While SCOTUS is taking its sweet time deciding the last of this session’s cases before the holiday next week, it did rule on a biggie yesterday. The high court struck down a decade-in-the-making settlement between Purdue Pharma and victims of the opioid epidemic.

The settlement, crafted as part of Purdue’s bankruptcy, would have forced the Sacklers—the wealthy family who reaped billions from Purdue’s massive OxyContin push—to shell out $6 billion that would partly go toward compensating individuals impacted by the drug. But, in return, the Sacklers demanded protection from any current and future lawsuits.

• The family amassed over $10 billion in Purdue Pharma payouts before they left the company’s board and Purdue filed for bankruptcy amid a slew of lawsuits. Sackler family members, none of whom filed for personal bankruptcy, said nearly half of that went to taxes.
• At the request of the Biden administration, the Supreme Court put the settlement on hold last summer after a lower court allowed it to go forward.

In a 5–4 vote, the high court nixed the settlement, saying protection from legal liability for the Sackler family is out of the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy court as the DOJ argued in the case. Now it’s back to the drawing board for Purdue, and a new settlement sans Sackler protections will likely be difficult to cook up.

What else the court decided yesterday

SCOTUS dismissed an appeal from Idaho officials, a decision that allows emergency abortions in the state for now—but did not rule on the underlying legal question. Pro-choice advocates said it was not the win they were hoping for, but instead punts the issue to a later date.

The court also ruled 6–3 that defendants facing SEC financial penalties have the right to make their case before federal juries instead of in-house tribunals, which could potentially undercut government agencies’ ability to penalize infractions.

Five more decisions are still pending…including former President Donald Trump’s highly anticipated immunity case and one on whether states can punish homeless people sleeping in public spaces.—MM

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The NFL has to pay Sunday Ticket fans $4.7 billion. A Los Angeles jury found that the league violated federal antitrust law by inflating the price of NFL Sunday Ticket—its out-of-market broadcast bundle—and preventing fans from buying single-team packages. The league reportedly must pay nearly $5b to fans who subscribed to Sunday Ticket and another $96 million to bars that were overcharged for the package (a sports bar in San Francisco initially filed the suit in 2015). These amounts could be tripled under the law. The NFL, which said it was “disappointed” in the decision, plans to appeal.

Walgreens will reportedly close a number of stores. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, CEO Tim Wentworth said the pharmacy chain will shutter a significant share of its 8,600 locations in the US. The closures are part of a broader attempt to boost the ailing company, which also includes reducing its stake in the primary care business VillageMD. Wentworth said the company can reassign most employees instead of conducting layoffs. Shares cratered yesterday after Walgreens whiffed on Wall Street’s earnings projections due to weak consumer spending.

Americans abroad were hit with a huge phone outage. Many US customers of AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon traveling out of the country could not make calls or send messages yesterday. A Verizon spokesperson told CNN that 30% of its overseas customers’ data connections were not going through as of last night. The companies blamed a third-party provider, Syniverse, that manages international roaming. Syniverse confirmed it was working to restore full service, but didn’t say what caused the issue.

The website where you can buy almost anything for cheap will soon sell a miscellany of goods for even cheaper. Amazon is planning to open an ultra-inexpensive, direct-from-China storefront that’ll compete with increasingly popular bargain sites Temu and Shein, The Information reported this week.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. In Amazon’s strongest-armed response to Temu and Shein yet—one that resembles its competitors’ tactics—the e-commerce giant’s forthcoming bargain section will sell China-made goods that are largely under $20, ranging from clothes to weights to gua sha facial tools (but nothing edible or liquid).

• Amazon will ship the products directly to US buyers from Chinese warehouses in nine to 11 days.
• That’s much slower than Prime speed, but Temu’s and Shein’s popularity suggests that some shoppers are willing to wait a while if they can pay less.

Because the packages will ship straight from China to your door (rather than as part of a larger shipment that stops at a US warehouse first), they could take advantage of the de minimis exemption—a much-criticized loophole that nixes import tariffs on individual foreign cargo valued at <$800 (which Temu and Shein both use).

TikTok is another concern: ByteDance’s brain-rot service will run a TikTok Shop sale beginning on July 9, the platform announced yesterday…two days after Amazon said Prime Day would be July 16 and 17.—ML

You need a backup plan. New research shows that a surprising amount of data exists on endpoints in business settings (regardless of policy). It also may not be properly protected, which can spell good news for hackers and bad news for your org. We teamed up with CrashPlan to explain what lacking endpoint data resiliency can look like—and how to solve it without manual effort.

A major attraction of the Magic Kingdom got a reboot. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure opens in Florida today in place of the mega-popular but controversial ride Splash Mountain, four years after Disney announced the revamp (the same transformation will happen at Disneyland by the end of the year).

The new ride, which is part of Disney’s $60 billion investment in its theme parks, follows Princess Tiana from The Princess and the Frog through a celebration of family and friends in New Orleans. While it runs on the old Splash Mountain tracks and still uses animatronics, it marks a new era for Disney as the first ride based on a Black character in the company’s nearly 70 years of operating theme parks.

Despite all the love for Br’er Rabbit…Splash Mountain had run its course, according to a creative director at the park. The attraction was based on the 1946 movie Song of the South, which has been criticized for featuring racist stereotypes of Black people. Disney never released the movie on home video or streaming.

Genie+’s out, too. Disney World unveiled a new ride reservation system this week, rebranding its former system, Genie+, into two different Lightning Lane passes. There’s one huge new perk for Disney aficionados: Visitors can now pre-book their rides up to seven days in advance.—CC

The IRS seems to hate talking to you as much as you hate talking to them. According to the agency’s internal watchdog group, just 31% of taxpayers were able to reach a representative over the phone this tax season, the WSJ reported. For certain departments, it was even worse: Less than one-fifth of the 2.1 million people who tried to reach the IRS collections line managed to get a human being to answer. Congress is aware of the communication problem—it approved funding in 2022 so the agency could hire thousands of agents. But the IRS says throwing more customer service reps at the problem isn’t a permanent solution. “Let’s think differently,” Erin Collins, head of the agency’s Taxpayer Advocate Service, said in her midyear report to Congress.

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