pelespirit

The Department of Health and Human Services is cutting undocumented immigrants' access to several health care programs.

The move could potentially affect tens of millions of people each year. Undocumented immigrants will no longer have access to Head Start or the Community Health Center program. Head Start provides education and health care assistance to children.

The change alters a three-decade interpretation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), issued during the Clinton administration.

The Trump administration has given contracts to four defense contractors that Vice President JD Vance has a financial stake in, according to a report by the government watchdog group Accountable.US.

Financial disclosure forms published by the Office of Government Ethics for June 2025 reveal that through at least the end of 2024—the last date at which he was required to disclose his investments—Vance had anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 invested in Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital group he helped to found before taking office.

"In the reconciliation bill, Texas entered $85 million to move the space shuttle from the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, to Texas. Eighty-five million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it is not nearly what's necessary for this to be accomplished," Durbin said.

Citing research by NASA and the Smithsonian, Durbin said that the total was closer to $305 million and that did not include the estimated $178 million needed to build a facility to house and display Discovery once in Houston.

Furthermore, it was unclear if Congress even has the right to remove an artifact, let alone a space shuttle, from the Smithsonian's collection. The Washington, DC, institution, which serves as a trust instrumentality of the US, maintains that it owns Discovery. The paperwork signed by NASA in 2012 transferred "all rights, interest, title, and ownership" for the spacecraft to the Smithsonian.

Axon's Draft One debuted last summer at a police department in Colorado, instantly raising questions about the feared negative impacts of AI-written police reports on the criminal justice system. The tool relies on a ChatGPT variant to generate police reports based on body camera audio, which cops are then supposed to edit to correct any mistakes, assess the AI outputs for biases, or add key context.

But the EFF found that the tech "seems designed to stymie any attempts at auditing, transparency, and accountability." Cops don't have to disclose when AI is used in every department, and Draft One does not save drafts or retain a record showing which parts of reports are AI-generated. Departments also don't retain different versions of drafts, making it difficult to assess how one version of an AI report might compare to another to help the public determine if the technology is "junk," the EFF said. That raises the question, the EFF suggested, "Why wouldn't an agency want to maintain a record that can establish the technology’s accuracy?"

Days after the investigation came out, the state of Alaska announced it would help prosecute city cases to avoid speedy-trial dismissals.

But those state prosecutors are no longer needed. According to the city, the municipal prosecutor’s office now has a full staff of 12 “frontline” prosecutors who take cases to trial, plus a supervisor and an attorney who files motions and appeals. The only vacancy, they said, is a supervisory role: deputy municipal prosecutor.

That amounts to a vacancy rate of about 7% in the prosecutor’s office. In contrast, more than 40% of city prosecutor positions were vacant as of mid-2024, according to a city spokesperson.

A Texas firefighter asked if emergency flood alerts could be sent to Kerr County residents about an hour before the first warnings were received, audio reveals.

In the recording, obtained by US outlets, the firefighter asks at 04:22 on 4 July if a CodeRED alert can be issued. The dispatcher says a supervisor needs to approve the request.

Some residents received the alert an hour later - for others it took up to six hours, according to reports. Asked about the delays, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said officials were putting together a timeline.

Note: If it's red, it's towards the negative number and means it's underwater.

Attorney Phillip Arroyo said his client, whom he isn’t identifying out of fear of retaliation, arrived in the United States from Mexico when he was a minor.

The man, now in his early 30s, has legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, according to the attorney. Arroyo said his client was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a “misunderstanding” during a traffic stop.

He was sent to Alligator Alcatraz on Friday and remains at the facility, Arroyo said. Considering his client’s legal status, Arroyo told the Herald he’s confident he will be able to get an immigration bond.

“The narrative is that only violent criminals are being sent to Alligator Alcatraz,” Arroyo said. “We don’t know why [he was sent there] because he has legal status.”

A federal judge in New Hampshire blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, certifying the case as a nationwide class action.

The decision from U.S. District judge Joseph Laplante comes after the US supreme court said federal judges could only issue nationwide injunctions if they certified plaintiffs as a nationwide class. The issue is expected to return to the US supreme court, which has not yet decided on the constitutionality of Trump’s order.

At least two regional Planned Parenthood affiliates have notices on their websites telling patients that, thanks to a provision in Republicans’ new tax-and-spending bill that “defunds” the reproductive healthcare giant, they can no longer accept Medicaid.

However, this provision – which abortion rights supporters have called a “backdoor abortion ban” – was recently blocked by a court order. Other Planned Parenthood affiliates are continuing to treat patients who use Medicaid to pay for treatment.

Edit: The bill was blocked by a court order but some have a website announcement saying it won't take medicaid.

A staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, recently got high-level access to view and change the contents of a payments system that controls tens of billions of dollars in government payments and loans to farmers and ranchers across the United States, according to internal access logs reviewed by NPR.

"When we talk about farm loan application records, there is no more personal information anywhere than in that database," Scott Marlow, a former senior official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told NPR. "The farmer's entire financial life and the life of their kids and their family, every time they've missed a payment, every time they've had a hard time, every time they've gotten in financial trouble … it's there."

In its 20 years of existence, the program’s funding has grown fortyfold — reaching $100 million a year starting Sept. 1 — making it the most heavily funded effort of its kind in the country.

Under new rules set to take effect then, the organizations in the program must now document all of their expenses, and they will be reimbursed only for costs tied to services approved by the state. And they cannot seek reimbursement when they redistribute donated items, an effort to prevent taxpayer money from going to organizations for goods they got for free.

Meanwhile, Texas is opening administration of the program to a competitive selection process instead of automatically renewing agreements with contractors, including one contractor that has overseen most of the program for nearly two decades.