NPR - More than half
a million Americans filed for bankruptcy last year, a nearly 50% increase over
the past three years. While filings remain below pre-pandemic levels,
rising debt and higher living costs appear to be catching up with many
households.
August 2, 2026
Money
Health
Nautilus
- The rate of high blood
pressure among women who gave birth shot up 73 percent between 2016 and 2024,
according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control. In fact, more
than 1 in 10 women who gave birth in 2024 were plagued with some form of hypertension
(including preeclampsia), up from a little over 6 percent in 2016.
Even more alarming, the incidence
of hypertension increased in every state and for women of every age, race, and
weight. And because the report drew on data collected at birth, and not prior
medical tests, the issue may be even more widespread than documented by the
CDC.
According to the report, American
Indian and Alaska Native mothers suffered the highest rates of hypertension,
but even Asian women, who had the lowest rates, saw their risk double in the
eight years studied. The incidence of high blood pressure was lowest for
mothers younger than age 20 and those aged 30 to 34 and highest for mothers 40
and older. The rates of high blood pressure also increased along with body mass
index, with heavier women showing a greater risk, but hypertension also went up
among underweight mothers during the eight-year period.
The
Hill - The end of a subsidy program that helped keep costs down for
Medicare drug coverage could leave millions of seniors with higher monthly
costs, a move that undermines the Trump administration’s message of cutting
drug costs.
President Trump often
touts his push for access to cheaper drugs through the TrumpRx platform and
making “most-favored-nation” deals with drug companies. But healthcare advocacy and policy
organizations have said the end of the subsidy program will raise premium costs
and put a burden on seniors at a time when costs are already high.
“President Trump has had a lot of
strong rhetoric on drug prices and negotiating deals with manufacturers to
lower prices, and they’ve taken a lot of different steps to try to bring drug
prices down,” Juliette Cubanski, vice president and director of the Program on
Medicare Policy at KFF, told The Hill.
“But it’s also true that this
move to end these extra premium subsidies for some Medicare drug plans cuts in
the other direction because it could translate to higher premium costs for
millions of people with Medicare,” she said.
The destruction of the American Dream: Some stats
Hartmann
Report - The destruction of the American Dream isn’t
just an abstraction; it’s measurable. In 1980 when Reagan was elected
president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American
families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy
a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire
with dignity.
Today, only 43 to 47 percent of
Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria
you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single
union job gave a family in 1980.
Consider wages. If wages had kept
pace with productivity since 1980, the median American individual worker’s
income would be over $100,000 today. Instead, it’s around $50,000. With help
from the Reagan Revolution, that missing $50,000 has largely gone into
corporate profits and executive compensation: in other words, into the money
bins of the nation’s oligarchs.
Then there’s housing. In 1980,
the median home price was about $47,000, roughly three times the median
(single-worker) household income. Today, the median home price exceeds
$400,000, while median household (two-worker) income is around $75,000. That’s
more than five times the household income, and in many cities it’s ten times or
more. People who could have bought a home in their twenties, like Louise and I
did in the 1970s, now struggle to do so even in their forties.
The same is true of education.
When I attended college in the late 1960s, I paid my tuition working part-time
jobs. My mom paid her way through four years at Michigan State in the 1940s
working summers as a lifeguard and propping airplanes. Today’s post–Citizens
United students graduate with an average of $30,000 in debt, and total American
student loan debt exceeds $1.7 trillion. We’re the only developed country in
the world where this is true, and an entire generation is now starting life in
a financial hole that previous generations never faced.
Or consider healthcare. In 1980,
healthcare costs were 8.9 percent of GDP, and most hospitals and health
insurance companies were required by state law to be nonprofits. Today,
healthcare costs are nearly 20 percent of GDP, and half a million American families
declare bankruptcy every year just because someone got sick. Medical bankruptcy
like this doesn’t exist in any other developed country in the world. Only in
America.
Kennedy Center stops free public tours
NY
Times - The John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts is stopping free public tours of the center,
which had been a mainstay of the cultural institution for more than five
decades, according to an internal memo. In
a memo viewed by the The New York Times, Brooks Boeke, the director of the
volunteer program, said the center was putting a “temporary pause” on the tour
program, effective Friday. Volunteers serve in a variety of roles at the
Kennedy Center, but only tour guides were mentioned, instructed to stop
reporting for duty “until further notice.”
The memo did not provide a reason
for halting the tour program; it has operated continuously since the center’s
opening in 1971, except for a one-year hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic. The ending of the tours comes after a
volunteer tour guide was featured in a New York Times article detailing
President Trump’s gutting of the iconic cultural institution. Before the memo
was circulated on Thursday, three volunteers had expressed worries to a
reporter that the Kennedy Center would target the tour program in retribution.
Middle East
The Hill - President Trump late
Saturday said he was halting
an attack plan against Iran and pointed to the outline of a deal being
reached as the reason why.
“The U.S.A. is locked and loaded
and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military
Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have
just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any
attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” Trump wrote on
his Truth
Social platform.
Trump added that the deal “would
include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an
end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”
“Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL,” he added. American officials had told several outlets on Friday that the U.S. was reportedly planning to restart strikes targeting Iran as soon as this weekend.
August 1, 2026
Toys for Trump
Daily Beast - The White House ballroom. The Triumphal Arch. The relined Reflecting Pool. The new 747. Together, they cost a small fraction of just one of the “Golden Fleet” of battleships that President Trump has ordered in a multibillion-dollar scandal that gets less notice than the gilded cherubs in the Oval Office. Their name: The Trump Class.
The first Trump-Class battleship is expected to cost $17.5 billion, with the next two coming in at $14.5 billion each, a total of $36.5 billion for three. A Naval warship expert describes them as hugely expensive, easily targeted behemoths that drain funding for small, more effective alternatives that the U.S. Navy actually needs.
Federal government wants to cut water use in three states
The
Hill - The federal government is proposing potentially steep cuts to
water used by California, Arizona and Nevada, a major step toward figuring out
the management of the dwindling Colorado River.
The river provides water to states throughout the West, including
drinking water and water for agricultural, industrial and municipal uses.
As the West becomes drier,
figuring out how to manage the shrinking resource has been a challenge. A final environmental impact statement
released Friday by the federal government cuts to California, Arizona and
Nevada, collectively known as the Lower Basin states of the Colorado River, of
up to 3 million acre-feet per year.
That could be dramatically deeper
than the 1.6 million acre-feet per year that the lower basin states themselves
have proposed for the next two years.
Arizona’s Department of Water
Resources said in a statement that a cut of 3 million acre feet per year “would
devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”
However, the federal government
has yet to release anticipated specific plans for managing the river over the
next two years.
The Washington Post reported
Friday that the forthcoming two-year plan is more in line with the cuts
proposed by the states for the next two years.
Economy
Greg
Gerritt - In the first quarter of 2026 the economic
growth rate was 2.1%, which is not that far off of the long term trend, in which the US has averaged something like 2.3
or 2.4% economic growth per year for the last 40 years. Admittedly the guy who
invented Gross Domestic Product thought it was a really lousy way to measure
the economy, but it is what we use, so it is worth noting. Growth in the second
quarter was 1.5%, mostly due to the stupidity of the Trump administration in
starting a war that has no plan and resulted in a major disruption of global
energy markets and rising inflation. The data from the BEA is adjusted for
inflation, but even so, rising prices caused consumer spending to slow.
Unemployment rates are barely
changed for the last year, the rate nationally is about 4.3%, which is pretty
close to the long term average, though when the rate is lower it is much easier
to find a job so a lot of us prefer to see a rate closer to 3%. But the
interesting thing is that overall employment has barely moved, even in places
in which the unemployment rate is down. I have not done any kind of statistical
analysis, just eyeballed the raw data which is presented as total employment in
each state comparing the last two months, and the same months last year, the
total number of people employed in those same months, and the unemployment
rates in the same months.
Polls
Pew Research Ctr - Far
more Americans support than oppose in-class cellphone bans for middle and high
school students (77% vs. 18%). And for the first time in our surveys, more
people now support than oppose banning cellphones during the entire school day (48% vs. 43%).
Just over half of Americans (53%)
have an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court, while 45% have a favorable
opinion. While Democrats largely describe the court’s ideology as conservative,
Republicans tend to see it as “middle of the road.”
Climate change
Study
Finds - Summer heat is more
than a seasonal discomfort. A new study suggests it may be aging people from
the inside out, faster than the calendar ever could. Researchers found that
exposure to extreme heat events was linked to accelerated biological aging in
middle-aged and older adults. Under the study’s strictest heatwave definition,
each additional heatwave event was associated with pushing the body’s internal
clock forward by roughly half a year, though the size of that effect varied
considerably depending on how heatwaves were defined, and was weaker or
statistically insignificant under looser definitions. As heatwaves grow more
frequent and more intense worldwide, that finding carries serious consequences
for public health.
The
Guardian - A senior policymaker
at the European Central Bank has said the climate emergency and the breakdown
of nature poses a dramatically growing risk to the global economy. Frank Elderson, a member of the ECB’s
executive board, said the eurozone lender of last resort was stepping up its
monitoring of the financial risks linked to the destruction of “ecosystem
services”, which are nature-related processes or assets that support human
activity.
ICE
NBC
News - ICE plans to sign contracts for new detention facilities in its
Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver jurisdictions that together would have
the capacity to hold 5,500 detainees, according to a public solicitation
document. It is the latest sign of the agency’s push to boost immigration
arrests, even as two fatal shootings by ICE officers in recent weeks
have drawn scrutiny across the country.
Health
NBC
News - Starting Wednesday, terminally ill patients in
New York will gain the legal right to end their lives. Under a new law allowing
medically assisted death, patients who a doctor says have less than six months
to live will be able to take a lethal prescription medication that puts them to
sleep, then ultimately stops their heart.
Scope of Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Widens
NY Times - The scope of cyberattacks on U.S. water systems has grown to include at least seven states and may be far wider, officials and experts warned, as the authorities raced to safeguard the nation’s water supply against an assault that increasingly appeared to be the work of Iran.
While there were no indications
that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local
officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in
vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water
quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure. Minnesota
first publicly reported the attacks, and now Michigan says its systems have
also been targeted.
The attack has little precedent,
experts said, but has long been the stuff of nightmares and sensationalized
Hollywood thrillers: an apparent cyberattack by a foreign power during a time
of war that could, at least in theory, jeopardize the health and safety of
Americans.
Officials cautioned that they had
not definitively determined that Iran was responsible for the attack and that
the investigation was still preliminary. But they said Iran had stepped up
cyberattacks since the U.S. and Israel launched a war against the country five
months ago, and had previously targeted similar water systems and other
critical infrastructure in the U.S. There seemed no financial motive, making a
criminal attack less likely.
Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
In a court filing, former Fox News host-turned-U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro asked a judge to dismiss the federal indictment against U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who had been arrested and publicly accused by Pirro of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Pirro acknowledged that investigators had concluded the damage wasn't caused by Hearn after all, but by a "flawed installation" of the pool's newly installed liner.
The filing also contained a remarkable bit of finger-pointing: Pirro blamed the Trump administration's own Interior Department for withholding information that could have prevented the prosecution from moving forward. She wrote that officials at the Doug Bergum-led agency failed to disclose that the pool's liner had been improperly installed, despite "dozens and dozens" of requests from prosecutors. "Had [the Interior Department] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment," Pirro acknowledged.
The
Hill -President
Trump called out U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro on
Saturday for agreeing
to dismiss the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism
case against former Olympian David Hearn.
The Justice Department moved to
drop the case on Friday, finding that the damage to the tidal basin resulted
from a “rushed and botched installation,” not alleged vandalism. Trump a day
later distanced himself from that decision.
“I disagree 100% with Jeanine
Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,”
Trump wrote in a post on
Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a
pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47
emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area.”
Politics
Prime Chronicle - California’s voter ID initiative, Proposition 39, would add ID and citizenship checks to state elections. Top Democratic leaders are organizing a major campaign to defeat the measure and protect broad ballot access. Attorney General Rob Bonta changed the official ballot wording, triggering accusations that Democrats are trying to mislead voters. Supporters say the fight shows how political insiders can tilt the playing field even after citizens qualify a measure.
Gavin Newsom - $100,000,000. That is the amount of money Elon Musk plans to spend in order to help Republicans win in the midterm elections this November. That includes Michigan - where control of the House and Senate runs through Michigan — with what will be some of the closest and most expensive campaigns in the country.
Auto workers stop support of Isra
July 31, 2026
It's not just Trump; it's our obsession with personalities
Sam Smith – Most of the
important and positive national legislation of the past century was the product
of the Democratic Party. In part because politics has become, in the eyes of
voters and reporters, the action of individuals rather than institutions.
Donald Trump has been a prime beneficiary of this change even though he can’t
even run for president in the next election and despite the fact that he has been charged with an unprecedented number of
serious offenses.
Television is a major participant
in this shift from policies to personalities and as result, for example, we find serious matters
such as the cost of food and driving getting only a fraction of the attention
they deserve. And decades of great liberal legislation is treated with near
total indifference.
Workers
Robert
Reich - This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the
labor participation rate — the percentage of people of working age who are
working or actively looking for work — is now down to 61.5 percent. That’s 0.6
percentage points lower than it was at the first of the year. In other words, the U.S. economy has lost 1
million workers since January.
Return of McCarthyism
The
Guardian - There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era,
roughly 1946 to 1956, and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own
updated McCarthyism.
Both regimes crafted a monster of
quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear: an enemy within, well-organized
and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on
overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality. Both used flagrantly
unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.
Each time, federal employees were
targeted first. President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Program screened 5
million workers for communist affiliation; 2,700 lost their jobs, 12,000
resigned. Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line; blacklists outlasted
their makers. The Trump administration purged the federal agencies of his
equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”. Applicants for civil service
jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain
how they would advance them if hired. The federal employees’ union correctly
called this request a “loyalty question”.
Then as now, law firms quailed,
media companies capitulated, universities collaborated. Artists and performers
– Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel – were exiled from film and television. In the
1940s and 50s, the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive
organizations, which, along with communists and socialists, included groups
from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America. Trump’s
justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue,
a chief funding source for Democratic candidates, the Southern Poverty Law
Center, and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, best known
for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.
Climate change
Climate change and its effects
are possibly the most important story of our time
The
Guardian - Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather at least 20
times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France, experts from the
World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium calculated. The finding is the
latest to pin the blame for the continent’s sweltering and deadly summer firmly
on the heating caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal.
The intense heatwave at the end
of June, which is estimated to have killed 20,000 people, could not have
happened without the extra heat trapped by carbon pollution, a previous WWA
study showed. Another found that the climate crisis-driven heat was “sucking
soils dry” as extreme drought spread across Europe…
This year’s wildfires in western
Europe have been made worse by a wet winter and spring, which boosted the
growth of vegetation, which then dried out and provided fuel for the fires –
so-called whiplash conditions. Global heating is making winters wetter and
summers drier and hotter in Europe.
Dr Clair Barnes, a research
associate at Imperial College London and part of the WWA study team, said:
“We’ve seen repeatedly how climate change increases hot, dry, flammable
conditions that are extremely conducive to wildfires.
“What’s unique about [the July
fires in Spain and France] is that it’s still early in the season – and with
another heatwave looming, these findings are extremely scary. What we’re seeing
is a clear sign of the escalating impacts of [human-caused] warming.”….
The wildfires have released huge
plumes of toxic smoke. Dr Augustin Colette, at the French National Institute
for Industrial Environment and Risks, said: “The smoke increased particulate
[pollution] peak levels up to 20 times above what is considered ‘fair air
quality’, and extremely poor air quality was felt up to 400 km away from the
fires.” About 1.5 million people a year are estimated to have their lives
shortened by wildfire smoke.
….The UN’s climate chief, Simon
Stiell, said: “These European megafires show how fast climate-driven extreme
heat and dry landscapes can turn wildfires into devastating national disasters.
“Humanity continuing to burn colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas is making
these conditions more dangerous, and these megafires more deadly and
destructive,” he said. “But the solutions are equally clear: all countries must
move faster from fossil fuels to renewables and protect people from worsening
climate impacts, from wildfires, to megastorms and floods, to droughts hitting
food production.”
Blanche appears to given up sme Epstein material
Alternet - President Donald Trump’s interim AG
Todd Blanche appears to have given up the ghost on hiding information that
could potentially out cohorts of convicted Jeffrey Epstein…. After months of
stalling by the Trump administration and ignoring the letter of a new law
demanding the release of the sex-trafficker’s files, U.S. District Judge Emmet
G. Sullivan demanded insight on Trump’s longtime friendship. Sullivan sided
with former MS NOW show host Phang in her lawsuit demanding the Trump
administration adhere to the Epstein Transparency Act.
….But instead, Blanche handed
over the unredacted information to Sullivan to review, possibly for release to
the public….
Trump's relationship with Jeffrey
Epstein spans decades, with the two meeting in the 1980s at Mar-a-Lago and
socializing frequently in New York and Palm Beach. Multiple women have
described witnessing Trump and Epstein together at parties and events during
the 1990s. After Epstein's 2008
conviction, Trump publicly distanced himself, claiming he barely knew him.
Artificial intelligence booms in China
The Guardian - China is
encouraging the deployment of AI at a scale unseen in the west. The technology
is being rolled out at a staggering rate in an increasingly precarious labour
market, and the Wuhan episode helped to highlight the social tensions it is
causing.
Gig workers … are fearful about
the impact of AI on their livelihoods, while recent incidents of white-collar
workers being replaced by AI have also sparked a debate over whether workers
should embrace the technology – or try to compete with it.
Addressing Shanghai’s World AI
Conference in July, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said that AI should be “an
important driver for shared prosperity and common security”.
But that goal is being pursued
amid an increasingly fragile labour market. As well as suffering from high
levels of unemployment, China has seen tens of millions of workers drop out of
formal employment into the gig economy. According to one thinktank, the number
of people in flexible employment will rise to 320 million this year, up from
160 million in 2019. That is about 44% of China’s workforce.
Taxi drivers are one part of this
huge cohort. Across the country, as previously heavyweight industries such as
real estate and education have floundered, workers have turned to ride-hailing
apps to make ends meet. But now the rollout of robotaxis, one of the most
popular applications of AI that is already in use in China, is threatening
their livelihoods.
July 30, 2026
The hazard of finding an old book in the house you just bought
Independent
- A book has been returned to an Australian public library an estimated
150 years late after being found in a sealed fireplace during recent home
renovations.
Antiquities of Athens, published
in 1858, was returned to a library in the seaside town of Kiama last week after
a local man discovered the text inside a tea crate, bricked into a disused
fireplace.
“We’ve never had anything that
old come back to us,” Kiama Library manager Michelle Hudson said.
“I follow lots of libraries on
social media, and often you’ll get things that are maybe 30 or 40 years old
when they’re cleaning out estates and stuff like that,” she added.
The late return fine would be
about AU$28,000 (£14,600), allowing for inflation, Hudson said. That was
calculated on the British three pence-a-week overdue fee that was printed on
the inside cover of the book, along with a list of rules that applied when the
library opened in 1872.
Polls
Feedly - Trump’s overall approval rating slumps to 34%, according to new CNN poll, as midterms testing Republican power loom. Three-quarters of Americans believe Donald Trump is not paying enough attention to the country’s most important problems, and two-thirds think he places himself above the needs of the US, according to a new poll. The CNN survey, conducted by market research company SSRS, comes less than 100 days before November’s midterm elections in which the president’s Republican party is widely expected to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress.
This new Quinnipiac poll is one of the worst yet for Trump: approval at 32 percent, and support for Iran policy (28), foreign policy (34), handling of economy (34), and handling of immigration (40) at abysmal lows. He’s 17 points underwater on immigration. Also—57 percent of Democrats say they’re more motivated to vote than usual; corresponding number for Republicans, 39 percent.
The
Hill - It’s no secret that both political parties are unpopular. This is particularly true of Gen Z, which
polls suggest feels like it is set to inherit a political system riddled with
partisan hostility and congressional gridlock.
A report from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at
Johns Hopkins University found that 62 percent of adults aged 18-29 said that
the design and structure of our nation’s government needs significant changes,
no matter which party is elected. Additionally, 58 percent said the party they
identify with needs to dramatically change.
The study’s conclusions pointed out that older generations
have longer histories with politics (duh) and have lived through a mix of both
steady and unstable leadership. They have been able to ground themselves
in the political framework produced by prominent leaders, like former
Presidents Reagan and Obama, the study cites.
Gen Z, in contrast, grew up or continues to grow up through
volatility with fewer frames of political reference, which makes it harder to
feel anchored by today’s politicians and system overall.
At the same time, Gen Z is less likely to describe the
opposing political party as “evil” or “less than human.” While 39 percent of
Gen Z respondents said the opposing political party is “evil” or “less than
human,” 44 percent of millennials aged 30-44 and 61 percent of baby boomers who
are 65 years or older characterized their opposing political party
negatively.
But if Gen Z is less likely to see their political opponents
as “evil,” they see more justification for political violence. Forty percent of
Gen Zers said political violence is justified to some degree, compared with 30
percent of millennials and 11 percent of boomers.
Middle East
NY
Times - Investigators believe a cyberattack this week on dozens of
municipal water systems in Minnesota was probably the work of Iranian hackers,
according to U.S. and state officials and others familiar with the matter, a
potential act of aggression that comes at a precarious moment in the U.S. war
against Iran.
Officials cautioned that they had
not definitively determined who was responsible for the attack and that the
preliminary assessment could change as the authorities collected more technical
data.
They also warned that the hackers
could be attempting to pose as Iran-based in an effort to ratchet up tensions
between the two countries, though former intelligence officials said such a
scenario was unlikely.
Local officials reported that the
well and treatment plant in at least one city was temporarily offline on
Monday, while other cities in the state had to use manual workarounds to cope
with attempted attacks on automated operations.
1440 - Saudi Arabia confirmed yesterday it publicly joined the US' military campaign against Iran. The kingdom participated in a joint strike on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, reportedly killing at least 20 combatants. In announcing the strikes, the kingdom's Ministry of Defense cited Iranian attacks on its oil industry: Saudi Arabia blames Iraqi militias for up to half of the nearly 1,000 drone strikes it has weathered since February. Earlier this week, drones and missiles struck Saudi Arabia's Abqaiq oil facility (see map). Although Riyadh had not openly participated in military offensive action until this week, US officials say the kingdom has secretly participated in US-led attacks in the past.
Todd Blanche
The new housing law
NY
Times - The 21st Century ROAD
to Housing Act, the first major housing package to become law in decades — and
passed with impressive bipartisan support — has the potential to put a real
dent in the nation’s affordable housing shortage.
The good news is that if carried
out as intended, the law will break through a lot of the regulatory sludge
holding back the construction industry. It will create a mix of financing and
building incentives that will help the nation close the supply gap that has
contributed to rising rents and put homeownership out of reach for many people.
The bad news is that President
Trump let the act become law without his signature, calling it “a yawn” — not a
great sign that his administration will dedicate the considerable resources
needed to put it into effect.
Most of that work will fall to
the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has to establish an
array of pilot programs, reports and other acts of rule-making and industry
guidance the law calls for. After last year’s purge of agency staff members,
however, HUD is down about 30 percent of its work force in many of its key
offices.
Health
NY
Times - The Trump administration
announced on Tuesday that it intended to end a Biden-era program that for the
past two years has helped tamp down the cost of monthly premiums for drug
coverage for people on Medicare.
Voting
The
Guardian -A new analysis of Black voters in the south indicates that Republican attempts to dilute their political power is driving them to the polls in larger numbers and shifting their counties further left.
After the supreme court effectively gutted section 2 of the Voting Rights Act protections in late April, Republican legislatures across the south rapidly pushed to disenfranchise Black voters by redrawing congressional maps. Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama all immediately worked to pass new maps, while the Mississippi governor has said that he wants legislators to redraw maps before the upcoming midterm elections.
The analysis by VoteHub, a data-focused election organization, indicates that the efforts have only motivated Black voters in the 78 Black belt counties it tracked. All but one shifted left in partisan turnout compared with 2024. Further, majority-Black counties that voted after Louisiana v Callais, the landmark supreme court decision that triggered the Republican-led redistricting efforts, had a surge in voter participation.
The trend was clear earlier this year when Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia held primaries after the supreme court ruling. Louisiana, from which the Callais decision stemmed, disregarded votes that had already been cast until the state was able to redraw congressional maps, while nearby Alabama quickly split its majority-Black districts.
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