First Thing: Utah officials sued over failure to save Great Salt Lake

Environmental and community groups file lawsuit as the lake shrinks from overuse. Plus, US Open struggles in New York heatwave

Good morning.

Environmental and community groups have sued Utah officials over failures to save its iconic Great Salt Lake from irreversible collapse.

The largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns. A megadrought across the US south-west, accelerated by global heating, has hastened the lake’s demise.

Unless immediate action is taken, the lake could decline beyond recognition within five years, a report published early this year warned, exposing a dusty lakebed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxic substances.The resulting toxic dustbowl would be “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, the ecologist Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University said earlier this year.

Despite such warnings, officials have failed to act, local groups said in their lawsuit, filed on Wednesday. “We are trying to avert disaster. We are trying to force the hand of state government to take serious action,” said Brian Moench of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the groups suing state agencies.

Can the lake be saved? Despite growing political momentum on the issue, scientists say the proposed measures are not nearly enough to save the lake, which has lost about 40bn gallons of water annually since 2020.

US to supply depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine

The US will give Ukraine depleted uranium anti-tank shells as part of a new military aid package worth up to $175m, the Pentagon announced during a visit to Kyiv by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

The $175m is part of more than $1bn in assistance that Blinken announced in the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday, the first day of his two-day visit.

It is the first time the US is sending the armour-piercing munitions to Ukraine, although Britain has already done so. The US shells will arm the Abrams tanks that the US is supplying in the coming months.

The Russian embassy in Washington denounced the decision as “an indicator of inhumanity”, adding that “the United States is deluding itself by refusing to accept the failure of the Ukrainian military’s so-called counteroffensive”.

What else did Russia say about the decision? In a social media post on Telegram, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, sharply criticised the US decision, writing: “What is this: a lie or stupidity?” She claimed an increase in cancer cases had been noted in places where ammunition with depleted uranium was used.

What else is happening? Blasts have been reported in the Russian city of Rostov, near the headquarters of the southern military district command, which plays a key role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was one of the sites seized by the late Wagner leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, during his failed mutiny in June.

First hearing held in Georgia for 2020 election interference case

A Fulton county judge said that he hoped to decide on trial schedules in the Georgia election interference case next week, a case for which a joint trial will take approximately four months, according to state prosecutors.

On Wednesday, the judge, Scott McAfee, held the first hearing in the Georgia election interference case involving 19 co-defendants, including ex-president Donald Trump, charged with interfering in the 2020 presidential elections.

During the hearing, a prosecutor from the Fulton county district attorney’s office said that a joint trial involving all 19 defendants would take approximately four months.

The prosecutor, Nathan Wade, said that the trial would involve approximately 150 witnesses and that the timeline did not account for jury selection.

What is happening with Trump’s re-election bid? A watchdog group is suing to remove Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot, saying he violated the constitution and is disqualified from holding future office. The lawsuit is so far one of the strongest challenges to his eligibility to seek re-election.

In other news …

Bruce Springsteen has postponed all September concerts as he is receiving peptic ulcer treatment. A statement on the singer’s Instagram account said his doctors had advised that he postpone the remainder of his September shows owing to the stomach ailment.

Japan’s “Moon Sniper” mission has blasted off on its mission to make Japan the fifth country to touch down safely on the lunar surface, and the first to do it with unusual precision. Watched by 35,000 people online, the H-IIA rocket carrying the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, lifted off early today from the southern island of Tanegashima.

A US judge ordered Texas to move a line of floating buoys placed in the middle of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border. The ruling is a tentative win for the Biden administration after the Department of Justice (DoJ) sued the state.

Linda Evangelista has revealed she has had cancer twice, and underwent a double mastectomy after her first diagnosis with breast cancer five years ago. The 58-year-old supermodel told the Wall Street Journal her breast cancer was detected in 2018 during an annual mammogram.

Stat of the day: Mexico set for first female president in 2024 election

Mexico will almost certainly have its first female president in 2024, after the governing Morena party and the opposition coalition both chose women as their candidates. The former Mexico City mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, was named Morena’s candidate yesterday. She is a climate scientist turned politician who was widely believed to be the preferred choice of president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is unable to run again.

Until recently, Morena had seemed assured of victory in the June 2024 elections, but the dramatic emergence in recent months of senator Xóchitl Gálvez as the opposition candidate has upended expectations. Gálvez, a businesswoman, has seized media attention with her aspirational story of growing up with an Indigenous father and mestizo mother in Hidalgo state.

Don’t miss this: ‘Everything is destroyed’ – dynamite use sends shock waves through fishing industries

The immediate aftermath of a blast is obvious, says Wilson Perera: the ocean turns murky with blood and is strewn with fish that are missing eyes or other organs. Those fish that are wounded swim off to die elsewhere. Their carcasses wash ashore days later. “Everything within a 100-metre radius of the blast is destroyed – coral reefs, marine plants and animals,” says Perera.

Blast fishing, is an illegal method in which dynamite or other explosives are used to kill or stun fish. In Sri Lanka and around the world it is thriving as a quick and easy route to a lucrative haul. According to one study, there were 850,000 blast fishing incidents recorded between 2006 and 2016 in Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines alone. “An entire generation [of fishers] will be destitute [because of blast fishing],” Perera says.

… or this: ‘One player is gonna die’ – US Open struggles as heatwave envelops New York

Daniil Medvedev was feeling the heat yesterday afternoon at the US Open, and it was not coming from his opponent, Andrey Rublev, whom he was on his way to beating in straight sets in their quarter-final. As the sun beat down on Flushing Meadows, the players – and crowd – simmered in the oppressive humidity.

“One player is gonna die. And they’re gonna see,” said the world No 3 as he wiped the sweat from his brow. Medvedev is known for his outspokenness, but other players have been suffering in the last few days as New York is enveloped in a late-summer heatwave, which has been made worse by the humidity and lack of a cooling breeze. The uncomfortable conditions have been a flashpoint for the tournament. With more steamy weather expected for the rest of the week, the tongue-wagging portion of the US Open has been reached.

Climate check: Extreme weather costs hit US as 60m people under heat alerts in ‘harrowing summer’

The increasing costs of extreme weather in the US are hitting hard as more than 60 million Americans are under heat alerts this week, experts say, even though federal law does not explicitly consider heatwaves to be climate disasters. Temperatures on Tuesday climbed toward record highs across the north-east, upper midwest and mid-Atlantic, with the south bracing for soaring temperatures later in the week. “It’s just an extraordinary, harrowing summer when it comes to extreme events, many of which bear the fingerprints of climate change,” said Rachel Cleetus, the climate and energy policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists. The country is stretched paying those costs, because of dwindling funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and laws that do not consider heat to be a climate disaster.

Last Thing: Delta flight returns after passenger has diarrhea ‘all the way through’ plane

Footage has emerged of the “onboard medical emergency” that forced a US airliner back to Atlanta only two hours into its flight to Spain: a messy trail of diarrhea left by a struggling passenger. Maintenance crews spent five hours cleaning the Delta Airbus A350 after its enforced early landing, including replacing an aisle carpet ruined in the incident. Passengers, reportedly including the one suffering diarrhea, were allowed to re-board after an eight-hour delay, making it to Barcelona on Saturday afternoon with no further incident. Accounts from some onboard posted to social media described flight crew doing their best to mop up the mess with paper towels and scented disinfectant – but that only had the effect of making the plane “smell of vanilla shit”, one passenger said.

Sign up

First Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now.

Get in touch

If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email [email protected]