Good morning. It is June 26th. This is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.The heat is already creeping in here in New York City. Your National Weather Service heat risk for today is orange or moderate, but elsewhere along the megalopolis it's code red or major, including Boston, Trenton, Philly, and areas around Baltimore and DC, and down in southeast Georgia, it's all the way up to magenta and extreme. Basically a minor swath of the upper Midwest and a tiny swath of the Pacific Northwest are the only places in the entire continental U .S. that aren't going to be at least a little bit sweltering today. On the front of this morning's New York Times, smack in the middle of the page, just above the fold, is a single column of news analysis circling back to the story of the 1 ,300 -plus deaths at this year's Hajj in Saudi Arabia. To look at the larger problem of heat deaths at major events around the world.

During India's recent election, the story says, dozens of poll workers died on the job. Last summer, troops of boy scouts visiting South Korea for a jubilee became sick from heat, as did others at music festivals in Australia, Europe, and North America. It's not entirely clear why the story is dateline to Sydney, Australia, where it's currently a cloudy, 47 -degree winter night, on the way to a forecast high of 65 degrees tomorrow. But here in the Northern Hemisphere, and in the tropics, the threat is very real. And as the story says, there is still a dangerous cultural lag. As an always underappreciated source of harm becomes more and more severe. Elsewhere on page one, the lead news story on the right -hand side is Israeli military is told to draft ultra -orthodox. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled, the Times writes, that there was no legal basis, for the long -standing military exemption given to ultra -orthodox religious students. It's not exactly a surprising piece of legal analysis. The story goes on to note, Israeli courts have ruled against the exemption before, including Supreme Court decisions in 1998, 2012, and 2017. The top court has repeatedly warned the government that to continue the policy, it must be written into law, though that law would be subject to constitutional challenges, as previous ones were, while also giving the government time to hammer out legislation. Since they never did pass the legislation, the court finally said enough was enough. The Times writes that this threatens to split the Netanyahu coalition, but it seems like lots of things have been supposed to threaten the coalition, and yet it's still in charge. Next to that on page one is one column of news and four columns of photo.

The latter shows someone dragging a wounded person away from an exploding canister of tear gas in Nairobi. As the headline on the news column is, "Kenya tax rise sets off chaos and bloodshed." Police killed at least five people as protesters against a new tax bill marched through the streets and briefly broke into parliament. Kenya's president, William Ruto, the Times writes, said he was deploying the military to crack down on what he called treasonous events.

The story notes that Kenya is also sending 400 police officers to Haiti to lead the international effort that's supposed to get civil unrest there under control. And the other story above the fold is about how Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, carrying on the couple's work as far-right, bellicosely pro-Israel political megadonors, has assured Donald Trump that the famous Adelson geyser of cash, the Times writes, which had shot out hundreds of millions of dollars over more than a decade, would erupt again. Inside the paper, on page A10, the government's pursuit of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ended in a plea deal for time served, in which Assange will say he's guilty of one count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material. On page A11, in a news analysis piece, Charlie Savage describes the result as bad for American press freedoms. As Assange's guilty plea, Savage writes, means that, for the first time in American history, gathering and publishing information the government considers secret will have been successfully treated as a crime. It's not as bad, Savage notes, as it could have been if Assange had appealed his prosecution and the courts had ruled that the Espionage Act applied to journalists in general. And Savage reminds readers that despite Assange's scuzzy collaboration with Russian hackers, to use leaked material to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential race. These charges, he writes, centered on the earlier publications that vaulted him to global notoriety and made him a hero to the anti -war left, a video of a US helicopter gunning down people in Baghdad, including a Reuters photographer, troves of military incident logs documenting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a quarter million diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world, and dossiers about Guantanamo detainees. And on page A21, the Nassau County Legislature voted to ban transgender athletes from county facilities. A county lawyer, the Times writes, listed four examples of cases in which transgender girls had allegedly hurt girls they were competing against, though none had taken place in Nassau County. One example was from Ontario, Canada.

Nice to see the Times concerned about flimsy and unsubstantiated attacks on transgender people's participation in society. Maybe next they'll investigate the New York Times. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Stay cool and don't go out in this mess if you don't have to. Drink plenty of water. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. Hit that little paid subscription button if you have not already. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.