Press freedom groups are sounding the alarm after news reports revealed that the U.S. government is poised to greenlight a massive telecommunications merger between industry giants AT&T and DirecTV. 

On Tuesday, after the Wall Street Journal first broke the news, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler issued a statement (pdf) indicating his approval of AT&T’s $49 billion acquisition of DirecTV. And though it is unclear when the Commission will formally vote on the merger, as CNN reports, “Wheeler’s recommendation makes government approval of the deal all but certain.”

Under the terms of the buyout, the third- and fifth-largest pay-TV providers in the country will now be combined. Further, as the nation’s second-largest home Internet access provider, AT&T will now have “new power and incentives to thwart online video competition,” media advocacy group Free Press warns.

Responding to the news, Free Press policy director Matt Wood charged that the merger will only thwart competition and hasten the consolidation of the telecommunications industry.

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Texas’s controversial voter ID law, the most severe in the country, has a “discriminatory effect” against minority voters, in what civil rights campaigners say is an important step towards justice for African-American, Latino, and low-income people suppressed under the rule.

The three judge panel determined that the law, passed by the state in 2011, violates what’s left of the Voting Rights Act after it was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. The ruling itself comes just one day before the 50th anniversary of the Act, which was the product of the mass organizing and protests of the civil rights and black freedom movements.

“We recognize the charged nature of accusations of racism, particularly against a legislative body, but we also recognize the sad truth that racism continues to exist in our modern American society despite years of laws designed to eradicate it,” wrote the three-judge panel for the New Orleans court, which is known for being conservative.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision, however, fell short of issuing a broad injunction against the 2011 law, instead determining that it must be sent to a lower district court to find an appropriate remedy. It was not immediately clear whether the state will continue to enforce the rule in the meantime.

This is not the first time a judge has ruled against the law. In 2014, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzoles Ramos overturned the rule on the grounds that it has “an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans” and compared it to a poll tax. She noted that voter suppression under the law was vast, with over 600,000 registered voters in Texas lacking the required documentation.

However, Texas successfully appealed this ruling, and the law was in effect during the November 2014 election, thereby disenfranchising large numbers of voters. Wednesday’s decision is a blow against the 2011 rule but falls short of the Ramos ruling.

As the number of civilians impacted by the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan rises along with the fighting, humanitarian agencies are struggling to meet the needs of the wounded, hungry and displaced.

The first half of 2015 has seen “record high levels” of civilian casualties, the United Nations relief agency said Tuesday, with civilian deaths touching 1,592 and total non-combatant casualties standing at over 4,900 – a one-percent increase compared to the number of casualties in the same period in 2014.

Fresh fighting in the provinces of Helmand, Kunduz, Faryab and Nangarhar are indicative of the geographic spread of the conflict, while tensions and sporadic clashes all across the central regions are forcing huge numbers of civilians from their homes.

An estimated 103,000 people have been displaced by the conflict in 2015 alone, including from locations hitherto untouched by forced population movements including Badakshan, Sar-i-Pul, Baghlan, Takhar and Badgis, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its mid-year review released on Aug. 18.

Clashes between the Taliban and other armed opposition groups are becoming more frequent, and the fragmentation of these groups only means that both the complexity and geographic extent of the conflict will continue to worsen.

Having received only 195 million dollars, or 48 percent of its 406 million-dollar funding requirement as of July, the U.N.’s humanitarian response plan is faltering.

Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman who sued the state of Georgia for housing her in men’s prisons and subjecting her to abuse since 2012, was unexpectedly paroled on Monday following a grueling legal battle.

“I’m overjoyed to be with my family again and out of harm’s way,” Diamond said after her release. “Although the systematic abuse and assaults I faced for more than three years have left me emotionally and physically scarred, I’ll continue to fight for justice and to shine a light on the gross mistreatment of transgender inmates in Georgia and nationwide.”

Diamond, 37, filed a lawsuit against the state in February, alleging that prison officials denied her access to hormone treatments and other medical needs, prevented her from expressing her gender identity, and allowed her to be sexually and physically assaulted by other inmates. Her previous requests for transfer to a lower-security level prison were denied.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which represented Diamond, welcomed the news but added that Diamond’s parole did not equal justice.

“While we’re thrilled that Ashley Diamond is out of prison, our lawsuit is far from over,” said SPLC staff attorney Chinyere Ezie. “Ashley has endured more than three years of systematic abuse based on the Georgia Department of Corrections’ unconstitutional policies toward transgender inmates and woeful lack of care.”

“Her release does not erase her barbaric treatment by GDC officials, which was tantamount to torture,” Ezie continued. “Nor is her plight isolated. We will continue to advocate for an end to prison practices that unfairly punish and inflict pain on transgender inmates.”

With a passionate press conference outside the White House on Tuesday morning, a sweeping coalition of climate, labor, Indigenous, and public health groups and leaders called on President Barack Obama to make the United States the first nation to commit to keeping all of its remaining, unleased public fossil fuels in the ground.

Such a move is imperative, the more than 400 organizations and individuals wrote in a letter outlining their demands.

“The cost of continuing federal fossil fuel leasing to our land, climate, and communities is too high,” reads the missive delivered Tuesday. “The science is clear that, to maintain a good chance of avoiding catastrophic levels of warming, the world must keep the vast majority of its remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Federal fossil fuels—those that you control—are the natural place to begin.”

Speaking to Obama’s ability to set an international precedent, the letter continues: “Each new federal fossil fuel lease opens new deposits for development that should be deemed unburnable. By placing those deposits off limits, stopping new leasing would help align your administration’s energy policy with a safer climate future and global carbon budgets.”

The campaign comes just days after the Obama administration announced it would open nearly 40 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to new oil and gas drilling leases, and one month after it approved a permit for Royal Dutch Shell to drill in the Arctic. 

Of course, significant damage has been done on the more than 67 million acres of public land and ocean already leased to the fossil fuel industry.

Human-induced climate change has pushed the Earth to the brink of a major shift as scientists predict rapidly rising global temperatures within the next two years.

A study, titled Big Changes Underway in the Climate System? (pdf) and published by the British Meteorological Office, notes that heightened greenhouse gas emissions will exacerbate the naturally-occurring phenomenon known as El Niño to push global temperatures to record highs.

This temporary warming of surface waters in the Pacific, known as El Niño, drives dramatic shifts in rainfall, temperature, and wind patterns worldwide, and can last for months or even years.

In the short term, this means that the Southern Hemisphere can expect record heatwaves during its 2015-2016 summer season, coupled with the extreme weather events, such as typhoons, typically associated with an El Niño. 

“It looks very likely that globally 2014, 2015 and 2016 will all be amongst the very warmest years ever recorded,” said scientist Rowan Sutton, who peer-reviewed the study.

“This is not a fluke,” Sutton, who works for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, continued. “We are seeing the effects of energy steadily accumulating in the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, caused by greenhouse gas emissions.”

In the most recent El Niño update released last Thursday, the National Weather Service also noted the planet is currently experiencing the upswing of one of the strongest El Niño events, and quite possibly the strongest, of the past 65 years of recordkeeping.

Organizers of a citizens’ initiative on Wednesday delivered a petition with over three million signatures to the European Commission headquarters in Brussels in their continuing bid to stop trade deals they say pose a threat to democracy and boon to corporate interests.

They say the number of signatures—over 3.2 million at the time of publication—is proof of the vast public opposition to the trade deals in question: the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and United States.

“By signing this petition, an unprecedented three million people from countries across Europe have made it clear that they reject these dangerous Trojan horse treaties which benefit big corporations at the expense of people,” stated Magda Stoczkiewicz, director of Friends of the Earth Europe.

Their petition, which has the support of over 500 European organizations, states:

As the London-based Global Justice Now explains in a media statement, the petition

“Three million people demanding an end to the TTIP negotiations shows that the EU does not have the public mandate to continue this deal,” the organization’s director, Nick Dearden, adds. “People across Europe are standing up to protect our labour rights, our environmental standards and vital public services, like the [National Health Service], from TTIP. Everything that we know about this secretive trade deal shows that it is very little about trade and very much about enshrining a massive corporate power grab.”