Good morning and welcome back. It is June 25th. It is a bright and comfortable morning so far in New York City after a beautiful night. It's going to get hot later, but the humidity will stay low somewhere in the distance. It sounds like some fool has already turned on their air conditioner. And this is the return of your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

It is primary day here in New York City. The recycling bag has been stuffed with mailings from two candidates in this district who hate each other. So if you live here, do get out and vote. On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story, two columns wide, is realities of abortion bans shift the terms of the issue. Sub-headline, complications of pregnancy and fertility sway voters from different parties.

Traditionally, the function of a headline is to clarify and simplify the point of a story. This is one of those ones where the people who write headlines at the Times have some other, more esoteric mission of making sure the institution doesn't seem too engaged with the news that it's covering. Let the generic language like shift the terms and sway voters from different parties is trying to insulate the reader from is that Republicans have gotten what they want on abortion, have put their preferred policies into action, and the public fears and despises the results. The story likewise sidles into its own point, talking first about the two -year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, and then saying the public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. And you have to make it to the next paragraph to get to "that shift, helps explain why a record percentage of Americans are now declaring themselves single-issue voters on abortion right, especially among black voters, Democrats, women and those ages 18 to 29. Republican women are increasingly saying their party's opposition to abortion is too extreme and Democrats are running on the issue after years of running away from it.

Two paragraphs after establishing this, The Times writes, "abortion opponents say that stories about women facing medical complications are overblown and that women who truly need abortions for medical reasons have been able to get them under exceptions to the bans.

This would have been a good point to insert the study that came out yesterday that the AP reported on, that the infant death rate in Texas is up 8 % since the movement known as Pro -Life got to write the laws there, but those are facts, and this is discourse. 

Next to that, on page one, there's a four -column picture of a crowd of pilgrims near Mecca, many of them under parasols. To go with the story, "Hajj deaths reveal underbelly of spiritual quest." The death toll so far this year is apparently more than 1 ,300. The analysis in the story focuses on the irregularities in the pilgrimage permitting system that lead to unauthorized travelers making the trip outside the official better climate controlled facilities. The lethalness of the climate itself seems like it probably had something to do with it too, but the story notes it is unclear if the number of deaths this year was higher than usual because Saudi Arabia does not regularly report those statistics. Last year, 774 pilgrims died from Indonesia alone and in 1985, more than 1700 people died around the holy sites, most of them from heat stress, a study at the time found. But the essence of climate change is that the bad things that used to happen happen more often and more severely. Right below that story, there's a picture of a bunch of trees and the top of a house sticking up out of floodwaters in an unspecified location in the Midwest, leading to a story inside the paper about weekend flooding in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota. On page A10, at least 48 people are dead in Guangdong because of flooding and landslides there. Also on that page, there's news of a study that found that the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires have more than doubled in the last two decades. And when the ecological, social, and economic consequences of wildfires were accounted for, six of the last seven years were the most energetically intense.

On page A6, the Times reports, an Israeli strike killed a top official in charge of ambulance services in the Gaza Strip, local health officials said on Monday. Guess that's easier than just continuing to blow up the ambulances. Take the attack right to the source. And back on page one, there's a story about how before audiences could hear Donald Trump at a turning point action event, they had to sit through a sales pitch from a scammer who sells precious metals to the elderly at inflated prices, returning to the core American political truth that the Donald Trump movement has always, from its inception, been a nexus for predatory marketing schemes that more or less accidentally stumbled into the presidency, and which is now chiefly motivated to get the presidency back, to terminate criminal and regulatory enforcement against the scammers, especially and particularly Donald Trump himself. And speaking of evading consequences, and of consequences possibly circling back around, in the left -hand column above the fold is one more look at Will Lewis, the Rupert Murdoch fixer turned publisher of the Washington Post, whose attempts to consolidate his power at the Post with his sewer mates from the British press have inspired people to circle back to look at exactly what he did as the middleman between law enforcement and the Murdoch Empire during the notorious phone hacking investigation. There's a great fulminating quote from a Murdoch spokesperson saying that the story of Lewis's involvement in the bulk deletion of emails that investigators were trying to get was illogical, far -fetched, and inherently incredible. The logical, credible, and near -fetched version of events then would be that the company just happened to give an email server a much -needed update and overhaul shortly after investigators started looking for the emails, and that the failure to preserve the emails of upper -level executives didn't matter since they had no involvement in the crimes anyway. And then the guy who oversaw this unimportant mix -up coincidentally got a plum job in the US with Murdoch's Wall Street Journal just an innocent, random series of unconnected events that won't continue to look worse and worse as the American journalists he's now antagonized keep digging at them. That is the news. Thank you for bearing with our interruption in service and for listening. Please do subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, we will talk again tomorrow.