U.S. News

Flint, Mich. – A decade after lead contaminated water was found in Flint, Michigan’s water system, the legal battle to replace lead water pipes is finished, a landmark milestone for a city defined by its dangerous water. Today the State of Michigan submitted a progress report to a federal court confirming that, more than eight years after a court-ordered settlement required Flint officials to replace pipes and restore property damaged in the process, nearly 11,000 lead pipes were replaced and more than 28,000 properties were restored. There is no safe level of lead exposure.

“Thanks to the persistence of the people of Flint and our partners, we are finally at the end of the lead pipe replacement project. While this milestone is not all the justice our community deserves, it is a huge achievement,” said Pastor Allen C. Overton of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action. “We would not have reached this day without the work of so many Flint residents who worked to hold our leaders accountable. I have never been prouder to be a member of the Flint community.”

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.

The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.

Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”

Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”

Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.

The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.

Women in Wisconsin will continue to have access to abortion services under a new ruling from the state's highest court that invalidates a 176-year-old state law that had banned abortions in nearly every situation.

In a 4-3 ruling July 2, the liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed a lower court's previous decision that overturned the 19th Century law.

The decision ends three years of tumult over the issue following the 2022 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, which had provided women nationwide with a constitutional right to abortion.

Writing for the court's liberal majority, Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet said the Wisconsin state Legislature had effectively repealed the 1849 law when it enacted additional laws regulating access to abortion.

"... this case is about giving effect to 50 years’ worth of laws passed by the legislature about virtually every aspect of abortion including where, when, and how health-care providers may lawfully perform abortions," Dallet wrote. "The legislature, as the people’s representatives, remains free to change the laws with respect to abortion in the future."

As a United States marine, Arturo Flores served in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he worked as a military police officer and trained dogs to find roadside bombs.

It’s his experience in the military that has made what he’s seen on the streets of southern California in recent weeks all the more disturbing to him, Flores said.

Flores is the mayor of Huntington Park, in south LA county.

Like in other parts of LA, many Huntington residents have been terrified amid reports of masked federal agents detaining immigrants, or those that look like immigrants, on the street, in parking lots, at swap meets or large stores and soldiers deployed into the city against the wishes of local officials and the governor.

“It is a campaign of domestic terror that is being imposed on our residents on a daily basis,” Flores said. “It is a level of psychological warfare that I’ve only seen in theaters of war. It’s terrifying seeing it being displayed here in my city.”

In a welcome sign that sky-high egg prices are coming home to roost, Waffle House is dropping its 50 cent per egg surcharge.

Government price-checkers monitor prices around the country every month to compile the government's cost-of-living index. Staffing shortages have recently forced the Labor Department to scale back that data gathering.

"Egg-cellent news," the chain announced Tuesday in a social media post. "The egg surcharge is officially off the menu. Thanks for understanding."

Waffle House had added the surcharge in February as an outbreak of avian flu forced the culling of tens of millions of egg-laying chickens, sending prices to record highs. Since then, both wholesale and retail prices have begun to normalize, although retail egg prices in May were still up more than 40% from a year ago.

I can't say that lede actually makes sense. "Coming home to roost" does not idiomatically mean what is clearly intended here. Were this a story about Waffle House going out of business because of the egg surcharge, then, by all means, go with that.

It isn't, so ...

A local diner chain had the same surcharge for a while and dropped it last month. I'm just glad they didn't print new menus and make it permanent in either case.

so glad we are decimating every federal program for the poor to make room for what really matters: tax breaks for millionaires. Finally the country gets back to its robber baron roots.

Another win for freedom to read legislation on the West Coast this week, as Oregon’s state House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1098 on Monday, a bill that will protect access to books in school libraries. It’s great news: books can no longer be banned solely because they discuss sexuality, religion, or other topics, nor can books be removed because they are written by someone from a protected class. SB 1098 now goes to the governor, who is expected to sign it into law.

The successful legislative effort got a big lift from a coalition of advocates and citizens, including the ACLU of Oregon, Basic Rights Oregon, and Authors Against Book Bans, a organization with a great track record in fights like these.

Fewer meteorologists means less climate change, right?

Cuts to the weather service by Trump and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have left NWS local forecast offices critically understaffed throughout this year’s heightened severe weather. In April, an internal document reportedly described how cuts could create a situation of “degraded” operations – shutting down core services one by one until it reaches an equilibrium that doesn’t overtax its remaining employees.

The changing climate is also making simultaneous weather disasters more likely, such as overlapping tornadoes and flash floods – creating emergency preparedness difficulties and compounding the effects of funding cuts.

Deadly storms earlier this spring in Kentucky and Missouri featured torrential rains during an ongoing tornado outbreak, a nightmare scenario that demands close attention by emergency managers to avoid people seeking shelter in flood zones. At the NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky, however, a staffing shortage meant there was no on-duty forecaster for the overnight shift when the storms were at their peak. This year marks the first time that local NWS forecast offices have stopped round-the-clock operations in the agency’s modern history.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request from ExxonMobil to overturn a historic ruling allowing ordinary people and citizen groups to sue industrial polluters, upholding what legal experts say is a crucial mechanism to deter companies from continuously breaking environmental laws.

The decision concludes more than a decade of litigation over toxic pollution from Exxon’s petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas. In 2010, environmental groups sued Exxon on behalf of residents living near the facility for years of reported violations of its Clean Air Act permits, including pollution of cancer-causing chemicals. A federal judge hit the company with a nearly $20 million penalty, later reduced to $14 million — the largest ever imposed on a company in a citizen-led public interest lawsuit to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Exxon did everything it could to battle the ruling. When its appeals failed, the oil giant asked the high court to reconsider whether citizens had standing to sue polluters for environmental harms in the first place.

“At trial, Exxon’s neighbors bravely testified to the harms they suffered from the company’s illegal pollution, painting an ugly picture of what it’s like to live in Exxon’s shadow,” said Josh Kratka, managing attorney at the National Environmental Law Center, one of the plaintiffs’ lead attorneys. “The Supreme Court saw through Exxon’s claim that its neighbors shouldn’t have the right to hold the company accountable for compliance with the Clean Air Act.”

Exxon will now have to pay the fine and make changes to its operations at the facility, where nearby residents continue to live with the consequences of its ongoing pollution.

Vice President J.D. Vance took heat from critics this week when he downplayed legislation that would result in millions of Americans losing Medicaid coverage as mere "minutiae."

Vance defended the budget megabill that's currently being pushed through the United States Senate by arguing that it will massively increase funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which he deemed to be a necessary component of carrying out the Trump administration's mass deportation operation.

The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.

The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.

NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.

For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources.

Sounds perfect for Palantir to merge into its database.

President Trump visited Florida on Tuesday to tour what's been dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz," a controversial migrant detention center in the Everglades that officials say is poised to start filling its bed in a matter of hours.

The president was joined by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state emergency management officials as he toured the makeshift facility, which the state put together within days of receiving federal approval last week.

"I thought this was so professional, so well done," Trump said after touring the center, which features rows of fenced-in bunk beds and a razor-wire perimeter. "It's really government working together."

The facility is situated within the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, an isolated, 39-square mile airstrip located within the wetlands of the Big Cypress National Preserve, next to Everglades National Park.

Blood-sucking ticks that trigger a bizarre allergy to meat in the people they bite are exploding in number and spreading across the US, to the extent that they could cover the entire eastern half of the country and infect millions of people, experts have warned.

Lone star ticks have taken advantage of rising temperatures by the human-caused climate crisis to expand from their heartland in the south-east US to areas previously too cold for them, in recent years marching as far north as New York and even Maine, as well as pushing westwards.

The ticks are known to be unusually aggressive and can provoke an allergy in bitten people whereby they cannot eat red meat without enduring a severe reaction, such as breaking out in hives and even the risk of heart attacks. The condition, known as alpha-gal syndrome, has proliferated from just a few dozen known cases in 2009 to as many as 450,000 now.

That's one way to reduce meat consumption, I guess.

This guy is just fucking delusional.

“They did obliterate it, it turned out,” Trump told Bartiromo, insisting Iran’s nuclear capabilities were destroyed. “We had to suffer the fake news with the fake news of CNN and The New York Times, [which were] saying, well, maybe it wasn’t as good as Trump said. Maybe it wasn’t totally obliterated.”

“It turned out, no, it was obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before,” he continued. “And that meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time.”

What is it with his obsession with "like nobody's ever seen before" narratives? Counterpoint: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden ... the list goes on.

This is exactly the sort of situation journalism is designed for. Government lied, we have receipts, here's the story.

Police in southern California arrested a man suspected of posing as a federal immigration officer this week, the latest in a series of such arrests, as masked, plainclothes immigration agents are deployed nationwide to meet the Trump administration’s mass deportation targets.

The man, Fernando Diaz, was arrested by Huntington Park police after officers said they found a loaded gun and official-looking documents with Department of Homeland Security headings in his SUV, according to NBC Los Angeles. Officers were impounding his vehicle for parking in a handicapped zone when Diaz asked to retrieve items inside, the police said. Among the items seen by officers in the car were “multiple copies of passports not registered under the individual’s name”, NBC reports.

Diaz was arrested for possession of the allegedly unregistered firearm and released on bail.

Well, yeah ... if actual officers/agents are going around masked in plain clothes, of course some people are going to see that as a great way to get away with shit.

Senators this week called for a federal investigation into the Trump administration’s killing of hundreds of contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Angus King, a Maine independent, wrote to the agency’s inspector general on Monday asking for an investigation into the administration’s cancellation of the contracts and the consequences for veterans.

The senators highlighted “damning reporting from ProPublica” on the cancellations, including how the Department of Government Efficiency used an artificial intelligence tool that marked contracts as “MUNCHABLE.”

The senators wrote that DOGE’s use of AI to scrutinize contracts “adds an entire new level of unease connected to the decision-making, security, governance, and quality control of the entire process.”

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts after DOGE’s review but have declined requests by lawmakers and ProPublica for details.

The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit district judges’ power to block his orders on a nationwide basis, in an emergency appeal related to the birthright citizenship case but with wide implications for the executive branch’s power. The court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided and the fate of the US president’s order to overturn birthright citizenship rights was left unclear.

The decision on Friday morning, however, decided six votes to three by the nine-member supreme court bench, sides with the Trump administration in a historic case that boosts tested presidential power and judicial oversight in the second Trump administration.

The court’s ruling in Trump v CASA, Inc will boost Trump’s potential to enforce citizenship restrictions, in this and other cases in future, in states where courts had not specifically blocked them, creating a chaotic patchwork.

Democracy sure was fun while it lasted.

Influential right-wing groups are calling on President Trump to deport the young progressive who just won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.

The ongoing political turmoil and bottlenecked federal funding have prompted the widespread development of solar-plus-storage systems across the island that are privately financed via leases, loans, or Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). Each month, the island sees around 4,000 solar-plus-battery storage systems come online, Rúa-Jovet says. These installations are connected to the grid but can also operate during blackouts.

At the end of March, LUMA reported over 1.14 gigawatts of grid-connected distributed solar capacity, with an additional 2.34 gigawatt-hours of distributed batteries connected to the grid. Solar power produces over 2 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, which accounts for more than 12.5 percent of Puerto Rico’s total residential electricity consumption annually. The majority of that power is generated from residential solar, and capacity continues to grow as more residents install systems with private financing.

Adjuntas, which has a population of about 18,000, took a more experimental approach. The town’s local environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo teamed up with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop a way to connect multiple microgrids to exchange power with one another, all without having to be hooked up to Puerto Rico’s grid. The strategy, called grid orchestration, ensures that if power is knocked out on one of the installations, the others aren’t compromised. It’s what kept multiple areas in Adjuntas electrified during April’s island-wide blackout.

During the blackout, Casa Pueblo and the Oak Ridge researchers were completing the testing of the orchestration strategy with three of the five microgrids connected in Adjuntas. These three microgrids are connected to the grid via net metering. The remaining two grids are isolated.

“By decentralizing, it’s creating a more resilient and redundant energy setup,” says Arturo Massol-Deyá, Casa Pueblo’s executive director. “Engineers will say: If you have redundancy, that’s more resilient; that’s better.”

The teams demonstrated trading energy from one microgrid to the other, and vice versa. This kind of transfer enables the system to overcome energy limitations during peak demand times and draw from additional storage at night when the sun is down. Together, the town’s five microgrids provide 228 kilowatts of photovoltaic capacity and an additional 1.2 megawatt-hours of storage, which serve residences and 15 commercial businesses. It’s a small amount of power, but an example of a way for systems to operate independently from the grid.

Don't believe your eyes; believe what the Party tells you to.

The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.

Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.

“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”

Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.

In reference to former TV anchor Kari Lake, who, since she can't win an election, has been tapped to run the US Agency for Global Media.

She suggested folding VOA’s remaining functions back into the state department, where it operated in the 1940s and early 1950s during what she called its “glory days” when there were “guardrails on what the story of America was being told” and it wasn’t “anti-American”.