Politics

“Without a doubt, this is the best session I’ve ever had,” Abbott said during an interview with me last week.

After all, he finally got the private school vouchers and the bail reform he has long advocated for through the Legislature. And more property tax cuts passed are on their way — the issue he forced lawmakers into two special sessions over back in 2023.

And the wild card may be the White House. As we reported last week, Texas members of Congress, at the behest of the Trump White House, have been meeting to discuss the possibility of redrawing all of the state’s Congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections to help the GOP pick up another seat or two to balance off expected Democratic gains elsewhere.

New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was detained for several hours after being arrested at an immigration court. Lander, the city's chief financial officer, said he had been escorting a defendant when he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. 'The rule of law is not fine and our constitutional democracy is not fine,' said Lander outside court after his release.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked Donald Trump’s administration from forcing 20 Democratic-led states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation grant funding.

Chief US District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, granted the states’ request for an injunction barring the Department of Transportation’s policy, saying the states were likely to succeed on the merits of some or all of their claims.

In its decision, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded it was likely Trump lawfully exercised his authority in federalizing control of the guard.

It said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so, citing violent acts by protesters.

“The undisputed facts demonstrate that before the deployment of the National Guard, protesters ‘pinned down’ several federal officers and threw ‘concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects’ at the officers. Protesters also damaged federal buildings and caused the closure of at least one federal building. And a federal van was attacked by protesters who smashed in the van’s windows,” the court wrote. “The federal government’s interest in preventing incidents like these is significant.”

The Environmental Protection Agency under Biden in 2024 set stringent vehicle emissions rules that aim to cut fleetwide tailpipe emissions for cars and light trucks by nearly 50% over 2026 levels in 2032 and drastically increase new electric vehicles.

The EPA forecast last year that between 35% and 56% of new vehicles sold between 2030 and 2032 would be electric to meet tough vehicle pollution rules. Senate Republicans also want to reverse the EPA rule's new emissions limits for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles like delivery trucks, garbage trucks, public utility trucks, school buses and tractor-trailers.

The Senate parliamentarian ruled rolling back the EPA rules would need 60 votes to pass in the 100-seat chamber, rather than the simple majority other elements of the tax and spending package would need under a complex budget process Republicans are invoking to bypass Democratic opposition.

The regulation was among the most significant environmental rules implemented under Biden, who made tackling climate change a key pillar of his presidency.

Spitzberg was among the dozens of veterans who were arrested at the Capitol last Friday. The arrests came just half a day before millions of people flooded American streets for No Kings protests, meant to stand in contrast to the military parade being held the same day.

"I think the parade was a colossal slap in the face of the American people," said Spitzberg, an Army and Air Force veteran. "And the president of the United States apparently sees himself as more than the people's president. He sees himself as a king or, I don't even know, an emperor."

Capitol Police said officers arrested about 60 people last Friday who illegally crossed a police line while running toward the Rotunda steps. All are facing charges, including unlawful demonstration and crossing a police line.

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The conservative-dominated supreme court voted by seven to two to back a challenge by oil and gas companies, along with 17 Republican-led states, to a waiver that California has received periodically from the federal government since 1967 that allows it to set tougher standards than national rules limiting pollution from cars. The state has separately stipulated that only zero-emission cars will be able to sold there by 2035.

Although states are typically not allowed to set their own standards aside from the federal Clean Air Act, California has been given unique authority to do so via a waiver that has seen it become a pioneer in pushing for cleaner cars. Other states are allowed to copy California’s stricter standard, too.

But oil and gas companies, as well as Republican politicians, have complained about the waiver, arguing that it caused financial harm. The waiver was removed during Donald Trump’s first term but then reinstated by Joe Biden’s administration.

In a statement sent to local outlet KGW, Ice alleged that Sotelo “first entered the United States illegally in 2006” and has a “criminal conviction for DUI in Newberg, Oregon”. Sotelo’s family says that he came to the United States in the early 1990s. The Yamhill county district attorney’s office told local outlets that they had found no evidence of DUI charges.

Sotelo was first taken to a detention facility in Portland. By the weekend, he was in an Ice processing center in Tacoma, Washington. On Tuesday, Van Nice drove up to Tacoma to visit his friend. But Sotelo wasn’t there.

“The Ice official told me they are under no obligation to tell the family or the attorneys of the detainees that they have been apprehended, or that they’ve been moved to another state, to another facility, or that they’ve been deported,” Van Nice said. “I told him I thought that sounded wrong, and he said, ‘Well, that’s the way it is.’”

The rule prohibits healthcare providers and insurers from giving information about a legal abortion to state law enforcement authorities who are seeking to punish someone in connection with that abortion.

"HHS lacked clear delegated authority to fashion special protections for medical information produced by politically favored medical procedures," wrote Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, a Republican, during his first term.

Kacsmaryk in December had blocked HHS from enforcing the rule against a Texas doctor who had brought the lawsuit, Carmen Purl, pending the outcome of the case. Wednesday's decision blocks the rule nationwide.

Instead, his administration has ordered the national parks and hundreds of other monuments and museums supervised by the Department of the Interior to ensure that all of their signage reminds Americans of our “extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”

Those marching orders, which went into effect late last week, have left Trump opponents and free speech advocates gasping in disbelief, wondering how park employees are supposed to put a sunny spin on monuments acknowledging slavery and Jim Crow laws. And how they’ll square the story of Japanese Americans shipped off to incarceration camps during World War II with an “unmatched record of advancing liberty.”

At Manzanar National Historic Site, a dusty encampment in the high desert of eastern California, one of 10 camps where more than 120,000 Japanese American civilians were imprisoned during the early 1940s, employees put up a required notice describing the changes last week.

He gave the official green light to the deal in an executive order on Friday.

Nippon agreed to pay $55 per share and take on the company's debt, a deal worth $14.9bn together.

It said it had also promised the government it would invest $11bn in US Steel by 2028, including a new facility that would be completed after that year.

It also granted the US government a "golden share" in the company, giving the government say over key decisions, including the transfer of jobs or production outside of the US, and certain calls to close or idle factories.

As protests broke out across American cities on Wednesday, veterans in cities such as Portland, Oregon and San Antonio, Texas have joined a growing chorus of national anger about the prospect of another Middle Eastern war and called on Democratic leaders to act swiftly to invoke the War Powers Act.

The demonstrations have been organized by groups like About Face, which describes itself as "post-9/11 military members and veterans organizing to end a foreign policy of permanent war," and Veterans for Peace, "a global organization of military veterans" that seeks to "inform the public of the true causes of war and the enormous costs of wars."

It seemed inevitable that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams would hold state Attorney General James Uthmeier in contempt of court after he violated her order to stop enforcing a new law that makes it a crime for undocumented immigrants to enter Florida.

After all, Uthmeier told state law enforcement agencies that they could arrest migrants who illegally cross into the United States and then arrive in Florida — despite her restraining order issued in mid-April.

Legal experts interviewed by the Miami Herald said Williams could fine Uthmeier up to $1,000 or send him to jail for up to six months, or both, as punishment.

“Judge Williams used great restraint in issuing her contempt order,” Miami defense attorney Brian Tannebaum, an expert in ethics law in Florida, said on Wednesday. “But if the attorney general doesn’t abide by her ruling, she could hold another contempt hearing, find him in contempt again, and fine him or send him to jail.”

The issue is so thorny that the Supreme Court has now weighed in. A June 18 decision allows work to move forward on a privately operated facility, to be located in Texas, that would store nuclear waste on an interim basis. The state of Texas fought the facility on the grounds that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licensed the facility, did not have the authority to issue such a license. Rather than explicitly confirming the NRC’s ability to license the facility, the court found that Texas and landowners included in the complaint did not have the legal authority to challenge the license.

Spent fuel is initially kept in a pool of water that cools it. (The ongoing radioactive decay produces enough heat that, without cooling, the spent fuel could cause a fire.) After a few years, the radioactivity drops enough that the fuel can be moved to cylindrical containers called dry casks. “They have the spent nuclear fuel in the center of this cask and then a layer of air that can flow and circulate and cool, just through natural convection, and then you’ve got a big layer of concrete around the outside,” says nuclear engineer Riley Fisher of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “[It’s] very effective in the way that it works.”

A further complication: Some of the power plants that produced the waste are no longer operating, such as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California. But, with nowhere else to go, the waste from these decommissioned plants often remains onsite, meaning the facility must still be secured and monitored by the plant’s owner. “We’ve got a whole bunch of waste at reactor sites that are … in a limbo state right now,” Fisher says.

The protests will be held on the fifth anniversary of the death of Rep. John Lewis, who was the last surviving member of the Big Six, which helped organize the 1963 March on Washington.

The theme of the July 17 protests will be "Good Trouble Lives On," a nod to Lewis’ quote: “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”

"We're going to make good trouble because good trouble lives on, and we will not stop until we win this fight," said Barbara R. Arnwine, president and founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition. "No kings, no tyrants, no despots, and we've got to always have good trouble. So we are determined that on July 17, we're asking all of you—each and every one of you—to turn out and host events in your city."

The NAACP has welcomed both Democratic and Republican presidents to address the convention over the years. Presidents have historically used their remarks to build stronger ties with the Black community.

President Ronald Reagan addressed the NAACP convention in Denver in 1981 and spoke out against racism and discrimination. President George W. Bush spoke at the convention in Washington, D.C., in 2006 amid criticism of his administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. The storm disproportionately affected Black residents in New Orleans and the Gulf region. In his remarks, Bush resolved to work with the Black community to recover from the storm. He had declined previous invitations to the event.

For any lawyer, this is a professional death sentence. But the court’s decision is not only a devastating blow to Eastman but also to the Trumpist myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

The case is unique and momentous because this is the only proceeding where Eastman, along with supporting denialist enthusiasts, testified under oath, cross-examined their critics and presented their full denialism defense. Eastman — assisted by his denialist apostles, who took 19 days to testify, present 7 witnesses and introduce over 180 document exhibits — had more than his day in court. He also presented his stolen election narrative to the public-at-large, with thousands watching by Zoom.

The data turned over to Homeland Security included information about residents of California, Illinois, Washington state and Washington, D.C. The federal departments haven’t announced whether they have located and detained any undocumented immigrants based on that Medicaid data.

Those states, like Colorado, use Medicaid to cover some undocumented people with state money. The federal government covers at least half the cost of Medicaid-funded care to qualifying U.S. citizens through matching funds.

The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.

The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.

Ice agents arrested the New York City comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander at a federal building in Manhattan. He had spent the morning there observing immigration hearings and told an Associated Press reporter he had intended to accompany some immigrants out of the building. Footage of the arrest shows an agent telling Lander: 'You're obstructing'. Lander replies: 'You don't have the authority to arrest US citizens asking for a judicial warrant' as he was led into a lift

Nevada, Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts:

State-run health care websites around the country, meant to provide a simple way to shop for insurance, have been quietly sending visitors’ sensitive health information to Google and social media companies, The Markup and CalMatters found.

The data, including prescription drug names and dosages, was sent by web trackers on state exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act to help Americans purchase health coverage.

As visitors answered the questions, their responses were sent to LinkedIn and Snapchat, according to tests conducted by The Markup and CalMatters in April and May.

On the other side of the country, Maine’s exchange, CoverME.gov, sent information on drug prescriptions and dosages to Google through an analytics tool. It also sent the names of doctors and hospitals that people had previously visited.

Those challenges were also evident in other data showing permits for future construction of single-family housing dropped to a two-year low in May as builders grappled with higher costs from duties on materials, including lumber, steel and aluminum.

Higher borrowing costs as the Federal Reserve responded to the heightened economic uncertainty from tariffs by pausing its interest rate cutting cycle have weighed on demand for homes, resulting in excess inventory of unsold houses on the market.

Fed officials at the end of a two-day policy meeting later on Wednesday were expected to leave the U.S. central bank's benchmark overnight interest rate in the 4.25%-4.50% range, where it has been since December, as it also monitored the economic fallout from the conflict between Israel and Iran.

A Tennessee state law banning gender-affirming care for minors can stand, the US supreme court has ruled, a devastating loss for trans rights supporters in a case that could set a precedent for dozens of other lawsuits involving the rights of transgender children.

The case, United States v Skrmetti, was filed last year by three families of trans children and a provider of gender-affirming care. In oral arguments, the plaintiffs – as well as the US government, then helmed by Joe Biden – argued that Tennessee’s law constituted sex-based discrimination and thus violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. Under Tennessee’s law, someone assigned female at birth could not be prescribed testosterone, but someone assigned male at birth could receive those drugs.

The groups noted that after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, California approved Senate Bill 98, which stipulated press rights amid protests.

Additionally, press groups noted that LAPD officers were given training following the 2020 protests on how to work safely with journalists.

"The investment in the training was in the millions, and some of the training has indeed been put to use by officers. But recent events have made it clear that the need for re-training is high," the National Press Club said.

The lawsuit seeks to stop the LAPD from engaging in unconstitutional acts against journalists.

Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, tells 11Alive that Chance, a baby boy, was born prematurely last week by emergency cesarean section. The infant weighs about 1 pound 13 ounces and is in the NICU.

Smith has been kept medically alive since February 19, when she was declared brain dead at eight weeks pregnant due to blood clots in her brain. Her family says doctors kept her on life support due to Georgia’s abortion law, the LIFE Act, which doesn’t clearly address cases of brain death, but causes confusion in medical environments. News of her condition made national headlines as she was kept on life-support while pregnant, and her family railed against the decision.

“I’m not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy. But I’m saying we should have had a choice,” she told 11Alive in a previous interview.