Interesting

Congress must pass a government funding bill before the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1 in order to avoid a shutdown just weeks before the November midterm elections.

Duke Energy filed an amended proposal this week to reduce its requested rate increase from about 18% to about 9.5% over two years for residential users.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators the bombing of Iran has cost $37.5 billion. He said that while the department has about $75 billion in unobligated funds from Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law, that money wasn’t intended to cover the costs of the war.

Youth sports is now a $40 billion industry. It’s a sprawling, commercialized ecosystem where parents pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year for club teams, elite camps, out-of-state tournaments, private coaching sessions, professional-level uniforms and equipment, recruiting events, and even streaming subscription services to watch their kids play.

Immigration arrests reached 1,593 per day in early July in a new push to detain and deport immigrants that has led to deaths in traffic stops. There were more than 43,000 arrests in June, the highest recorded by the Trump administration, according to statistics released Monday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reflecting new bookings into detention facilities.

Mass challenges are a fairly recent development, spurred by improvements in election technology and transparency. Thousands of votes now can be challenged at once. Historically, such challenges have also often been used to suppress the votes of people of color, a separate brief said.

A federal commission voted Tuesday in favor of a Trump administration proposal to rescind requirements that larger employers report the demographics of their workers — information that’s used to help enforce racial and gender antidiscrimination laws. Most employers with 100 or more workers have been required to submit data annually on staff sex, race and ethnicity since 1966 to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Under the proposed rule, federal grants could not be used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” DEI initiatives. Awards would also in many cases have to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” and agencies would be allowed to cancel funding that is “not effective at achieving program goals or Federal agency priorities” or “no longer in the Federal Government’s interest.”

Shirlye Grandy served nearly six years in the N.C. Correctional Institution for Women. She’s now the public arts project coordinator for Arise Collective, a Raleigh nonprofit dedicated to helping incarcerated women across the state.

Former U.S. Department of Education officials in Republican and Democratic administrations sounded the alarm Monday over the agency’s efforts to outsource its special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies.