local time (3 a.m. ET) and closed at 10 p.m.

For a guide to Brexit, go here.

We’ll update this story with the latest as we learn more.

Justices Against Drunk Driving

The U.S. Supreme Court outlined new parameters for testing suspected drunk drivers on Thursday, ruling that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless breath tests but forbids warrantless blood tests.

“The impact of breath tests on privacy is slight, and the need for BAC [blood alcohol content] testing is great,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Court in Birchfield v. North Dakota and its consolidated cases. “We reach a different conclusion with respect to blood tests. Blood tests are significantly more intrusive, and their reasonableness must be judged in light of the availability of the less invasive alternative of a breath test.”

The Court combined three cases from lower courts in the Midwest for its ruling. All of them involved state laws criminalizing the refusal of blood and breath BAC tests. In North Dakota, Danny Birchfield received a 30-day sentence and fine for refusing a warrantless blood test and Michael Baylund lost his drivers’ license after officers told him refusing a warrantless blood test was a crime. In Minnesota, William Bernard challenged his prosecution after refusing a warrantless breath test.

Writing for the Court, Alito analyzed the tests under the Fourth Amendment’s search-incident-to-arrest exception. As its name suggests, the rule allows police officers to search a person’s body and immediate surroundings without a warrant after their lawful arrest. Breath BAC tests, he wrote, don’t rise to the level of intrusiveness the Fourth Amendment protects: they leave no permanent sample in the government’s possession and don’t undermine the arrestee’s dignity in any significant way.

But the justices in the majority refused to apply that logic to blood BAC tests, citing both the greater intrusiveness of obtaining blood and the wealth of other information that can be obtained from it.

“It is another matter, however, for a State not only to insist upon an intrusive blood test, but also to impose criminal penalties on the refusal to submit to such a test,” Alito wrote. “There must be a limit to the consequences to which motorists may be deemed to have consented by virtue of a decision to drive on public roads.”

In a separate opinion joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor sided with the majority on forbidding warrantless blood tests. She parted ways, however, on sanctioning warrantless breath tests, which she argued was inconsistent with both the Court’s precedents and the Constitution.

“This Court has never said that mere convenience in gathering evidence justifies an exception to the warrant requirement,” she wrote. In her conclusion, Sotomayor added, “I fear that if the Court continues down this road, the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement will become nothing more than a suggestion.”

Justice Clarence Thomas also wrote a partial concurrence but took the opposite approach from Sotomayor, arguing that the Fourth Amendment permitted warrantless breath and blood tests alike.

“The compromise the Court reaches today is not a good one,” he wrote in a brief three-page dissent. “By deciding that some (but not all) warrantless tests revealing the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of an arrested driver are constitutional, the Court contorts the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.”

Thomas instead suggested the Court should sanction the searches under the exigent-circumstances exception. That rule allows cops to forego warrants if they believe a suspect is about to destroy evidence. The human body’s ability to metabolize alcohol, he argued, produced a similar quandary for law enforcement.

The Trump Campaign Gets a $50 Million Donation

There’s good news and bad news for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. We’ll start with the good: Trump’s cash-strapped campaign received $50 million today. The donor? None other than Donald Trump, which means it should go some way to reassuring potential donors that he’s serious about his campaign.

Now the bad news: The gift is actually Trump converting loans he’d already made to his campaign into donations, which means the huge sum doesn’t do much to close up his massive fundraising gap with Hillary Clinton. It just gets him back to zero or so.

Still, it’s Trump’s most dramatic moment of self-funding so far. Although he has claimed he was paying for his own campaign all along, Trump had in fact spent very little of his own money, since the rest was structured as loans. Meanwhile, sizable chunks were flowing back into his own pocket in the form of campaign expenses paid out to venders like the Mar-a-Lago Club or Tag Air—both companies Trump owns. For a time, it seemed Trump might be able to follow through on a 2000 claim that he could make money running for president.

Trump’s campaign portrayed this as an act of fidelity and political boldness. “Donald J. Trump has just announced he has honored the pledge he made on May 13, 2016, when he stated, ‘I have absolutely no intention of paying myself back for the nearly $50 million dollars I have loaned to the campaign.’”

But as my colleague Andrew McGill explained yesterday, Trump in fact had very little choice:

Until his acceptance of the nomination at the Republican National Convention, Trump can use campaign funds to pay back loans without limit, replenishing his personal bank account with contributions and proceeds from the “Make America Great Again” hats. But that spigot closes at the conclusion of the convention. At that point, Trump has 20 days to use cash received before his nomination to pay off loans. If he gets any new contributions to his primary campaign, he can only use up to $250,000 to pay himself back. (A similar cap applies for any loans he might make to himself during the general election, the cut-off date being November 8.)

In essence, Trump could either raise $45.7 million to pay himself back over the next month—a challenging prospect for a fundraiser starting almost cold, especially because he’d still need to raise enough to keep his campaign afloat—or he could forgive his own loan. He wisely decided to spin it as a gift.

Still, Trump’s statement boasted that he had been “overwhelmed” with gifts since reporting weak fundraising totals on Tuesday. The next FEC report will indicate just how overwhelming those gifts really are.

No Charges for the Texas Pool-Party Cop

A Texas grand jury declined Thursday to indict a former police officer who was captured on video last summer throwing a teenage girl to the ground while he attempted to break up a pool party.

The footage showed Eric Casebolt, a white police officer, pinning a black teenager to the grass at the party in McKinney, Texas, on June 5, 2015. He also drew his gun on two young people who approached him. Casebolt received criticism for his treatment of the girl. From the Dallas Morning News:

Casebolt resigned four days after the incident on June 5, 2015, in the upscale Craig Ranch neighborhood in west McKinney. But by that point, the incident at the pool party had already become fodder for a national debate about police relations with minorities.

My colleague Yoni Appelbaum noted at the time that McKinney, which Money magazine had named the Best Place to Live in America, has, like other growing American suburbs, “struggled with questions of equity and diversity.” Here’s more:

In 2009, McKinney was forced to settle a lawsuit alleging that it was blocking the development of affordable housing suitable for tenants with Section 8 vouchers in the more affluent western portion of the city. East of Highway 75, according to the lawsuit, McKinney is 49 percent white; to its west, McKinney is 86 percent white. The plaintiffs alleged that the city and its housing authority were “willing to negotiate for and provide low-income housing units in east McKinney, but not west McKinney, which amounts to illegal racial steering.”

All three of the city’s public pools lie to the east of Highway 75. Craig Ranch, where the pool party took place, lies well to its west. BuzzFeed reports that the fight broke out when an adult woman told the teens to go back to “Section 8 housing.” …

Whatever took place in McKinney on Friday, it occurred against [the] … backdrop of the privatization of once-public facilities, giving residents the expectation of control over who sunbathes or doggie-paddles alongside them. Even if some of the teens were residents, and others possessed valid guest passes, as some insisted they did, the presence of “multiple juveniles…who do not live in the area” clearly triggered alarm. Several adults at the pool reportedly placed calls to the police. And none of the adult residents shown in the video appeared to manifest concern that the police response had gone too far, nor that its violence was disproportionate to the alleged offense.

Tom Mills, an attorney for Casebolt, told the Dallas Morning News Thursday “we’re glad that the system worked in his favor in this case.”

Casebolt’s attorneys had said the officer arrived at the pool party after responding to two stressful scenes, according to the Morning News. In one, Casebolt comforted a woman whose husband had shot himself in front of the family, and in another, the officer helped persuade a girl not to jump from the roof of her parents’ house.

What the U.S. Supreme Court Immigration Ruling Means for Hillary Clinton

The U.S. Supreme Court’s deadlock on a key immigration case on Thursday will prevent President Obama from carrying out his plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation before he leaves office. But the ruling doesn’t necessarily invalidate the promises Hillary Clinton has made to take similar action if she wins the presidency.

The justices made no determination as to whether Obama’s executive actions on immigration exceeded his authority as president. Their 4-4 tie merely left in place a lower court’s temporary injunction blocking the administration from implementing the deferred-action program, known as DAPA. The case now goes back to the lower courts for a decision on the merits of Obama’s policy, and if Judge Andrew Hanen of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas permanently blocks the program—as many legal observers expect—then the Justice Department could appeal to the Supreme Court once again. If Clinton wins the White House and gets Senate confirmation for her nominee to the Supreme Court (or, in a less likely scenario, if Republicans approve Merrick Garland before she takes office) then she stands a much better chance of being able to move forward on immigration.

“This is a very long delay, but it’s not a final decision,” said Angela Kelley, a senior vice president at the left-leaning Center for American Progress and a longtime advocate of immigration reform.

“Nobody won. Nobody lost. The court just didn’t make a decision.”

The outcome for immigration policy already hinged to a large extent on the 2016 election, and the Supreme Court’s inability to rule definitively lends even more weight to the choice in November. While Donald Trump has campaigned against offering legal status to the 12 million people estimated to be in the country illegally, Clinton has, like Obama, vowed to pursue comprehensive reform legislation in Congress and take executive action to protect those people from deportation if the House and Senate fail to act. The former secretary of state has also said she would go beyond the policy pursued by Obama to include the parents of so-called Dreamers who were brought into the U.S. illegally as children. Had Justice Antonin Scalia lived for a few more months, it is likely that the high court would have struck down Obama’s program entirely and foreclosed the possibility that Clinton could carry out her plans.

Whether she has that opportunity next year now depends not only on her election but on her ability to swiftly win Senate confirmation of a justice likely to rule favorably on her authority over immigration policy. And until there is a more definitive ruling, any executive action along the lines of what Obama tried to do is impossible. “Practically-speaking, you’d have to have this whole situation resolved before any new president could take similar steps,” said David Leopold, an immigration lawyer and reform advocate. Tom Jawetz, the vice president of immigration policy at CAP, said the Obama administration could, within the next few weeks, ask the Supreme Court to rehear the case next year, but there almost certainly won’t be another ruling before he leaves office.

In their statements responding to the decision, Democrats including Obama and Clinton emphasized the deadlock caused by the vacancy on the court. “Today’s decision by the Supreme Court is purely procedural and casts no doubt on the fact that DAPA and DACA are entirely within the president's legal authority,” Clinton said. “But in addition to throwing millions of families across our country into a state of uncertainty, this decision reminds us how much damage Senate Republicans are doing by refusing to consider President Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.”

Obama also stressed that the decision has no impact on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shielded immigrants brought illegally into the U.S. as children from deportation. Nor does it invalidate the administration’s late-2014 decision to change its enforcement priorities so that most of those immigrants who would have been able to come forward legally under the DAPA program won’t face deportation as a practical matter. “They will remain low priorities for enforcement,” Obama said. “As long as you have not committed a crime, our limited immigration enforcement resources are not focused on you.”

“We prioritize criminals. We prioritize gang-bangers,” he added later. “We prioritize folks who have just come in. What we don’t do is to prioritize people who’ve been here a long time, who are otherwise law-abiding, who have roots and connections in their communities.”

Republicans hailed the Supreme Court’s ruling as a vindication of their complaints that Obama has exceeded his authority as president. “This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said. Trump said the court had blocked “one of the most unconstitutional actions ever undertaken by a president.” But while the Obama’s critics were relieved that the DAPA program will stay dead for the remainder of his term, their responses frequently overstated the scope of the court’s ruling. “Nobody won. Nobody lost. The court just didn’t make a decision,” Leopold said.

While the deadlock may not permanently prevent Clinton from taking executive action on immigration, the lengthy legal process and a likely judicial confirmation fight means that she wouldn’t be able to do so in the first weeks of her presidency. And that makes it more likely that she would first try to steer legislation through Congress that would render moot the debate over executive authority, as Obama did in 2013. She has already pledged to submit an immigration bill to Capitol Hill within her first 100 days, but unless Democrats can win back both the House and the Senate, the prospects for a deal with Republicans are uncertain at best.

As both supporters and critics of immigration reform have long agreed, the only way to address the issue permanently is through an act of Congress. As much as Thursday’s ruling means for the millions of immigrant families seeking certainty in their status, ultimate decisions about the future of immigration policy still rest with the voters, not the courts.

Why Lightning Disproportionately Kills the Poor

Seventy-nine people died this week in lightning strikes in India. Most of the dead lived in rural areas, and many were farmers. It’s the rainy season and storms are frequent this time of year. It might seem like an astonishing number in such a short time, but Indian government statistics point out that 2,000 people are killed by lightning strikes each year.

India’s population is about four times larger than that of the U.S., but about 2 people in 1 million die from lightning strikes in India; in the U.S., that figure is 0.3 per million.

The discrepancy holds for Europe, where lightning kills a tiny fraction of the population each year, about 0.2 people for every 1 million. Then there are parts of Asia and Africa, where lighting deaths can be 100 times higher. In Zimbabwe it’s around 20 per 1 million. In Malawi it’s 84 people per million. While lightning may seem to strike and kill at random, it’s mostly a problem of the poor.

As my colleague Rebecca J. Rosen has pointed out, the U.S. is a good example of how a country has gone from a relatively high rate of lightning deaths, to one of the lowest. One reason often pointed to is the move from farm to city. In 1900 about 60 percent of Americans lived in rural areas; by 2000 about 20 percent did. In step with that, lightning deaths decreased. This correlation is sometimes regarded as the cause of the decrease––and rural areas certainly are more dangerous when it comes to strikes––but in 100 years the U.S. population has jumped from 63 million to 323 million. There are more people everywhere, even in rural parts.

Why then are people not fried by bolts in increasing numbers? The answer, in part, is plumbing and tractors.

In the 1890s, lightning most commonly killed people asleep on their beds inside their homes. That doesn’t happen anymore. By now, if  lightning strikes a home there’s enough wiring and plumbing for the electricity to ground out. In the 1920s, only 1 percent of homes in the U.S. had electricity and plumbing. By the 1930s, the U.S. had developed codes regulating both, and as more buildings followed those regulations they became safer. Since the 1950s, nearly all homes in the U.S. have both electricity and plumbing, and consequently, Ronald Holle, a meteorologist with Vaisala, the world’s largest manufacturer of meteorological equipment, told me lightning deaths inside homes in the U.S. have become nonexistent. In the past 20 years, he said not one person in the U.S. (excluding the elderly or disabled who were caught in fires started by lightning) has died from a lightning bolt that hit a home. But in poor areas of the world, homes may not have all those wires and pipes that help divert electrical shock. Homes often have a thin roof made of corrugated metal. If lightning hits that, the bolt can jump to the nearest person.

The other place lightning often struck people in the 1890s in America was in the fields. One hundred years ago, 25 percent of lightning deaths in the U.S. were people working agricultural jobs. And that’s who died in India this week.

Every year Indian farmers make up a large portion of the 2,500 people killed by lightning in the country. A recent report by Holle, the meteorologist, looked at 969 lightning deaths in at least 10 Asian countries and found most farmers died working in rice paddy fields, which are often huge tracts of flat and flooded land. Holle wrote that what famers desperately need in these areas is someplace close to shelter: “Fully enclosed metal-topped vehicles can provide such a lightning-safe location but they may not be available nearby when needed … ”

An Indian farmer named Lal Babu Usvaha told The Guardian that “work is work. We can’t stop because of the weather. We have to keep working in the fields. But we feel scared when we see so many clouds, so much electricity in the sky.”

India has adopted newer farming technologies, but as the man who spoke with The Guardian points out, many poor farmers still use preindustrial methods to work the field. This was the same issue the U.S. had 100 years ago, and that began to change with the advent of the tractor.

Tractors used today in big U.S. agricultural operations are fully enclosed, making them as safe as a car during a storm. Tractors also reduced the number of people needed to raise and pick crops (see The Grapes of Wrath).

“The amount of time it takes to work a field has changed,” Holle told me. “Back then it might have taken you all day to do a small plot of land. Now it can be done in a few hours. ​​​​​​”

That’s another major factor: In developed countries, people work outdoors less, and so are at less risk of being caught in a storm and killed. Nowadays in the U.S., lightning almost exclusively kills athletes and outdoor-leisure enthusiasts––fisherman the most, then beach goers, then campers. For sports, it’s soccer players.

Other technologies, like the advent of CPR, have helped reduce lightning deaths. And another big factor has been information about lightning. John Jensenius, the National Weather Service’s lightning specialist, told me that the number of lightning deaths now are half what they were 15 years ago. Jensenius partly attributed this reduction to Lightning Awareness Week, which started around 15 years ago. It’s credo: “When lightning roars, go indoors!”

But in poorer countries, it might not help even if they followed that motto. In some parts of Africa, lightning strikes that hit schools kill hundreds of children each year.

“It’s gotten to the point where some parents have said, ‘I’m not sending my kids to school because that’s where they get killed,’” Holle said.

The numbers are bit of a rough estimate, because not all countries keep the data, but each year lightning kills about 24,000 people. And while the strikes themselves may be random, the victims are almost exclusively poor.

Any Given Wednesday Is Sports TV Without All the Hot Air

The first episode of any new late-night talk show is usually a wash: Even the most experienced hosts can take weeks to find their voice. Bill Simmons, whose HBO series Any Given Wednesday just debuted, is not the most experienced TV host. But like many entertainers who cut their teeth on podcasting, Simmons has learned how to put celebrity guests at ease and coax them into being more candid—something that became obvious in the pilot when Ben Affleck went off on an impassioned, profane rant about Deflategate.

Simmons seems to be trying to do for sports what Bill Maher currently does for politics. Unlike HBO’s other late-night legend, John Oliver, Simmons is going for a looser, conversational vibe, mixing chats with celebrities (Affleck and Charles Barkley were his first guests) and nerdy monologuing about sports. During his ascendency at ESPN, where he started as an online writer and quickly became one of the network’s most popular personalities, Simmons never quite fit in. He eventually came to buckle under the commercial-break reliant structures of live sports broadcasting. At HBO, Simmons has greater freedom, and outside of Affleck’s strangely compelling Tom Brady tirade, Any Given Wednesday’s pilot was almost aggressively chill—a pleasantly meandering antidote to the usual hot-take cauldron of sports TV.

You’d be forgiven for expecting something different—HBO sold the show on the back of a Bull Durham­-style promo in which Simmons barked at the camera about what he “believes” and spouted a bunch of eminently uncontroversial opinions (one was that Kanye West being too self-aware of his own musical genius). In an appearance on Katie Nolan’s Garbage Time podcast, Simmons said he had recorded the promo months ago, after HBO had signed him but before the show had taken shape. Any Given Wednesday does have some direct-to-camera monologuing, but its host is aiming much gentler humor at an audience of deep sports nerds, and, at least in this opening episode, sticking to his strengths.

As an ESPN personality, Simmons was an online star who never quite seemed at home on television. He looked uncomfortable and annoyed on two seasons of NBA Countdown (the network’s flagship basketball show), struggling to get a word in among a crowded panel of commentators. He founded Grantland, an award-winning, ESPN-owned website that covered sports and pop culture with voracious intelligence but never seemed to gel with the company’s larger brand. After leaving NBA Countdown, Simmons hosted the sporadic Grantland Basketball Hour, a talk show that bounced around the schedule to little fanfare. By betting on the star, who will produce 20 episodes of Any Given Wednesday over the next seven months, HBO sent the message that all he needed to succeed was some room to breathe. And so it’s given him plenty.

Any Given Wednesday’s pilot was almost aggressively chill—a pleasant, meandering antidote to the usual hot-take cauldron of sports TV.

The set of Any Given Wednesday is cavernous (there’s a whole office behind some glass doors that Simmons doesn’t even visit), but he isn’t playing to a live audience as Maher or Oliver do. His opening monologue had the air of stand-up comedy, but eschewed the “OTS” presentation that most of late night opts for (“OTS,” short for “over-the-shoulder,” refers to the constantly changing graphic that hovers next to the host). Simmons waxed rhapsodic about LeBron James’s performance in the NBA finals, and later poked fun at Steph Curry’s shortcomings as an advertising brand, but as he did so, the show cut to TV footage and vintage YouTube clips. Perhaps he’s self-aware enough to recognize that he’s no comedian—even the best of them struggle with the stand-up monologue. Simmons isn’t doing the “set-up, joke, set-up, joke” routine of his peers, but rather nerdy, sports-themed deep dives that are singular to him.

The show’s interviews were much better than the monologue, letting Simmons sit back and do what he’s best at—pepper outspoken celebrities with questions on his favorite topics. Charles Barkley arrived to do his usual shtick about the NBA’s lack of toughness and to weigh in on LeBron’s legacy, while Affleck gave the kind of rambling, bizarre performance that any late-night host dreams of, talking about the ups and downs of his film career before launching into an anti-NFL tirade about the railroading of Tom Brady. Perhaps the intimacy of the set, the lax censorship standards of HBO, and the lack of a live audience lulled Affleck into sounding off; perhaps it was something else entirely. Either way, it was exciting, amusing stuff, far better than any manufactured opinion Simmons would have been required to serve up on a 2-minute segment for NBA Countdown.

There were moments that chafed—in his monologue on Curry’s breakdown in the NBA finals, Simmons snarkily referred to him “losing control” of his wife Ayesha (when she posted and deleted a tweet about the game being “rigged”).That’s the kind of cheap language he should leave at ESPN, where broadcasters like Stephen A. Smith embarrass themselves on a nightly basis with misogynistic advice for athletes on how to keep their wives in check. But it also stuck out because the rest of Any Given Wednesday so consciously avoided the toxicity of the world Simmons has left behind. Even its most charged moment—Affleck’s rant—seemed right out of a conversation at a Boston sports bar between two excitable fans, rather than the bloviating lectures about grit and toughness that are the norm on SportsCenter or Pardon the Interruption.

The question is whether Simmons has enough material to replace all the hot air of a typical sports show. Halfway through the first episode, he pulled out a pair of Curry’s much-derided new shoes, mocked as being fit only for the dullest of dads when they hit stores a few weeks ago, and admitted his fondness for them. From the look of this first episode, Curry’s new sneakers are to branded footwear as Any Given Wednesday is to sports TV—it’s not going for controversy, and it’ll probably earn a few jeers from the snarkier sections of sports fandom, but it’s a welcome addition to sports TV all the same.

A Whole Lotta Love For Zeppelin

A jury in Los Angeles decided Thursday that Led Zeppelin did not steal one of its most iconic melodies, that of the song “Stairway to Heaven,” from Spirit, another 1960s band.

Surviving Zeppelin band members––guitarist Jimmy Page, keyboardist John Paul Jones, and singer Robert Plant––had all taken the stand in a week’s worth of testimony to reject claims that the riff on “Stairway to Heaven” sounded awfully close to Spirit’s instrumental “Taurus.”

Here’s the song in question:

  

The song came out in 1968, two years before “Stairway To Heaven.” The two bands had toured together, making it a decent likelihood Zeppelin members had in fact heard it. Page and Plant both denied they’d lifted the melody. They instead said they’d come up with the tune while they sat around a fire at a rural recording retreat in England called Headley Grange.

Spirit’s songwriter, Randy Wolfe––who went by Randy California––has died, but in liner notes of a 1996 reissue of a Spirit album, he wrote: “People always ask me why ‘Stairway to Heaven’ sounds exactly like ‘Taurus,’ which was released two years earlier.” Wolfe never said he wanted to take Zeppelin to court for the matter, but the notes fueled rumors Zeppelin had lifted the tune.

After Wolfe died, his trustee, Michael Skidmore, insisted the two songs were uncannily similar, and close enough to violate copyright infringement. In the lawsuit, Skidmore demanded a rewriting of rock ’n’ roll history.

Instead, it seems the L.A. jury showed Zeppelin a whole lotta love.

A 'Not Guilty' Verdict in the Death of Freddie Gray

Updated on June 23 at 1:48 p.m.

Officer Caesar Goodson, the Baltimore police officer driving a van where Freddie Gray was mortally injured in April 2015, is not guilty of all seven charges, a judge ruled Thursday morning.

The most serious charge against Goodson was second-degree depraved-heart murder. He also faced second-degree assault, manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct charges. Judge Barry Williams adjudicated the case himself after Goodson waived his right to a jury trial. Williams said in court that while Goodson may have shown poor judgment, the prosecution failed to prove that he had intended any harm to come to Gray, according to The Baltimore Sun. The judge that said they had not proven even negligence, much less depraved-heart murder.

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Can Prosecutors Convict Anyone at All in the Death of Freddie Gray?

The decision is a massive blow to a prosecution team that has struggled to convict officers in the high-profile death of the 25-year-old black man. Goodson’s case has been considered the centerpiece of the trials of six officers charged with Gray’s death, and he faced the most serious charges. The trial also came after two high-profile failures for the prosecution. First, Officer William Porter’s prosecution ended in a hung jury. Then Officer Edward Nero was acquitted.

The depraved-heart murder charge against Goodson raised eyebrows from the moment that Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced it last spring. Because Gray was apparently injured while riding in a police van after his arrest, it made sense that the driver of the van might face the harshest charges, but the severity still surprised many observers. “Officer Goodson is charged with depraved-heart murder in a case that on its face seems more like negligence, whereas depraved-heart murder says that the individuals showed such wanton and reckless disregard for human life that it amounts to malice,” David Jaros, a law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, told me at the outset of the trial. Jaros said the prosecution was advancing “novel” legal theories to make their case.

On Thursday, Williams repudiated that approach, saying prosecutors had failed to substantiate their theories: “As the trier of fact, the court cannot simply let things speak for themselves.” He said that because Gray’s injuries were internal, a non-medical professional would have been unable to gauge them.

In order to prove that charge, prosecutors argued that Goodson had been giving Gray a “rough ride,” a form of punishment in which police drive vans erratically, turning sharply or braking suddenly, to throw prisoners in transit around. There had been suspicions of a rough ride since Gray’s death, because the 25-year-old was placed in a van while apparently healthy, but less than an hour later was found with a nearly severed spinal cord. He spent a week in a coma before succumbing to his injuries. But prosecutors did not seek to prove the rough ride until Goodson’s trial. What was not in dispute was that the shackled Gray was not seat-belted in the van, which is contrary to department policy but nonetheless common, according to witnesses.

But Williams rejected the rough ride argument, and upbraided prosecutors for using an “inflammatory” term without proving it.

Almost immediately, prosecutors got off to a difficult start in the Goodson trial. Williams erupted at the team over revelations that they had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense team, information gleaned from a meeting with Donta Allen, who was transported in the same van as Gray. Williams declined to throw the case out over the move, but he berated the prosecution: “What else is out there that you haven’t turned over?” Williams’s questioning throughout the case seemed to indicate some skepticism about the prosecution’s case.

The Gray case became one of the most high-profile in a string of cases of deaths involving police officers, joining Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others. Gray’s death inspired massive protests in the streets of Baltimore, as well as brief rioting and looting. The protests revealed a long-simmering fury on the part of black Baltimoreans toward a police force known for its brutality and harshness in communities of color. But the case also showed the subtle ways race plays in policing in places like Baltimore. The mayor and then-police chief are both black, as are three of the officers charged in Gray’s death, including Goodson. Nonetheless, parts of the city are strongly segregated by race and income, with poor black areas said to be subject to policing that could be both indifferent and brutal.

Some of the fervor of protesters has chilled since the initial demonstrations more than a year ago. Journalists on the scene for The Baltimore Sun reported that media outnumbered protestors at the court house.

The verdict in the Goodson case has been viewed as crucial for Mosby, the state’s attorney. She won praise from police-reform advocates for her prompt and aggressive charging of officers, but critics worried that she was moving too quickly or did not have adequate evidence, and was simply trying to appease protesters in the streets. The failure to convict Goodson on the most serious charges is certain to amplify doubts about her judgment and approach. After the Goodson case, there are three more officers yet to be tried, all on charges less serious than his. Prosecutors have also said they intend to retry Porter after his hung jury. But they’ll face an uphill battle, as it’s believed they’ve already presented their best evidence, with no convictions to show for it.

“There just wasn’t enough to prove that Officer Goodson was aware of what he was doing,” Jaros said. “The fact that officers are shuttling people through the system in a callous and unthinking way is an indictment of the whole system, but actually an argument that this particular defendant is not guilty of the crime.”

In that way, the Goodson trial, and Mosby’s aggressive but so far futile prosecutions, may spotlight the need for more system reforms of the police, rather than simply more criminal charges. There’s no dispute that Gray incurred the injury while in police custody, and he seems to have been arrested for nothing, and yet prosecutions have proven an inadequate tool for responding.

“The case revealed some egregious problems with policing in Baltimore,” Jaros said. “It’s incumbent on policy makers to ask, ‘If the criminal process is not working, what are we going to do?’”

The End of Colombia’s War With FARC

Updated on June 23 at 2 p.m. ET

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and  Timoleon Jimenez, the head of FARC, the left-wing rebel group, announced in Havana a historic cease-fire in the more than five-decade-long conflict.

Rumbo a La Habana a silenciar para siempre los fusiles. #SíALaPaz pic.twitter.com/Oa2aH7SJjm

— Juan Manuel Santos (@JuanManSantos) June 23, 2016

Farc aceptarán el mecanismo de refrendación que sea acordado por la @CConstitucional #SíALaPaz

— Presidencia Colombia (@infopresidencia) June 23, 2016

The agreement could lead to a peace deal between the two sides; the conflict has killed more than 200,000 people.

Signs of a possible end to the bloody conflict emerged last fall when the Colombian and FARC leaders announced—after three years of talks—their intention to sign a definitive peace agreement within six months. The efforts came after multiple appeals for peace in the country from Pope Francis.

In March, the government also announced it will begin talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s second-largest rebel group.

As my colleague J. Weston Phippen previously reported:

[The] announcement came as the Colombian government is nearing a final peace deal with FARC. Those talks are now centered on how FARC’s rebels will disarm—an issue that is likely to come up with ELN, too. Analysts see the prospect of a peace deal with ELN as a sweetener to FARC to disarm and reach an agreement with the government.