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National

Data: Martin-Quinn scores; Note: 2005 term refers to the median justice score after Justice Samuel Alito joined the court; Chart: Simran Parwani/Axios

The Supreme Court continued to lean conservative during its most recent term, according to preliminary data. 

Why it matters: After overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the court continued to push American law toward the right — including in its historic decisions last week on affirmative action and gay rights.

Driving the news: Preliminary data following a contentious 2022-23 Supreme Court term shows Justice Brett Kavanaugh remained the court's "median justice." 

That means the court is conservative enough that its center falls squarely on the right.

Justice Samuel Alito became the court's most conservative member, surpassing Justice Clarence Thomas for the first time since both have served on the high court. 

How it works: The "Martin-Quinn score," developed by Andrew D. Martin of Washington University in St. Louis and Kevin Quinn of Emory University, measures the ideology of Supreme Court justices dating back to 1937.

The score is calculated using data from each Supreme Court term and measured on an "ideological continuum." 

The current estimates are preliminary, and final versions of the scores will be available later in the summer.

Details: In her first term on the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was on the liberal side, but less so than justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Historically, the court's most conservative median justice was Byron White in 1988, with a Martin-Quinn score of 1.096, compared with Kavanaugh's 0.524 this term. 

The big picture: The recent term also saw wins for voting rights, including the justices deciding that states' election laws can be challenged in court and striking down a Republican-drawn congressional map in Alabama.

Go deeper: The political leanings of the Supreme Court justices

states' election laws can be challenged in court

striking down a Republican-drawn congressional map

The political leanings of the Supreme Court justices

Supreme Court ideology continues to lean conservative, new data shows

After overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the court continued to push American law to the right.

Supreme Court justices

Politics & Policy

The Israeli military on Monday deployed hundreds of soldiers and launched air attacks on the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, killing at least eight Palestinians and vowing to continue the operation for "as long as it takes." 

The big picture: It's one of the largest assaults on a West Bank city in nearly 20 years. 

The raid and drone strikes began early Monday, with Israel saying it had launched an operation targeting "terrorist infrastructures" in the densely populated Jenin refugee camp, which is a militant stronghold.  

Gunfights between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants were reported to be taking place by Monday afternoon. At least 50 Palestinians have been injured, with 10 in critical condition, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. 

The Jenin municipality accused Israel of "deliberately destroying" the city's "water networks’ main lines." 

What they're saying: “What the Israeli occupation government is doing in the city of Jenin and its camp is a new war crime against our defenseless people,” Palestinian Authority spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said in a statement.

The PA was holding an emergency meeting Monday evening local time about the escalating situation in Jenin.

IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said the Israeli military will continue the operation for "as long as it takes."

"We want to break that mindset of a safe haven" for "terrorists," Hecht told reporters.

Neighboring Jordan and Eygpt as well as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation quickly condemned the raid.

The operation “constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law and obligations of the [Israeli] occupation," Jordanian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sinan al-Majali said in a statement. 

UN envoy Tor Wennesland said on Twitter that the escalation "is very dangerous" and "reminds us of the extremely volatile & unpredictable situation across the occupied West Bank."

"All must ensure the civilian population is protected," he said. He added he has been in touch with "all relevant parties to urgently de-escalate the situation."

Palestinian factions in the West Bank and Gaza said they will not abandon Jenin. 

The "Israeli occupation’s attempts to take the battle to the streets of Jenin and the West Bank would be in vain, assuring that Jenin would not be left alone,” senior Islamic Jihad member Khaled Al-Batsh told Al Jazeera. 

State of play: The Israeli military over the last year has stepped up its raids in Jenin, where Israel says several attacks against Israeli citizens have been planned and launched. The IDF also conducts near-daily raids in other Palestinian cities and towns. 

The Israeli military has killed at least 130 Palestinians in the West Bank in this year, per the UN and news reports. Many have been militants but several civilians, including children, have also been killed. 

Last month, the Israeli military killed several Palestinians, including two 15-year-olds, in a large-scale Jenin raid that included the use of armed drones for the first time in about two decades.

Nearly 30 Israelis have been killed in attacks by Arabs inside the West Bank and in Israel over the last year, AP reports. 

At the same time, Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians and their homes and cars have increased as well. 

Israel launches massive deadly attack on West Bank city of Jenin

It's the largest such assault on Jenin in about 20 years.

Smoke billows during an Israeli military operation in Jenin city in the occupied West Bank, on July 3, 2023.

Smoke billows during an Israeli military operation in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, on July 3. Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Israel

Conflicts, policies and powers are intersecting and shaping the world. Breaking news and analysis of national security, foreign policy and global crises.

World

Macro

Axios Macro

Gloom-and-doom pessimists who predicted 2023 would be a year of economic misery have been wrong (at least as the second half gets underway). Those who predicted a gradual rebalancing with limited pain have been right.

Why it matters: Things could obviously go wrong in any number of ways from here, but so far the immaculate disinflation — what had seemed a remote scenario in which inflation comes down without a recession — has materialized.

That said, it has been slower than ideal, with inflation still tracking well above what most Americans — or Federal Reserve policymakers — consider acceptable.

By the numbers: The labor market has shown only the mildest slippage from a super-hot 2022. The unemployment rate was 3.7% in May, up from 3.5% in December (the June number is due out Friday).

Employers have added an average of 314,000 jobs a month, robust by any historical standard but slower than last year's pace of 460,000 per month.

The share of 25- to 54-year-olds who are employed has kept rising this year, to 80.7% from 80.1% in December, a sign this economy keeps putting more people in their prime working years into jobs.

The number of new jobless claims averaged 213,000 a week in 2022 — and 231,000 so far in 2023. Higher, yes, but hardly crisis-level.

Back in December, Fed officials projected that unemployment would be around 4.6% at the end of 2023. Unless the labor market falls off a cliff in the next few months, they were too pessimistic.

State of play: The inflation trend is in the right direction, though with less alacrity than would be desirable. Over the past 12 months, the overall Consumer Price Index is up 4.1%, compared with 6.4% as of December.

But that has been driven by energy and other commodity prices normalizing after their surge in the early days of the Ukraine war. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, is coming down more slowly.

Core CPI was 5.7% for the 2022 calendar year and has been an annualized 5.1% through the first five months of 2023.

Yes, but: The disinflation has been enough to leave workers with more purchasing power. Average hourly earnings have been growing more slowly than they were in 2022, but inflation has come down by more, and so real wages are slightly up.

Average hourly earnings for all private-sector workers are up 4.3% over the last year, compared to 4.1% headline inflation.

The mid-year picture in financial markets is similarly benign, though not without some bumps along the way.

State of play: A strong first half of the year for the stock market has driven the S&P 500 index up 16.4% (16.9% including reinvested dividends). The S&P is now only about 7% below its early 2022 peak.

That has been enough to boost Americans' wealth, improve CEO confidence and prompt some chatter of a new bull market being underway.

Yet beneath the surface, bond prices tell a somewhat more complicated story.

Interest rates, as reflected in the market for Treasuries, have experienced a round trip so far in 2023. For example, the two-year yield — a good proxy for market expectation of medium-term Fed policy — soared from the low 4% range in January to over 5% in early March.

It collapsed following the demise of Silicon Valley Bank in mid-March, amid fears of a systemic banking system crisis.

Then, it rebounded to nearly its pre-SVB highs, as a much-feared credit freeze failed to materialize. It was 4.9% as of Friday.

Between the lines: Markets have become more confident that the economy is strong enough to shrug off banking system troubles, but that also means the Fed will have to keep rates higher for longer.

It's a big contrast with last year, when higher rates tended to trigger a stock market selloff.

Now, higher rates have coincided with a stronger stock market, suggesting conviction that the corporate sector can weather the storm of higher rates from the Fed.

The bottom line: So far so good for the economy and markets in 2023. The question now is whether it will last.

A mid-year assessment for the U.S. economy

So far the immaculate disinflation — what had seemed a remote scenario in which inflation comes down without a recession — has materialized.

Illustration of a one hundred dollar bill on a monthly calendar

Labor economics

Top stories & latest news on the Federal Reserve, real-time data, plus the biggest shifts happening in the U.S. and global economy.

Economy

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

Finish Line

Axios Finish Line

Destinations that were once ideal for summer travel are now on the decline because of extreme heat and other effects of climate change.

Why it matters: Many of the world’s natural wonders have been so severely altered by our warming planet that it’s getting too late to save them.

“The number one message is that nowhere is safe.” said Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown. “There’s always the potential for a nasty surprise.”

What’s happening: Travelers are rethinking their plans — skipping some former hot spots altogether, or visiting earlier in the year, before extreme heat sets in;

And travel itself is getting interrupted by climate change as extreme heat and smoke from wildfires grounds planes.

Popular spots in Italy, Greece, France and Spain, which typically see peak tourist traffic around July, are notching record temperatures and even dealing with wildfires, the New York Times reports. 

As a result, people are choosing cooler places — like Amsterdam and Copenhagen — for summer travel and saving the warmer countries for September or October, Dolev Azaria, who owns a travel agency, told the Times.

Coastal towns in New Jersey and Florida that are typically popular in the summer are also becoming unpleasant and unsafe as they're hit with "sunny-day floods," which is flooding that occurs due to rising seas as opposed to storms, Marvel said.

The stakes: Some of the world's most stunning destinations have already undergone drastic changes.

The world has lost about 15% of its coral reefs in the last decade, per the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network

Some of Glacier National Park's glaciers have lost more than 80% of their size in the last 50 years, CNN reports.

Mount Everest's highest glacier has lost 2000 years worth of ice in the last 30 years, one recent study found. The mountain's rapidly changing conditions are also making climbing it even more dangerous, according to Nepal's tourism board.

What to watch: Climate change is also introducing wholly new destinations that were previously too cold to visit but have warmed enough for tourists, Axios' Andrew Freedman notes.

Greenland is building new airports to accommodate more international flights as it sees a rise in visitors.

Climate change upends summer travel

Extreme heat is prompting tourists to rethink their plans.

Illustration of a beach umbrella with a thermometer for the base on a hot beach

Travel

Climate change

Breaking climate science and policy coverage as extreme weather events reshape communities. Keep tabs on the race to a low carbon economy, which may be bumpy as governments, climate tech startups and major oil and gas companies race to find their niche amid the changing energy landscape.

Energy & Climate

Torrential rains flooded Chicago's streets and forced NASCAR officials to postpone a race through the city, as the National Weather Service issued hazardous weather alerts for over 110 million Americans during the extended July Fourth holiday weekend.

State of play: Chicago train services were suspended, buses were temporarily rerouted and Illinois State Police said parts of Interstate highways 55 and 290 were shut due to flooding, per WLS-TV. 

A screenshot of a tweet by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago saying: " At approx 4 p.m.,  we began reversing to the lake at the Chicago River locks downtown. We have far exceeded the previous record for July 2 rainfall which was two inches. Final numbers are not in yet but some areas have exceeded five inches of rain already today."

Photo: Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago/Twitter

Heavy rains flood Chicago as 110M under extreme weather alerts

NASCAR officials had to postpone a race through the city's streets due to flooding.

Axios

Monday's top stories

Supreme Court ideology continues to lean conservative, new data shows

Israel launches massive deadly attack on West Bank city of Jenin

A mid-year assessment for the U.S. economy

Climate change upends summer travel

Heavy rains flood Chicago as 110M under extreme weather alerts

Yellen to visit China this week

2 dead, 28 injured in shooting at Baltimore block party

GOP 2024 rivals and Buttigieg slam DeSantis video targeting LGBTQ rights

Pennsylvania's playbook for Democrats

The Supreme Court falls to Earth

Karl Rove's blunt take on the 2024 GOP presidential field