State-News
States mark 25 years after 9/11 as diesel, maps and chatbots collide
World & Security
New York spent Friday doing the two things it still does better than anyone: ritual and argument. At the National September 11 Memorial, the 25th-anniversary ceremony began just after 8:40 a.m. with no speeches, a tolling bell and the reading of 2,977 names. President Donald Trump paid respects at the Pentagon instead; Vice President JD Vance and four living predecessors—George W. Bush, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—gathered at Ground Zero. The city’s first Muslim mayor, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, attended despite a petition of more than 100,000 signatures urging him to stay away. Terry Strada, widow of Tom Strada, used the live broadcast to ask why there was still “no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played.” A drone show of 2,977 lights had already rebuilt the towers over the harbor. The quieter arithmetic is harsher: the federal World Trade Center Health Program says more than 9,400 people have died of 9/11-related illnesses, outnumbering those killed that morning.
Mamdani’s more durable contribution was paperwork. The city published more than 170,000 pages of long-withheld Ground Zero air files, closing two lawsuits by 9/11 Health Watch and opening a public portal. An October 2001 “Harding memo” from senior city lawyers had already projected about 10,000 toxic-exposure claims, even as officials told residents and rescuers the air was safe. Some of the records turned up only in 2025, in 68 boxes in a basement. The city is putting $34.2 million from its $125.8 billion fiscal 2027 budget into digitizing them. Former mayor Rudy Giuliani accused the new administration of rewriting history; Jon Stewart, standing with first responders, wanted the health program and the Victim Compensation Fund funded so the archive is not the only thing that lasts.
Elsewhere the hazards were less commemorative. Hurricane Lowell, which brushed Hawaii overnight Tuesday with damaging winds while its center stayed offshore, is linked to at least two deaths: a 74-year-old man found near Kauai’s shoreline and a homeless man on Oahu killed when a tree fell on his tent. Gov. Josh Green asked President Trump for an expedited major disaster declaration, comparing the infrastructure hit to 1992’s Hurricane Iniki. Lanai’s only commercial cargo harbor was inoperable—a problem for roughly 3,000 residents who depend on it for food and fuel—and Kauai’s utility said about 90 percent of customers lost power, with more than 10,000 still dark Friday morning. On the other ocean, Texas confirmed the first U.S. horse this century with New World screwworm, a ranch animal in Presidio County with an infestation on a hind limb, and banned moving warm-blooded animals out of a designated zone in Presidio and Jeff Davis counties. The parasite, eradicated in the 1960s, already has cattle officials talking about a $1.8 billion hit if it spreads. Horse owners are being told to inspect wounds. It is not a metaphor, though it will be used as one.
Markets & Economy
Diesel did something American pumps are not supposed to do: the national average crossed $6 a gallon for the first time on September 10, GasBuddy told Reuters, and 28 states logged all-time highs the same day, Texas and California among them. In California, five Chevron stations posted $9.999—the highest figure many pumps can display—though GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan noted some of those readings can mean a station has simply run out. AAA put the statewide diesel average near $7.98, up $2.82, or 55 percent, from a year earlier. The explanations arrive in a pile: war disruption through the Strait of Hormuz, Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, a Moscow export ban, tighter Chinese quotas. One dispatch had West Texas Intermediate at $97.26 on September 9; another, a day later, had WTI at $102.48 and U.S. diesel inventories 13 percent below their five-year average. Farmers watching crop prices sag while fuel costs doubled are not in a mood for a lecture about “four independent taps.”
The same week, Canada’s retaliatory tariffs—duties of 15 to 50 percent on hundreds of U.S. products, matching about $20 billion in American measures—started hitting the Midwest where it lives. A Detroit News analysis of federal data put roughly $1.5 billion of Michigan’s Canada-bound exports in the firing line, seventh among states; Pennsylvania led at about $2.6 billion. Michigan sold more than $800 million in iron, steel and related products to Canada between July 2025 and June 2026. “This is going to have a tremendous impact, and it’s not just going to be the automotive sector,” said John Walsh of the Michigan Manufacturers Association, in the tone of a man who has already counted the aluminum in a toaster. In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie declared a rent emergency after median rents jumped 26 percent and eviction notices 44 percent in a year, a boom observers tied to AI paydays in a city where more than two-thirds of residents rent. The package—a bar on some nonpayment evictions, a 10 percent cap on certain passthroughs, a 25 percent bump in Ellis Act buyouts, $3 million more for tenant lawyers—is more agenda-setting than a new police power. Tenants’ advocates called it incomplete, which is how housing politics says hello.
Not every ledger was bleeding. Ford said it would put $1 billion into a new paint shop at the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, the company’s largest factory, where a Super Duty, Expedition or Navigator rolls off every 45 seconds. Groundbreaking is expected by late this year; a 2023 University of Louisville estimate put Ford’s statewide economic impact above $33 billion if you count the vendors, which Kentucky certainly does. North Carolina announced a $590 million PFAS settlement with Chemours, DuPont and Corteva—the largest environmental damages recovery in state history, officials said—guaranteeing $455 million over 10 to 15 years for the state and 11 local governments along the Cape Fear, plus a $135 million reserve if Chemours cannot keep paying for well-water relief already promised. About 27,500 wells have been sampled; clean water has been offered to some 10,500 families. Chemours had already spent nearly $1.2 billion under a 2019 consent order. Forever chemicals, meet a payment plan.
Technology & Industry
Gavin Newsom spent Thursday signing the kind of internet rules Congress keeps promising and then remembering it has a calendar. Thirteen California youth-safety and privacy bills got his name, including SB 1119—“Adam’s Law,” after Adam Raine, a California teenager whose family says ChatGPT conversations preceded his suicide—which requires chatbot age checks and limits how systems remember minors. OpenAI backed the bill after lawmakers clarified memory and parental-consent rules; Sam Altman had contacted Newsom’s office before the vote. Assembly Bill 1709 bans personalized “For You” feeds, infinite scroll and autoplay for users under 16, a feature ban Newsom preferred to Australia’s account ban. AB 2 threatens fines of up to $1 million per child, with treble damages in some cases, if platforms are found liable for fostering anxiety, depression or other harms. Newsom called a recent Meta settlement of up to $18 billion “a drop in the bucket” and, not for the first time, offered Washington a tutorial in getting out of its own way.
A quieter bill may last longer. AB 1405, signed September 9, creates the first state registry of AI auditors, with a January 1, 2029 start date after which no one may sell a covered AI audit in California without registering. Independence rules borrow from accounting: no auditing your own homework, no job-hunting with the client mid-engagement. OpenAI and Anthropic both backed it, which is either mature industry or a clue to read the footnotes. Covered audits are those assessing controls needed for state-law compliance; the law does not, by itself, order every model into a public exam. Paired SB 813 sets a 2028 deadline for a framework of independent verification organizations. Three years is a long time in AI. It is also, historically, how long it takes a legislature to buy a filing cabinet.
While Sacramento regulated chatbots, the grid did something less theoretical. California got through its hottest August on record without a Flex Alert—none since 2022—and without the rotating outages last seen in August 2020. Battery storage on the CAISO system reached 21,112 megawatts by August 7, up from under 700 megawatts when Newsom took office in 2019, about a third of the 63,000-megawatt peak from the September 2022 heat wave. “Batteries are really the story here,” CAISO’s Jayme Ackemann said. Winter nights, when solar contributes nothing, remain the ungraded exam. In Fort Worth, Texas moved electric air taxis from slide decks to asphalt: Joby’s S4 and BETA’s ALIA flew Thursday at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport under the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, Texas the sixth site to start. Joby is barnstorming Dallas–Fort Worth through Sunday. Passenger service is still a certification away, which is the polite way of saying do not sell the Honda yet.
Politics & Policy
Missouri election clerks spent the week living in a civics textbook that had been left in the rain. For two days they were under a state supreme court order to use one congressional map and a federal judge’s order to use another. The U.S. Supreme Court ended the split Thursday, with unusual speed, a day after being asked and just over a week before military and overseas ballots must go out. Officials will use the 2022 map, under which Republicans hold six of eight House seats, not the 2025 Republican map drawn after President Trump’s call for mid-decade redistricting and designed to make seven districts strongly Republican, including a flip of Kansas City’s 5th. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins had tried to keep a veto referendum off the ballot; the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously said he was wrong. Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected the GOP’s emergency appeal Tuesday; half an hour later, Judge Stephen Clark of the Eastern District told the state to stick with the 2025 lines because they had been used in the primary. Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, who had both maps sitting in the voter file, said the hard part was not clicking a box. It was not knowing which box.
Dallas hosted the first Republican midterm convention in 50 years, an event RNC Chair Joe Gruters had previewed as a rally and which President Trump opened with one hour and 44 minutes of remarks. Texas Republicans tried to claim tax cuts on tips and overtime while pinning grocery and gasoline anger on Joe Biden—a division of labor that works until someone mentions Iran or Canada. Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP Senate nominee, accused Democrat James Talarico of wanting to tax tips, overtime and Social Security; Talarico has been running against “trickle-down” and for higher taxes on corporations and billionaires. Gov. Greg Abbott called the choice “common sense and crazy.” The surprise guest was not on the floor. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman sent a 64-second hoodie-and-steel-mill video introducing Republican Sen. Dave McCormick as a friend who would work with Trump to protect steel jobs, while identifying himself as a Democrat allergic to “the extreme left.” Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride likened it to boarding the Titanic after the iceberg. Rep. Madeleine Dean of suburban Philadelphia called the whole convention a product of Republican fear. Pennsylvania’s Democratic delegation is, if nothing else, covering both ends of the arena.
In Illinois, U.S. District Judge John Tharp declined Thursday to block the End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act before it takes effect September 12. Terminally ill adults with less than six months to live, confirmed by two physicians, may seek life-ending medication, with a waiting period, a capacity finding and a ban on doctors raising the subject first. Illinois is the first Midwestern state to legalize the practice, modeled on Oregon’s 1997 law. Disability-rights plaintiffs, including Chicago resident Ebony Payne, argued doctors would steer disabled patients toward death; Tharp called that speculation and gave them 30 days to explain why the case should not be dismissed. A separate religious-provider challenge already has a stipulated restraining order. The Hippocratic oath, like a Missouri map, is now a litigation exhibit.
Human Stories / Social Trends
Off St. Lawrence Island, closer to Russia than to the rest of Alaska, a 15-year-old spent close to three days on the hull of an 18-foot skiff in roughly 40-degree Bering Sea water. The boat had left Savoonga on Friday, due back early Sunday; weather kept a Coast Guard HC-130 on the ground until Monday, when Lt. Cmdr. Jonathon Resch spotted the boy about four miles from the island. “People don’t flip boats and survive nights,” Resch told ABC News. “They don’t do it in warm water.” The fishing vessel Northwest Explorer reeled him in; he had hypothermia, and through chattering teeth told the crew his brother was still under the skiff and that his cousin had “slipped away” the night before. Both were recovered and taken to Nome with the survivor. Names were not released. Captain Adam White’s review was the only one that mattered: “That’s one tough kid.”
Arizona, meanwhile, is curating a monument to the other kind of survival instinct. Rangers at Petrified Forest National Park keep a “conscience pile” of rainbow fossil wood that visitors stole and then mailed back, usually with a letter blaming subsequent car trouble, sick cats, lost jobs or worse. The park holds more than 700 such letters, some 1,200 pages, the oldest from the 1930s; one man returned a piece after 66 years. Several tons still walk out each year despite fines starting at $325—park leadership has walked back the old “ton a month” myth, which is a polite way of saying the real number is merely relentless. Returned rocks cannot go back on the landscape: unknown provenance would contaminate a research site. So the pile grows by the service road, joined by the occasional gift-shop souvenir mailed in on spec. Late repentance, it turns out, does not restore stratigraphy.
Nashville’s airport board voted 6-0 Friday to start renaming Nashville International after Dolly Parton, who died in late August after what her family called a brief battle with cancer. More than 175,000 people had signed a petition; Gov. Bill Lee blessed the idea within days of her death. The process could take months or years—signage, uniforms, a 40-foot monument—and Parton herself, hearing an earlier version of the campaign, had joked that it sounded fun to hear “Your flight is departin’ from Nashville’s D. Parton.” In New York, 14-year-old Miles Wu folded 54 variations of the Miura-ori crease, stacked dumbbells on them, and found that tighter panels and steeper angles held more than 9,000 times their weight. Last October that won him the $25,000 top middle-school prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. He wants the geometry in flat-pack disaster shelters. After a week of maps, maggots, $10 diesel displays and chatbot statutes, a kid crushing origami until it teaches you something is the closest the states came to a clean result.
This daily edition uses stored reporting scoped by publication date, or arrival when publication was absent. Source collection can lag publication.