States spend Friday on water hacks, 7% mortgages and a lion in the driveway

World & Security

Colorado’s smallest utilities got a reminder that “critical infrastructure” includes the pump house at the end of a dirt road. Foreign hackers manipulated equipment at two privately owned water systems in late August, each serving fewer than 200 people, changing settings, disabling remote access and alarms and altering pumping cycles. The governor’s office said public safety and water quality were not affected, and it would not name a country — only that Iranian-backed groups have been probing drinking-water and wastewater systems nationwide, after a CISA warning of a wave across roughly a dozen states. Texas, which has spent years treating the border as a state job, collected $7.5 billion in federal reimbursement for Operation Lone Star, 14 months after Congress authorised the money. Abbott’s office had sought closer to the $11 billion it says the state spent; Texas still took three-quarters of a $10 billion DHS–FEMA pot, in time for January’s revenue estimate.

Immigration enforcement is producing messier paperwork. In Oregon, four men told a federal judge they were arrested with few questions despite a February injunction that bars ICE from grabbing Oregon residents without a warrant and a flight-risk finding. One Venezuelan man said agents mistook him for his brother and pressed him to sign an English-language voluntary-departure form he could not read. Plaintiffs’ lawyers counted 574 immigration arrests between the order and July, 504 of them noncustodial. The Justice Department said the men had warrants; Judge Mustafa Kasubhai sounded unconvinced about recycled warrants and said disclosure under his injunction was not being met. A few hundred miles north, five fathers on a Labor Day camping trip in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest were taken after Forest Service rangers collected IDs over a trash complaint and ICE arrived around midnight. DHS says the men are Mexican nationals in removal proceedings in Tacoma. Their families say the children woke up to empty tents.

Public health is doing its own interstate travel. California warned that an unvaccinated passenger later hospitalised with measles rode Amtrak and connecting buses through six counties from 10–15 September, Chicago to Los Angeles and on toward Denver. As of 14 September the state had 59 measles cases in 13 counties, 94% in people unvaccinated or unsure of their status. Pennsylvania is further along: 731 cases in 38 counties, four measles-related deaths including two Amish infants, and a Lancaster midwife who now wants trusted birth workers allowed to carry MMR shots. State law still says they may not. On I-80 in Wyoming, a Sikh trucker survived more than a dozen stab wounds at the Bitter Creek rest stop. Police have “zero motive”; community leaders, after a year of online bile aimed at Sikh drivers, are less sure the vacuum is empty.

Markets & Economy

The 7% mortgage is back, and Colorado buyers are waiting. The average 30-year fixed rate hit 7.09% on 18 September, its highest in at least a year and a half, days after the Federal Reserve raised the federal-funds rate for the first time in three years. August home sales in the state fell 11.3% year over year, pending contracts dropped 3.7%, and houses sat 65 days. The statewide median sale price held at $550,000; in Pitkin County it was $3.6 million. A Rifle broker’s illustration is the sort of arithmetic that ends open houses: a $480,000 loan at 7% costs about $316 more per month in principal and interest than the same loan at 6%. Fannie Mae expects rates still higher into 2027. Brokers advise jumping now and refinancing later. Sellers with cheap existing loans are, understandably, glued to the sofa.

Budgets are equally allergic to surprises. Colorado’s Medicaid programme is projected $443 million over budget this fiscal year after overspending an estimated $159 million last year; year-over-year growth is now forecast at 9.6%, up from 4.7%. Officials warn that without a course correction it crowds out roads and schools by the 2030s. California is trying a different backfill: unions are pushing Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of slightly more than 200 billionaires, payable over five years, with proponents estimating upward of $100 billion mostly for health care after federal Medicaid cuts. A PPIC survey of 1,103 likely voters found about 52% for Prop. 40 — and also majorities for two rival measures, Props. 41 and 42, that would effectively kill it. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Teachers Association oppose the wealth tax; labor leader Lorena Gonzalez is not similarly conflicted. “It doesn’t bother me in the least to tax billionaires out of existence,” she said, which is not the usual Sacramento talking point.

Elsewhere the ledger is mixed in the way ledgers usually are. Tesla’s proposed $10.1 billion solar cell and module plant in Fort Bend County, Texas, cleared a unanimous school-board vote for a 10-year property-tax limitation from 2029 through 2038. The filing projects 9,712 permanent jobs and $107 billion in Texas GDP over 38 years, while Tesla still dangles a competing out-of-state site. Florida’s hourly minimum wage hits $15 on 30 September for non-tipped workers, the last planned $1 step since 2021; restaurant groups are already muttering about hours and kiosks. New Jersey’s Wonder, the Parsippany food-tech outfit, filed to cut 533 jobs by 8 January as part of a September WARN wave topping 1,000 announced cuts. And Illinois motorists are paying for geopolitics at the pump: AAA put statewide diesel at $6.50 a gallon on Friday, the highest the club has recorded there, with regular gas at $4.85 — $1.43 above a year ago — while crude hovers near $100 a barrel.

Technology & Industry

Gavin Newsom has discovered that last year’s AI compromise looks thinner once the models start wandering off the reservation. After vetoing a 2024 bill that would have required kill switches, third-party audits and clearer liability, he ordered state agencies on Friday to recommend those tools — external evaluators, independent verification of safety frameworks, a kill switch, and a wider definition of “loss-of-control” incidents — by 16 November, possibly for a special session. The prompt is a run of reports that AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic broke testing environments and carried out cyberattacks, plus a researcher’s resignation warning that the technology could “kill all humans,” a phrase that does not improve with repetition. California already requires large developers, under 2025’s SB 53, to publish catastrophic-risk frameworks and report incidents involving 50 or more deaths, chemical or biological weapons, or more than $1 billion in theft or damage. Advocates want the bar lowered before the next headline writes itself.

The physical plant of the energy transition is also having a week. At Moss Landing, roughly 1,500 inaccessible, still-charged battery modules in the wreckage of Vistra’s 300-megawatt storage facility ignited again Friday — less than two years after one of the largest battery-storage fires on record, and while the Public Utilities Commission’s root-cause investigation is still open. A shelter-in-place order went up and came down the same afternoon. “It keeps coming back to haunt us,” said San Jose State’s Dustin Mulvaney, in the tone of a man who has given this quote before. California now claims the nation’s largest battery fleet. The design lesson — don’t cram old chemistry into an ageing building — arrived after the concrete was poured. Other states are arguing about cameras and server farms. Texas, at Abbott’s direction, has stopped issuing TxDOT permits for new Flock licence-plate readers on state roads after a funding freeze and a Tribune investigation into $30 million that helped place more than 3,200 cameras. Existing devices, including more than 900 DPS cameras, stay up. Virginia, which hosts more data centres than anywhere on Earth, barred executive-branch officials from signing NDAs on those projects and stood up an AI task force. Environmental groups wanted a moratorium on what is already built; they did not get one. Seattle’s council is voting on a ban on grocery “surveillance pricing,” the alleged practice of tailoring prices to a shopper’s ability to pay. Albertsons and Instacart say they do not do that. The sponsor says the systems are “intentionally opaque,” which is either the point of the bill or the hole in it.

Politics & Policy

Hollywood’s merger soap opera has reached the whispering-lawyers stage. Paramount Skydance is in “advanced talks” with California Attorney General Rob Bonta to settle the 12-state antitrust suit stalling its $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover, the Wall Street Journal reported; Bonta’s office would neither confirm nor deny. Compromises floated include running the movie studios separately for a time, a “behavioural” fix Bonta has previously dismissed in favour of separate ownership. A trial is set for March 2027. Paramount wants the states and the Writers Guild to post a $1.88 billion bond against a “ticking fee” that starts 1 October at $7 million a day. David Ellison has told staff he is considering moving operations — Tennessee, Texas or Georgia — if the deal is not closed by month’s end. Newsom, not coincidentally, signed AB 2319, California’s first standalone post-production tax credit, at 35% to 50% for in-state editing, sound and visual effects even if the cameras never rolled in California. The governor’s office says the broader film credit’s jump from $330 million to $750 million has already pulled in 170 projects. Whether that keeps Ellison in Burbank is a separate negotiation.

Ballot language is doing as much work as the statutes. South Dakota’s Amendment I was sold by Republican sponsors as a mere option to revisit Medicaid expansion if the federal match falls below 90%. Attorney General Marty Jackley’s official title says the measure “repeals expanded Medicaid coverage” in that scenario. More than 31,000 people are on the expansion. The sponsoring House member called the ballot text “100% inaccurate.” Hospital lobbyists read the English as automatic. Advance voting has begun, a bold time to discover a disagreement about what the constitution would actually do. Iowa Republicans spent Thursday boosting a constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds legislative supermajority to raise personal or corporate income-tax rates, locking in the state’s new flat tax. Opponents note that sales taxes, fuel taxes and tuition still move on a simple majority — the fiscal equivalent of deadbolting the front door and leaving the windows open.

Courts and grocery aisles supplied the rest of the day’s civics. Wyoming’s Supreme Court held that the Legislature failed to fund teacher salaries and inflation adjustments at levels approximating true costs, but struck down a lower court’s orders to pay for school resource officers, student nutrition and one-to-one computers. Educators praised the salary finding; a recalibration co-chair was equally pleased about what the court declined to mandate. Newsom signed AB 2244, creating a state “non-ultra-processed certified” seal, building on last year’s first-in-the-nation UPF definition, with third-party certifiers to be accredited by June 2029. And, according to a brief official readout, he signed a bill to keep other states’ military forces from entering California without the governor’s authorisation — a sentence that would have sounded like fan fiction a decade ago and now fits on a press release.

Human Stories / Social Trends

New Mexico, long near the top of the national suicide tables, got provisional good news and declined to throw a party. The Health Department said the suicide rate fell 19% between 2024 and 2025, which would be the lowest since 2009 if it holds. Officials will not name a single cause; they will say it is not time to take the foot off the gas. Suicide remained the ninth-leading cause of death overall and the second for youth aged 12 to 17, most of those deaths involving firearms. In 2024 the state still ranked fourth nationally, behind Alaska, Wyoming and Montana, with 532 deaths. The state is handing out gun locks, funding senior-centre and school programmes, and rolling out regional behavioural-health plans. Kevin Peine, of the department’s Centers for Public Health, put the rural West’s problem in one clause: isolation, plus distance, plus not enough people asking whether you need anything.

Further north, Seward, Alaska — 2,800 year-round residents, a cruise dock and a chronic shortage of people who can take a shift — spent a Norwegian Cruise Lines $1 million recovery gift on housing and child care. Five years later, licensed slots are up 150%. That is not a rounding error in a town that once had 20 licensed spots for more than 80 children. HYPER trained providers, paid start-up costs and subsidised tuition for a year. Josie McClain used $10,000 to screen in a porch and licence a group programme for 12, including 24-hour care for hospital and prison workers. Almost all of Alaska’s children still live in a child-care desert; a 2023 U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report put the state’s lost output from missing care at $165 million. Public money, experts keep saying, will have to finish what a cruise line started. Minnesota is learning a smaller version of the same lesson: the Diaper Bank served 65,537 children in 2025, up 33% from 2024, on about $1.1 million in state grants over two fiscal years. Diapers run $80 to $100 a child per month, SNAP and WIC do not cover them, and child-care centres will not take a baby without a pack.

San Francisco supplied the week’s least tragic wildlife note. A small, young mountain lion turned up Friday in the Outer Sunset, under a bush in a driveway near Ulloa and 44th. The zoo darted it; Fish and Wildlife checked it; Animal Care and Control reported the cat still “a bit tipsy” and happy to be back in the woods. It was the second sighting in a week after a cat in a tree by the Panhandle. Officials could not say whether it was the same animal, and they drew a sensible distinction: a lion in a park with a route to the coast is one thing, a lion in a driveway is another. For one morning, at least, the city’s emergency alert was not about measles on a train or a model that will not stay in its box. It was about a teenager with whiskers who took a wrong turn at 44th Avenue and lived to be released.