State-News
Floods, Fortune Taxes, and a Grid That Hit Pause
World & Security
Indiana spent the weekend counting the dead and the salvageable. Days of storms that began Aug. 11 left at least seven people dead as the White River receded through Indianapolis, according to Associated Press reporting. The victims included a 4-year-old boy, three men and three women; among the latest was James Briar, a 31-year-old cyclist found in a hole that opened on a washed-out Henry County road, and Matthew Morey, a 19-year-old headed to Purdue whose body was recovered after he jumped from a Delaware County bridge into the Mississinewa. Stephanie Sallee, 58, and her dog were found in a cornfield after her car was apparently swept off a flooded road. The White River crested above 24 feet in Anderson and Noblesville, beating records set in 1913. Mayor Joe Hogsett called it Indianapolis’s worst flooding in more than 30 years. President Donald Trump approved Gov. Mike Braun’s federal disaster request on Saturday. Nearly 130,000 utility customers were still dark Sunday, down from a peak around 300,000 — a modest improvement that, in the Midwest, counts as a sunny briefing.
On the other ocean, Hurricane Lala weakened to a tropical storm after raking Hawaii without making landfall, still packing enough rain and wind to sweep about 100 homes off their foundations on the Big Island. Gov. Josh Green said no one was believed to have died when those homes washed away, though it was unclear whether a Saturday vehicle wreck that killed one person in the South Point area was storm-related. More than 200,000 homes and businesses were without power by midday, including nearly two-thirds of Big Island customers; at least three hospitals were on generators. Honolulu Fire Department logged more than 600 weather-related responses by noon Sunday, 147 of them downed trees. Some higher-altitude spots on the Big Island took as much as 35 inches of rain. The Punaluʻu Bake Shop in Nāʻālehu, a tourist fixture and major local employer, ended up with about three feet of mud. Green, a doctor who once worked remote Big Island emergency rooms, put it with clinical understatement: everyone was safe. “But boy, a lot of work ahead.”
The slower emergency is hydrological. Lake Mead hit a new record low of 1,040.5 feet around Aug. 7, then slipped further to 1,039.95 feet, about 27 percent of capacity — several inches below the previous mark from July 2022. Hydroelectric generation at Hoover Dam becomes a serious worry near 1,035 feet; “dead pool,” when water can no longer pass the dam by gravity, sits around 900. More than 25 million people from Los Angeles to Phoenix drink from this shrinking bathtub. Meanwhile, police in Ettrick, Virginia were still hunting additional shooters after a Saturday shooting at Virginia State University wounded five people ages 17 to 23, only one of them a student. Camron Harris, 19, of Henrico, was found hiding in a dorm closet more than 14 hours later. And after a deadly crash near Fort Hood that killed two aviators, the Army paused its entire Apache fleet while investigators work — a reminder that not every threat this week arrived with a flood warning.
Markets & Economy
Texas cities are discovering that a boom state can still run out of municipal cash. Dallas is staring at a $51 million budget gap, Fort Worth at $94 million, San Antonio at $158 million over two years, and Austin at a structural deficit that could grow past $100 million by the start of the next decade, The Texas Tribune reported. Dallas plans to lay off more than 100 employees and cut library hours; Fort Worth wants to eliminate vacant posts and slash civilian raises. State law already caps how much extra property-tax revenue cities can collect without a vote at 3.5 percent, and Gov. Greg Abbott wants the next Legislature to tighten that further. Austin raised its rate to the maximum allowed without going back to voters — $195 more a year, 7.4 percent, for a typical home — after residents rejected a hike at the polls last year. San Antonio is considering its first property-tax increase in more than three decades, about $2.95 a month for an average home, plus some $90 million in cuts. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, never one to miss a regional slight, proposed charging non-residents more at the zoo. John Diamond of Rice University’s Baker Institute put the fiscal mood in one line: “I just don’t see an out.”
California, meanwhile, is debating whether to invoice its billionaires. A one-time 5 percent tax on residents with assets above $1 billion is headed to the November 2026 ballot after certification on June 25, and it would apply retroactively to California residents as of Jan. 1. Labor group SEIU-UHW West pitched it as a way to plug a projected multibillion-dollar deficit. Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes the state-level one-off and says he would rather see a nationwide levy; he cannot veto a ballot measure. Mark Cuban, safely in Dallas, warned that only “idiot startup founders” would stay if it passes. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, still in Silicon Valley, said he had not thought about it once. Sergey Brin has poured a combined $102 million into the coalition fighting the proposition and compared the idea, with characteristic understatement, to the Soviet Union he fled in 1979. The argument is less about whether California is broke than about whether paper billionaires can write a check without selling the company.
Factory floors told two stories. Tyson Foods is closing its Joslin, Illinois, beef plant, cutting about 2,500 jobs and removing roughly 3,000 head of daily slaughter capacity from the Midwest. Primary duties ended Aug. 13 and 14, with pay continuing through Oct. 12. Tyson also shuttered a case-ready plant in Eagle Mountain, Utah, and is seeking a buyer for Pasco, Washington, while concentrating beef work in Nebraska, Kansas, and Amarillo. The company cut its fiscal 2026 beef outlook to an adjusted operating loss of $500 million to $650 million after a quarter in which beef volumes fell 15.9 percent and the segment lost $138 million. Historically tight cattle supplies are the unglamorous villain. New York manufacturers, by contrast, looked almost cheerful: the Empire State Manufacturing Survey jumped to 20.6 in August from 15.6 in July, beating a consensus of 11. It is one volatile regional print. Illinois packing towns will not be using it as a consolation prize.
Technology & Industry
Ohio is still the place where the AI boom wants to park a small country’s worth of power, but the financing just got less heroic. Nvidia has cut the financial guarantee underpinning OpenAI’s proposed Ohio campus from a discussed $250 billion to less than $120 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, and is now expected to backstop only the first phase of a 10-gigawatt site being developed by SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy. OpenAI is still negotiating a binding lease for the whole campus, so the smaller backstop covers a fraction of the eventual buildout. The chipmaker remains unprofitable OpenAI’s richest friend, not its credit card without limits. Investor worry about Nvidia’s own exposure, plus a new bank-backed compute-financing push aiming at more than $500 billion in third-party capital, looks less like a retreat from Ohio than an attempt to move the risk onto someone else’s balance sheet. Circular financing — Nvidia helping the companies that buy Nvidia chips — is still the loop. It is just a slightly smaller loop.
Texas, which spent years marketing itself as the easiest place to plug a data center into the wall, has hit pause. On Aug. 3, Gov. Abbott directed ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission to audit projects in the grid operator’s Batch Zero study; no new data center may move forward until that work is done. At a Aug. 14 emergency meeting, ERCOT put the scope at 250 to 300 projects, mostly data centers, representing about 200 gigawatts of future demand — more than double the grid’s recent peak. The broader interconnection queue has swollen past 1,800 projects and roughly 474 gigawatts, more than five times record peak demand, with data centers about 90 percent of that figure. The audit will ask who pays for infrastructure, whether operators bring their own power and water, and what they do to neighbors. There is no fixed deadline; ERCOT has told regulators it could run several months. Texas data centers now use about 0.4 percent of state water, a figure researchers think could reach 2.7 percent by 2030. For a state that sold itself as hyperscaler heaven, a self-imposed freeze is a more interesting signal than another ribbon-cutting.
Not every megawatt this week was spoken for by a server rack. Heart Aerospace flew its full-scale X1 demonstrator on Aug. 12 from Plattsburgh International Airport in New York — the largest battery-electric aircraft yet to take off, the company and coverage say, at more than 11 tonnes, with a 32-metre wingspan and more than a megawatt of electric propulsion. The 27-minute hop reached 1,100 feet and used about $5 of electricity, a figure that does not include pilots, insurance, or the rest of aviation’s expensive reality. The X1 is a testbed for the planned 30-seat ES-30, aimed at about 200 kilometres all-electric and 800 in hybrid mode, with a 2031 entry-into-service target. Regional hops, not transcontinental glory. Still, an 11-tonne electric aircraft that actually left the ground is a more persuasive prototype than another slide deck about the future of flight.
Politics & Policy
Florida votes Tuesday in a primary that will choose nominees to replace term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis and to finish the unexpired Senate term Marco Rubio left behind, the AP Decision Notes laid out. Eleven Republicans are chasing the governorship, including Rep. Byron Donalds, who has President Trump’s endorsement and a pile of money, and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, a DeSantis ally whom the governor once called “the Chuck Norris of Florida politics” without actually endorsing him. Six Democrats are in the mix, led in fundraising by former Republican David Jolly, who joined the party in 2025 and put Gwen Graham on the ticket. Sen. Ashley Moody faces little GOP opposition; Democrats will pick between state Rep. Angie Nixon and retired Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman. New maps drawn to help Republicans in November have scrambled South Florida, including a Democratic primary that pits Debbie Wasserman Schultz against former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick. Only party members may vote. As of July 20, Florida had about 13.5 million registered voters — 42 percent Republican, 30 percent Democratic — and about 663,000 Republican and 610,000 Democratic ballots were already in by Friday. Seventy-seven days to the midterms, if anyone is counting.
In Oakland, four states are trying to turn a youth mental-health argument into the most expensive consumer-protection case in memory. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey go to trial Tuesday in federal court against Meta over Facebook and Instagram, part of a 29-state action that accuses the company of designing features to addict children and of collecting data on kids under 13 without parental consent. States have floated damages that could, in theory, total as much as $1.4 trillion — a number Meta itself disclosed, then called “untethered” to any claimed violation. Legal scholars note that a penalty near the company’s market cap would be less a fine than a nationalization. Meta says the evidence will show its commitment to young people and points to Instagram teen accounts and age-detection tools. A Los Angeles bellwether earlier this year already found Meta and YouTube negligent in a single plaintiff’s case. Structural changes to the products may matter more than the fantasy trillion.
Two other calendars are rearranging American civic life. Texas families asked the Supreme Court on Monday to take up S.B. 10, which requires a specific King James text of the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom. The full Fifth Circuit upheld the law 9-8 in April, arguing that 1980’s Stone v. Graham died with the Lemon test. The families say only the justices can overrule Stone, and not by implication. And on Saturday the DNC, meeting in Austin, approved six early 2028 primaries by voice vote: South Carolina on Jan. 22, then Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, and Virginia. Iowa, which spent decades going first, is out. Iowa Democratic Chair Rita Hart called the map broken promises with no Midwest state among the first four. Republicans, inconveniently, are keeping the Iowa caucus. The party that wants to win back the presidency has decided the path runs through the South. The path around Chick Hill, Iowa, will have to wait.
Human Stories / Social Trends
Hayden Panettiere, who grew up on camera as the fiery kid in Remember the Titans and later as cheerleader Claire Bennet on Heroes and a troubled country star on Nashville, died on Sunday at 36. Her father, Skip Panettiere, confirmed the death. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office said she was found in cardiac arrest at a Greenville, South Carolina, apartment complex Sunday afternoon; lifesaving measures failed, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. An autopsy completed Monday showed no signs of trauma. No cause has been released, and the investigation remains active. She would have turned 37 on Friday. This spring she published a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, about domestic abuse, postpartum depression, the death of her brother Jansen, and addiction — struggles she had already described, with unusual candor, after leaving Nashville for treatment in 2015. SAG-AFTRA and co-stars sent the tributes the industry always sends, which does not make them less sincere. Thirty-six is an obituary that still feels like a draft.
Back-to-school week produced a more farcical kind of educational failure. Students at Farnsley Middle School in southwest Louisville went home on day one with a packet so riddled with AI hallucinations that Kentucky was labeled “Venecky,” Texas “Taxas,” and Oklahoma “Olkchoma.” Havana sat on Mexico’s Yucatán; Mars became “Marc”; magnesium was assigned an atomic mass of -3.08. One sentence, printed as if it meant something, read: “Planetary distance are temporatory earth, equater the elenonts and regnestiom org toed dishlign.” The district said it had spoken with the school about inaccuracies; administrators reportedly told teachers to rip out 17 pages. The generator is not the scandal. The adult who hit print without reading is. Michigan, in a more constructive mood, lowered the age for Michigan Reconnect — free community-college tuition for adults — to 21 for one year, with $25 million in the 2027 education budget. The program awarded $61.4 million to 46,277 adults in 2024-25. Advocates want the expansion written into statute before the next budget cycle turns it back into a debate.
In Clifton, Maine, population 877, the internet did what the internet does to a town that only has one general store. Local Facebook groups turned a select-board race into a mugshot-and-deed-dumping contest, the Bangor Daily News reported. Steve Armenia lost 114-113, then won 115-114 after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ordered two forgotten absentee ballots counted. Planning-board chair Bruce Jellison resigned, citing “public outpouring of hate.” The town clerk was fired in July; the town carries more than $2 million in debt; residents physically sort themselves at meetings by which officials they support online. Jeff Roberts, who runs the Clifton Maine Truth page, allowed that it has added to the divisiveness “to a degree” and that eight harassment orders have been filed against him. Armenia, a former Marine, asked a question every small town now has to answer: if you have a problem with someone, could you maybe say it in person? He also offered a more modest civic reform. “Post something nice once in a while.”
This retrospective news edition uses archived reporting scoped by publication date, or arrival when publication was absent. Collection may have occurred later.