TAMPA — No strategy can survive a lack of execution.

And recently, the Detroit Tigers’ strategy of using an opener ahead of a bulk reliever, such a weapon at the end of last season, has been doomed by shoddy execution, be it by the opener, the bulk operator, the defense or all of the above.

Lefty opener Brant Hurter was charged with four unearned runs in the first inning Saturday and for the third time this season, the Tigers have lost three straight games.

The Tampa Bay Rays, winners in seven of their last nine, coasted to an 8-3 victory over the Tigers at Steinbrenner Field.

It was second straight game the Tigers fell behind by four runs in the first inning.

“That’s what we try to do,” said catcher Jake Rogers. “Punch first. That’s what we’ve done to a lot of teams. But Tampa is hot right now and playing a good brand of baseball.”

Hurter got the first three hitters out in the first inning, striking out two of them. But Brandon Lowe, the No. 2 hitter, reached first base on a third-strike passed ball by Rogers. Lowe whiffed at a 91-mph sinker but the ball seemed to handcuff Rogers. It hit off his glove and went to the backstop.

“I’m not going to make excuses,” Rogers said. “It needs to be caught. It was a sinker away. It kind of caught a seam and cut on him and I botched it and hit it to the backstop. Which is not what you want from me. It was a crucial point in the game and it led a much larger inning.”

The Rays turned that extra out into four, two-out runs. But that’s not all on Rogers. Hurter struck out right-handed hitting Junior Caminero for the second out with Lowe still at second base.

He never got the third out.

“The reality of that first inning is that Hurter couldn’t get the lefties out,” manager AJ Hinch said. “That inning turned into a mess. But in that situation (using Hurter to open), we were hoping to get the lefties.”

Lefty Jonathan Aranda doubled and then Hurter started spraying pitches. He walked righty Christopher Morel and, with the bases loaded, walked lefty Josh Lowe. He then forced in another run by hitting Jose Cabellaro. His day ended after switch-hitter Taylor Walls plated two with a single.

“Giving up the extra base runner is painful,” Hinch said. “Especially when you look back at it. But even in the moment, we were still in a good position to get out of it. I’m not worried about Hurter, at all. It was a bad inning for him.”

Sawyer Gipson-Long finished the first inning but his mission at that point was more of a recovery than a rescue. With the bullpen covering 14 innings over the last three games, including the doubleheader Thursday, it was paramount for Gipson-Long to eat innings.

That he was able to pitch through the seventh inning was the biggest positive of the day for the Tigers. He gave the bullpen a chance to reset for the finale on Sunday.

“That was big,” Hinch said. “Big for him, first off. We want to get him going. The word is out that we pound the zone early. He threw a ton of first-pitch strikes and they were first-pitch swinging from 12:10 p.m. (game time) on.

“It was good that he could get us into seven innings and be able to hold his stuff.”

Gipson-Long went 6.1 innings, his longest outing this season, and was charged with four runs.

“It’s not a traditional start but I know I have to go out there and eat up innings,” he said. “I need to get into the later part of the game for my team and if I can do that, I can put us in a good spot.”

He was dinged by three solo homers, two of them in the fourth inning, by Danny Jansen and Caminero, his 19th homer this season. Morel launched a 434-footer in the seventh.

“I thought I pitched my game pretty well,” said Gipson-Long making his fourth start back after recovering from elbow and hip surgeries. “Solo homers, they’re not something you want, but they’re not going to beat you in the long run. If I keep throwing strikes, everything evens out.

“I feel like staying in the zone, not walking people, throwing to contact, that’s a good approach against any team.”

Gipson-Long’s performance certainly put the Tigers in a good spot for Sunday. So did an incredible, 13-pitch dogfight in the eighth inning by Jahmai Jones.

“You try to put pressure on teams, even in defeat,” Hinch said.

With a couple of pinch-hitting moves in the eighth, Hinch forced the Rays to use two relievers in the eighth inning get a third reliever warm in a blowout game.

Righty-swinging Jones pinch-hit for Zach McKinstry against hard-throwing lefty Mason Montgomery. He fouled off five 3-2 pitches, all of them at 98 and 99 mph. On the 13th pitch, Jones lofted an RBI double to the wall in left center.

“I just went up there battling,” Jones said. “The guy’s got a very good heater, as you could see. The biggest thing was just trying to get a barrel to the ball on a guy that throws 100. All it was was just try to fight and battle.”

The 13-pitch at-bat, plus right-handed hitting Dillon Dingler’s presence on the on-deck circle, forced Rays’ manager Kevin Cash to bring in one of his leverage relievers, Kevin Kelly.

“You’re just trying to create a little bit of an advantage for tomorrow by putting up good at-bats later today,” Hinch said. “Our guys play the whole game.”

It seemed odd, using Dingler to pinch-hit for lefty Parker Meadows against a funky righty like Kelly, but there was a method to the madness. Kelly ended up throwing 21 pitches to get five outs.

“Wanted Kelly in the game,” Hinch said. “We wanted to make them use as much pitching as we could. If I leave (Meadows) in, he’s going to leave his lefty (Montgomery) in. Bringing Dingler in got Kelly in for two ups.”

Just little nips at the Rays’ heels as they’re running away with a convincing win that could trip them up at some point on Sunday.

“We play tomorrow, twelve o’clock,” Hinch said, on any possible overreaction to a three-game losing skid. “Come watch us if you’re here, watch us on TV if you’re not. We have a good team. We’ll be fine.”

TAMPA – Riley Greene gets down to this part of the country, just a couple of hours away from his home and family outside of Orlando, once a year during the baseball season. And usually, Team Greene comes out in hordes for this series against the Rays.

So, does he have a lot of family here for this one?

“No,” he said.

Huh?

“So, it’s my godchild’s first birthday and everyone is going to that instead of watching Riley play,” he said, with a wistful shrug.

More than 100 people were expected to attend young Riker’s first birthday bash in the Orlando area.

“At least my parents are here and my sister,” Greene said.

The rest are missing quite a show.

Greene, in case you’re not paying attention, is on a tear. He hit two home runs and knocked in four Friday night, giving him 17 homers and 59 RBI on the season. He’s got 29 RBI in his last 29 games and he’s making a strong run at player of the month honors for June, slashing .353/.400/.618 with a 1.1018 OPS with four homers and 19 RBI entering play Saturday.

“I really haven’t changed much,” Greene said. “Just trying to get a good pitch to hit, put my body in a good position to hit the ball and see what happens.”

Damage happens. Lots of damage.

He’s slugging .526 on the season. The last Tiger to have 59 RBI on June 21 was Miguel Cabrera, who had 71 in 2013. He is one of three American League players to have at least 17 homers, 59 RBI and 35 extra-base hits, joining Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh.

Still, he contends that nothing has really changed. He’s not consciously chasing power. Except for significantly more tilt in his swing, his mechanics and approach are mostly the same as last season.

He was asked before the game Saturday if he went into last offseason consciously trying to add more slug to his offensive profile.

“To be honest, no,” he said. “Just kind of did the same stuff over and over again like I’ve done the past offseason. I just think it comes with being on time and getting a good pitch to hit.”

This has always been Greene’s primary focus. It’s what manager AJ Hinch asks him after just about every at-bat – did you get a good pitch to hit. Here’s why that’s so important:

Greene, overall, is slugging .554 against fastballs and .580 against breaking balls. When he’s ahead in the count, he’s slugging .826 on fastballs, .773 on breaking balls and .727 on off-speed pitches.

Impressive.

“I think it speaks to my approach,” Greene said. “It speaks to another year under my belt. More experience is huge. And maybe I’m getting a little stronger. Who knows?”

For all of Greene’s production, the Tigers, still with the best record in baseball, have hit a bit of a plateau. They came in Saturday on a rare losing streak (two games) and had split their last 10.

And Saturday’s 12:10 p.m. start meant they would be playing at least 37 innings of baseball over the last 60 hours with more than three hours of rain delays and a two-hour, late-night, early-morning plane ride mixed in.

“We just flush it,” Greene said. “Yesterday was yesterday. It doesn’t really matter because we can’t change what happened. Just focus on today. This is just part of it. We can’t complain about it and say it’s a tough stretch. At the end of the day, that’s just kind of an excuse.

“People go through it. It is what it is. We just have to figure it out and play through it.”

By Melissa Nann Burke, The Detroit News

Michigan hospitals would take an estimated hit of more than $1 billion a year if a Medicaid cut proposed in the Republican-led U.S. Senate this week were to become law, according to the industry group that represents them.

Hospitals across Michigan already operate on average with a negative margin, and some ― especially rural facilities with higher shares of low-income patients on Medicaid ― are likely to reduce services and staff or even shut their doors under the proposal, according to the Michigan Health & Hospital Association.

“What’s in the Senate version, I want to be very clear, is specifically cutting Medicaid. It’s not addressing waste, fraud and abuse,” said Laura Appel, MHA’s executive vice president for government relations and public policy, in a dig at Republicans’ messaging on Medicaid reforms.

“It’s cutting the funding that Michigan uses ― as do 48 other states ― to support Medicaid,” the government health care program for mostly low-income residents.

Appel was referring to a provision in the Senate Finance Committee’s proposed version of President Donald Trump’s so-called “one big beautiful bill” that would gradually shrink states’ use of so-called provider taxes from a safe-harbor threshold of 6% to 3.5% by 2031. The Medicaid reforms are part of a larger tax cut and spending bill that is the cornerstone of Trump’s second-term agenda.

The $1 billion impact that the Michigan hospitals group has estimated is specific to the GOP-run Senate’s changes. It doesn’t account for a projected spike in uncompensated care that hospitals would encounter due to coverage losses as a result of other provisions in the legislation, such as expanded Medicaid work requirements and twice-annual eligibility assessments for Medicaid participants.

“We’re going to keep pushing right up until the very last vote to protect coverage and funding, because cutting funding is cutting coverage is cutting care,” Appel said. “We’re going to keep taking care of people. But it’s already hard enough. Let’s not make it harder for people to get the care that they need.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said Tuesday that reducing the Medicaid provider tax rate that states may charge represents “important reforms.”

“We think they rebalance the program in a way that provides the right incentives to cover the people who are supposed to be covered by Medicaid,” Thune said.

“But we continue to hear from our members specifically on components or pieces of the bill that they would like to see modified or changed or have concerns about. And we’re working through that.”

Pressure to rein in Medicaid use

Medicaid is a health insurance safety net for low-income adults and children funded jointly by the states and the federal government. Every state except Alaska imposes provider taxes to help finance the state share of Medicaid costs.

Michigan uses provider taxes ― with federal approval ― on hospitals, nursing homes, ambulance companies and health insurers (managed care organizations) to generate 20% or $3 billion of the state’s share of Medicaid program costs. The extra tax leads to higher payments from the U.S. government, which critics argue is a loophole that lets states abuse the system and swell enrollment in the program.

In a report last month, the state health department said Michigan’s hospital provider tax was projected to generate enough revenue in fiscal year 2025 to support $5.84 billion in Medicaid payments to Michigan hospitals, including the federal matching funds that the tax revenue draws down.

But if the hospital provider tax were limited to 3%, reimbursement payments to Michigan hospitals would decline $2.33 billion, according to estimates by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. (The state hasn’t provided a revised estimate based on the 3.5% limit proposed by the Senate.)

Michigan is one of 22 states that could be required to lower their provider taxes on hospitals or health plans because their rates are currently more than 5.5% of patient revenues, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. So Michigan hospitals would feel the impact of the new limits almost immediately if the provision goes into effect in 2027.

The reduced provider tax limits only apply to states like Michigan that have expanded Medicaid. Some experts view the change as a way for Congress to pressure these states to drop their expansions, rather than face the drastic cuts to provider taxes that would devastate state budgets.

“States are going to be in a bind: Either raise other taxes ― income taxes, sales taxes ― or they’re going to cut other parts of the budget like K-12 education or most likely make big cuts to their Medicaid program,” said Edwin Park, a research professor and Medicaid policy expert at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

“This is an attempt to really roll back the Medicaid expansion,” Park said. “The clear intent is to undermine financing of the program.”

Michigan expanded Medicaid eligibility under Republican Gov. Rick Snyder in 2014. The Medicaid program known as Healthy Michigan currently enrolls 749,000 low-income adults, according to state figures. Overall, Medicaid provides health care coverage to more than 1 in 4 people in Michigan, totaling 2.6 million beneficiaries, including 1 million children, according to state data.

Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, last week embraced the proposed federal spending cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, despite their potential to blow a $3 billion hole in the state budget.

“I can’t force (Democratic Gov. Gretchen) Whitmer’s administration … to spend tax dollars wisely,” Hall said at the White House.

“But President Trump and the Congress can, because they’re the ones who are entrusting her with the dollars. So if they just pay out accurately and don’t pay out fraud, they won’t get penalized.”

That kind of language grinds on J.J. Hodshire, president and CEO of Hillsdale Hospital, who is “disgusted” by lawmakers claiming that the average Medicaid participant is a 27-year-old man playing video games in his parents’ basement. In his rural south-central Michigan community, Medicaid covers the pastor of a local church, farmers, pregnant moms and grocery-store workers ― the working poor, Hodshire said.

“This is me speaking as a Republican. This is me speaking as someone who has supported his party, but you’re also talking to someone who has been on the recipient side of Medicaid growing up one of seven children of my parents, when we were on Medicaid,” Hodshire said.

“This notion that Medicaid is for the lazy or those that are refusing to work isn’t true,” he added.

Hodshire estimated that the Senate’s proposal to limit provider tax rates would result in his hospital losing $6 million a year in reimbursement payments. That amount would reduce services at Hillsdale Hospital, and he predicted that it would result in hospital or program closures in some communities.

“Board rooms across this country are gonna have to make tough decisions. One side might say, ‘They’re just fear-mongering that you’re going to lose your Medicaid. You’re not going to lose your Medicaid,’” Hodshire said. “That might be true. But where are they going to get those services if their local hospital is closed?”

More revenue losses

The Senate’s proposal keeps language that passed the U.S. House in late May that would freeze states’ provider taxes and prohibit certain types of taxes because of how they’re structured using variable rates.

Michigan’s Insurance Provider Assessment (IPA) tax generates about $450 million a year toward the state’s base Medicaid costs, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, and would be prohibited under the GOP’s proposal, posing another hit for the state budget.

The Michigan Association of Health Plans has estimated that changing the variable IPA tax to equalize the rate would result in a 300% tax increase on commercial insurance providers in the state ― something that would be passed along to customers through premium increases, said Dominick Pallone, executive director of the industry group representing health insurers.

However, the current bill text makes no provision for states to revise the tax to eliminate the variable rates that are no longer allowed, Georgetown’s Park said.

Michigan and other states are also barred under the legislation from creating a new provider tax or increasing existing taxes to replace the lost revenues.

“It’s a little bit like changing the speed limit and then giving a ticket to somebody who sped before you changed the speed limit,” Pallone said.

A proposed rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also seeks to bar certain provider taxes on managed care plans that lack uniformity in seven states, including Michigan. Neither the legislation nor the proposed rule would guarantee a transition period for the states to adjust.

While Michigan’s health plans would like to see the provider taxes continue, it’s “pretty clear” that Congress won’t allow them to operate as they have in Michigan, Pallone said.

“Now, we’re just really asking for a three-year timetable, so that we can have some very difficult conversations in Lansing about how deep and how broad the cuts to Medicaid will have to be,” Pallone said. “And giving us several years to get there would be helpful.”

On the insurer side, he said, the cuts would likely mean lower reimbursement rates paid to Medicaid providers, which would hit rural hospitals hard and could prompt closures. Health plans would also, where allowed, use more prior authorizations to “squeeze” out low-value care, Pallone said.

“It’s pretty dire consequences here of reducing this without being able to find revenue sources to offset it,” Pallone said.

Gabe Schneider, director of government relations for Munson Healthcare ― the state’s largest rural hospital system ― was in Washington, D.C., lobbying Michigan lawmakers this week, urging them not to support the changes by the Senate Finance Committee, he said.

Munson has eight hospitals across 24 counties in the northern Lower Peninsula — an area that includes 140,000 people who receive insurance through Medicaid, he said.

Schneider said he’s reminding lawmakers that Munson can’t turn away Medicaid patients just because their reimbursement rate is being slashed. That loss of revenue will hurt all patients, he said.

Munson’s medical facilities across northern Michigan include hospitals in Cadillac, Charlevoix, Frankfort, Gaylord, Grayling, Kalkaska, Manistee and Traverse City.

“We are the sole community hospital where we’re at, and so patients can’t just go down the road by 15 minutes and get to another hospital because there are no other hospitals,” Schneider said.

“In rural areas, this really has an outsized impact because we’re talking about services that are really critical for our patients and our communities that we serve.”

Nursing homes hit

Provider taxes on skilled nursing facilities and intermediate care facilities that care for people with disabilities would be exempt from the new limits.

However, Michigan’s provider tax on nursing homes wouldn’t be allowed under the prohibition against differential rates, said Melissa Samuel, president and CEO of the Health Care Association of Michigan, which represents nearly 370 nursing facilities in the state.

“If you’re a state that needs to fix your provider tax after May 1, 2025, you wouldn’t be eligible for the exemption,” Samuel said. “It’s clear that they’re directing us to fix it, but in doing so, it’s almost like you’re being penalized.”

Michigan’s skilled nursing facility tax generates $680 million toward the state budget, according to HCAM. The Senate’s new proposed limit would mean a $120 million cut in reimbursements to skilled nursing facilities, Samuel said.

She anticipated the cut would hit labor and benefits and potentially prompt owners to reduce hours or staff, which would in turn limit the number of patients who could be admitted and cared for.

Like Pallone, the Health Care Association is hoping for a transition period to restructure the provider tax so it can continue to be used in Michigan, Samuel said.

“I know there’s language around ‘fraud’ and ‘misuse’ of the provider tax. But the skilled nursing facility tax came in under (Republican Gov.) John Engler in the ‘90s. It’s very straightforward in the state of Michigan and goes directly into skilled nursing reimbursements,” she said.

“We assume that the restructuring of our provider tax is something we’ll have to do, because it was in both the House and Senate versions. That’s something we’re willing to do. But give us another glide path to do that, so then, how much do we have to close the gap?”

U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, said he was “deeply frustrated” that GOP senators are pushing for cuts to Medicaid in their bill and said he’d oppose it.

“The bill would take away health care and food assistance from millions of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, in order to give a tax cut to billionaires,” Peters said in a statement.

“It would increase our nation’s deficit and put our country on worse financial footing, all while hurting hardworking families. I will never vote for a bill that does that.”

Ethan Daniel Davidson is no stranger to releasing music — he’s put out 13 albums since the end of the ’90s, after all.

But his latest, “Cordelia,” represents a bit of creative sea change for the Birmingham-based singer, songwriter, author and philanthropist.

After recording his last several albums locally — with a crew of Detroit-area musicians that includes his wife, Gretchen Gonzales Davidson, His Name is Alive’s Warren Defever and others — Davidson journeyed to Mississippi to make the seven-track “Cordelia” as well as a follow-up, “Lear,” that will be released later this summer. He recorded at Zebra Ranch Recording Studio in Coldwater, Mississippi, opened by the late Jim Dickinson, whose credits include the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Replacements and many more. It’s now operated by his son Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars, who co-produced “Cordelia” and “Lear” with David Katznelson.

The two played on it, as well, joined by musicians who have worked with Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris and others, with Rayfield “Ray Ray” Hollomon added to provide the sacred-style pedal steel sound Davidson wanted for the album.

“Every once in a while, you want to change and get out of your comfort zone,” Davidson, 55, the adopted son of the late Detroit Pistons and Guardian Industries owner Bill Davidson, explains while walking around his home. “It had been a long time, for me, working with the same group of people. I was ready to try something new, and you kinda challenge yourself, too, working with people you haven’t met before.

“It was a little bit of self-awareness for me. I had been letting myself slide a little bit, get too comfortable — not that I think I’ve put out any crap, but I wanted to freshen it up. I thought these songs were really good, and they deserved my attention.”

The Mississippi Delta also exerted a special pull, Davidson adds.

“I think Mississippi has always been one of my musical homes,” he says. “So much of the music I’ve absorbed my whole life come from Mississippi — other places, as well, but Mississippi factors big in my musical psyche. So just being down in that environment it was like, in a way, being back home.”

Davidson and the Mississippi gang recorded 25 songs, many dating from the COVID period or before, over the course of five days in the studio. One, “Your Old Key,” is a new version of a track from his 2012 album “Silvertooth,” which marked his return to record-making after a seven-year break. “The version that’s on ‘Silvertooth’ is, like, the first time that song was ever played. It was made up in the studio, in front of the microphone,” Davidson recalls.

“When I went down to Mississippi, these guys had listened to some of my back catalog, and they wanted to record a few of those (songs), too, to see what would happen. We recorded a number of the old songs, but doing ‘Your Old Key’ again and putting a sped-up version on this album seemed to fit with what we wanted to do. The guys were like: ‘That’s a great song. It’s got great changes in it.’ I was very flattered by that. I always believed in it and thought it was a good song.”

The “Cordelia” crew also encouraged Davidson to open up and extend some of the song arrangements more — notably “Gasoline,” “a love song about a middle-aged arsonist who gets released from jail and reconnects with his old flame” — that stretches beyond the nine-minute mark.

“Just letting these guys play was something I hadn’t done in a really long time — not since the first album, I think,” notes Davidson, a Lahser High School and University of Michigan graduate who began writing music while living in Alaska during the 1990s. “I’m not a soloist. I don’t jam. But I do like to hear guys that can really do it, and do it well. I like being part of that. I’m just plugging along with my rhythm guitar behind the drummer and listening to everybody else.

“It’s something people haven’t heard from me in a long time. There’s a couple more like that on the (‘Lear’) record, too.”

The music remains a part of a broad creative universe for Davidson, who also executive produced the 2019 documentary “Call Me Bill: The William Davidson Story.” In addition to working with the William Davidson Foundation that his father founded, he’s also the board chairman for Detroit Opera and serves on the boards of the Detroit Institute of Arts and Motown Museum. And he maintains what he calls a “rabbinic side hustle” whose studies have led to a couple of books with another, inspired by the Leviticus passage about the Blasphemer, in progress.

“It’s all part of the same piece, in a way,” Davidson explains. “I regard my whole musical practice, or whatever it is, really being more about my own psychotherapy practice. It’s a way of figuring out what’s going on inside of me and healing myself. It’s about trying to understand what’s inside of me, unpack what’s inside of me.

“My attitude is if people like it, that’s great — and if people don’t like it, that’s great. (laughs) Whatever. I never cared about being some big star. It’s all just a way of expressing what’s inside me, and maybe somebody else will connect with it.”

Ethan Daniel Davidson celebrates the release of his new album, “Cordelia,” with a performance at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 26 at the Detroit Public Theatre, 3960 Third Ave., Detroit. 313-974-7918 or ethandanieldavidson.com.

The Michigan State hockey team is returning a lot of key pieces from a Big Ten championship-winning squad. It’s about to get even stronger.

The Spartans’ recruiting class this year includes a number of top prospects, including fourth overall draft pick Cayden Lindstrom, projected second-rounder Eric Nilson and the CHL’s leading goal scorer two seasons ago in Anthony Romani. The class may even include Gavin McKenna, the projected top pick in next year’s draft, who Michigan State is firmly in the running to commit.

Among Michigan State’s underrated additions, though, is Ryker Lee. In a draft class of heavy hitters, Lee could make an immediate impact. The 18-year-old Illinois native is the reigning USHL Rookie of the Year. He’ll also be an NHL Draft pick next week, likely early in the second round.

Lee comes to Michigan State from the USHL’s Madison Capitols, where he played one season after four years at prep school Shattuck-St. Mary’s — the same program that developed Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon and Macklin Celebrini, among others, and the same one where Michigan State coach Adam Nightingale cut his teeth as a head coach.

Like many of the Spartans’ recruits, Lee pledged because he wanted to play for Nightingale and his staff.

“The main thing was the coaching staff and their belief in me as a player and how they want to develop guys,” Lee told The Detroit News. “And then obviously, Michigan State is a great school with all the athletics and being a Big Ten school. Good education, it’s not too far from home. My brother also goes there, so I think just a lot of things lined up for me going there.”

Lee arrives with a reputation as a strong playmaker and scorer who is rounding out a complete game. His coach at Shattuck, Tom Ward, compared him to a mix of Cole Eiserman and Celebrini in style, and mentioned there are shades of MSU Hobey Baker winner Isaac Howard in the mix, too.

But one of Lee’s most important attributes may be his patience, especially when joining such a loaded team. It’s part of the reason why so many things have “lined up” for Lee to begin with.

Take his senior year for example. Some hockey players are constantly trying to get to the next level in a sprint. Lee certainly had his opportunity to do so when Madison offered him a roster spot right out of training camp in 2023. But Lee credits much of his success in hockey to the values he learned at Shattuck — work ethic and patience — and he decided to return for his senior year.

That extra year paid off. Once a very undersized player for his age group, Lee hit a growth spurt that took him to his current 6-foot stature. His playmaking and scoring were honed with the disadvantage of being smaller than everyone else. Both areas grew more confidence as Lee could hang physically with anyone on the ice.

“He was going from the littlest guy to a regular-sized guy, which is great for him because he’s got a good game,” Ward told The News. “He’s a great kid, and it was just a matter of time. He had to be patient.”

“That was a question mark — I think for everybody — when he was younger,” Madison coach Andy Brandt told The News, “was just what was his size going to end up being? We all know now that he sprouted up near 6 feet tall, although slight. He’s a competitive hockey player that still wins battles. I think again, if you’re looking at the biggest improvement for him, it’s going to probably come off the ice in terms of developing some muscle mass.”

When he finally did get to Madison, Lee made an outsized impact. He led his team with 31 goals and 68 points, fourth-most in the USHL.

“When he has the talent that he has, he garners respect from his teammates right away because they see how talented he is,” Brandt said. “I think where Ryker separates himself is his work ethic along with his skill and what he can do. He’s the hardest worker. He’s one of the most communicative guys we had. He drove energy for our practices because he enjoyed being on the ice. He’s a special player in that regard.”

That’s pretty much the M.O. for a Nightingale recruit, but the Michigan State coach didn’t promise anything to win Lee over. In fact, it was the opposite that helped seal the deal.

Lee’s commitment came with no guarantees of ice time or role from Nightingale. Both have likely dipped with every commitment that joins his class. But in reality, that’s one of the other areas that attracted Lee to Michigan State.

“A lot of times, teams will try to recruit you and promise you things,” Lee said. “They don’t do that at Michigan State, and I like that. I think you gotta go in and you gotta earn everything.”

Lee’s track record suggests that won’t be a problem. He played for Shattuck and Madison programs that had other top players, and he fit in well. His personality helps him fit in with an established unit. His coaches suggest he isn’t one to come into a room and make demands or alienate himself, but he also isn’t a pushover begging to fit in. He exists comfortably within himself, and that benefits him joining a culture that’s well intact with a number of strong leaders in the mix.

“He knows he’s gotta go there and just shut up and do his job and earn respect from these guys,” Ward said. “But at the same time, he’s not going to back down. He’s not going to kowtow to these guys. … He’s going to go in there and earn a spot and earn ice time. And if guys aren’t ready to go compete with them, they should be ready because he’s a competitive little guy, and he likes the puck, and he wants to go get it.”

That mentality is important when joining a Michigan State team that has so many key returners driven by a distinct mission to make up for last postseason’s early exit. Lee understands what drives Michigan State’s locker room. He sees it as an opportunity for him to learn.

“I think it’s a good thing that we have a lot of guys coming back and older guys that can kind of show me the way and lead the way, and I can learn a lot from them as people,” Lee said. “But also, they’re great players. So it’s going to be fun to play with them and chase that goal of winning a national championship. I know that they’re going to come back with a bad taste in their mouth, and, yeah, I want to win, too.”

Few of music’s icons are, or have, demonstrated the art of aging with grace — and defiance — than Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan.

The two Mount Rushmore-caliber singers, songwriters and song interpreters have logged more than 60 years of performing and recording each. On Friday night, June 20, at the Pine Knob Music Theatre they reprised their 2024 pairing at the top of Nelson’s annual Outlaw Music Festival bill, each of 65-minute their sets acknowledging the ravages of time (Nelson’s 92, Dylan 84) but still tapping into the creative drive that has kept each consistently on the road (again) throughout those decades.

Their methods are similar; both Nelson and Dylan (still basking in the triumph of last year’s biopic “A Complete Unknown”) have stripped their presentations down to stark core that frames the songs and their vocal performances within rudimentary arrangements. They still deploy sophisticated nuances and occasional bursts of virtuosity, but their approaches allow them to treat even their best-known tunes as living, breathing material open to re-interpretations both dramatic and subtle.

It’s not always crowd-pleasing; it wouldn’t be a Dylan show, after all, if some of the 13,000-plus fans at Pine Knob weren’t grumbling about the changes he made to favorites such as “Simple Twist of Fate” or “All Along the Watchtower.” But the ovations were strong throughout the night, in recognition of legendary stature as much as artistic adventure.

Earlier sets from Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats and Trampled By Turtles showed that Nelson and Dylan have passed those lessons down to those following in their wake, while Kalamazoo’s Myron Elkins opened the nearly seven-hour show with a half-hour set that highlighted his just-released new album “Nostalgia For Sale” and brought Michigan-bred blues guitarist Larry McCray on for a number.

The sun came out for the first time just before Dylan, in a dark suit and open-neck white shirt, led his quintet on the stage for a mostly low-key 15-song exposition that found him in confident voice and showcased his acumen on piano (and occasionally harmonica) as the other musicians meandered around the melodies and loose structures that were delicate but never tentative. Dylan would often start a song on his own and let the band members work their way in — which worked particularly well on renditions of “Forgetful Heart,” “Under the Red Sky,” “Desolation Row,” “Love Sick” and a sinewy “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

As is his wont, Dylan sampled beyond his own songbook as well, covering George “Wild Child” Butler’s “Axe and the Wind” and Charlie Rich’s “I’ll Make It All Up to You” and slotting Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” in front of Dylan’s own blues-celebrating “Blind Willie McTell.” The concluding “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” meanwhile, sent its own message — not to overthink what was being played, or how it was being performed, but to enjoy the music on its own merits, as well as another opportunity to experience a legend and his legendary work.

Nelson, meanwhile, hewed to the familiar as he and his acoustic quintet rolled through a spirited 21-song performance that also embraced his colleagues’ music and was loaded with hits; in fact, favorites such as “Whiskey River,” “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” “On the Road Again” and “You Were Always on My Mind” were played within the first 10 songs and 20 minutes, a mark of just how deep a well Nelson was drawing from.

Despite battling an obvious cold (lots of coughing and nose-blowing), Nelson picked his shots throughout and delivered sturdy renditions of “Still is Still Moving to Me,” “I Never Cared For You” and “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” wringing solos from Trigger, the battered acoustic guitar whose tone at times also showed signs of wear and tear. And even when guitarist Waylon Payne took over lead vocals on songs such as Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues,” Hank Williams’ “Move It On Over” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” Nelson stayed present and engaged, while longtime harmonicist Mickey Raphael provided accents and solos — as well as accordion during Tom Wait’s “Last Leaf.”

Defiance and celebration were themes as Nelson promised during that latter that “if they cut down this tree I’ll come back as a song.” He offered his wish to “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” and admonished music executives to “Write Your Own Songs,” then brought Rateliff, some Night Sweats and members of Trampled By Turtles back for a joyous medley of “Will the Circle Be Unspoken?” and “I’ll Fly Away.” And if there was a finality intended with “The Party’s Over” and Hank Williams “I Saw the Light,” there was no question Nelson will fly away on nothing but his own terms.

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By KELVIN CHAN, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — “Have you seen the cats?”

That’s a common refrain in my household because our two felines, Maple and Juniper, can venture outside through a flap in the backdoor. Like many other London house cats, they’re free to come and go, roaming the surrounding backyards and beyond, equipped with microchips to identify them if they get lost.

If your cat likes to prowl outdoors for long stretches, or your dog has a tendency to run off, it can be distressing when they don’t return as expected.

If you’re worried about your furry friend’s whereabouts, technology can help you keep tabs on them.

How pet tech works

Dedicated pet trackers are collar-worn devices that typically use GPS signals to pinpoint the location of the animal wearing them. They use a 4G cellphone signal or your home Wi-Fi connection to relay the position to a smartphone app.

There are many products on the market. Tractive, Jiobit and Pawfit are among brands that offer trackers for both dogs and cats. Devices for the latter are generally smaller and lighter.

Dog trackers with integrated collars are available from Fi and Whistle. PetTracer is a cat collar that uses both GPS and radio signals from a home base station. FitBark, also for dogs, has an Apple Watch app to monitor location and other activity.

Garmin has a range of GPS dog collars that work with handheld devices resembling walkie-talkies, but they’re pricey and aimed at outdoors enthusiasts like hunters.

Phone signals

Most trackers let you designate a safe zone on a map, usually your house and surrounding area, and alert you if your pet has left it.

They usually operate on the 4G LTE spectrum commonly used by wireless carriers. It typically has the longest range of any cellular signal, said Andrew Bleiman, Tractive’s executive vice president for North America.

That means strong connectivity in most of Europe and North America “unless you’re in a really far flung place like the middle of a national park,” Bleiman said.

What it costs

Exact price depends on brand and model. Most devices sell for less than $100. However, keep in mind you’ll also have to pay a subscription fee for the cell service to function.

While that could cost $100 or more a year, for some pet owners it’s worth the “peace of mind,” Bleiman said.

Battery life

The collars usually have a built-in rechargeable battery but battery life varies. Most will be last at least two to three days before they need charging, and a lot longer in ideal conditions.

One big factor is signal strength. The battery will drain faster if the device has to work harder to pick up the GPS or connect to Wi-Fi. Some save power by not sending coordinates in the safe zone.

Other features

Like fitness watches for humans, pet tracking apps offer health and activity monitoring features. You can see how long your cat or dog has spent resting or exercising on a daily or hourly basis.

But be aware, a tracker is “not going to keep your pet in the backyard,” Bleiman said. It will only “alert you when they leave the virtual fence area that you set up.”

How to use it

This One Tech Tip was inspired by Maple, who once went AWOL for days. It turned out he was hanging out in a backyard 10 doors down the street. We only found out after the residents got hold of a pet microchip scanner to look up our contact details to let us know so we could retrieve him.

Tractive provided a loaner device to try. Using the included breakaway collar, we put it on Maple, who clearly didn’t like it at first. He dashed out the back door and jumped through a hole in the fence.

Over the next day, I used the Tractive app to monitor his movements. It showed his travels back and forth onto various neighboring properties. He came back to rest for a few hours around midnight, went out to prowl again around 3 a.m, then came back after an hour to nap some more.

It was fascinating to see where he was spending his time. According to the app’s “heatmap,” one of Maple’s favorite spots was the same backyard where we had to retrieve him previously.

Losing track

About 24 hours after I attached the Tractive collar on Maple, I noticed he was no longer wearing it. It had somehow come off.

If you can’t find your pet’s exact location, or the device gets lost, Tractive has a “radar” feature to pinpoint it with your phone’s Bluetooth. Other brands have similar features.

On the app’s map, I could see it was in a nearby backyard and that I was getting closer because the circle was getting bigger. But I couldn’t figure out where it was and, not wanting to disturb the neighbors, I gave up.

Bleiman recommends using a harness for cats that don’t like collars, but I’m not convinced.

Microchips

It’s common for cats and dogs to be implanted with microchips, with the details added to a database. That makes it much easier to reunite owners with lost dogs and cats, even if they’ve strayed hundreds of miles away or gone missing for years.

Pet microchips, about the size of a grain of rice implanted just below the skin, are legally required in some European countries. There’s no federal law in the U.S., though some places like Hawaii now require them, so check with state or local authorities.

But there’s some confusion about what microchips can do. Because they don’t have a power supply, they can’t be tracked in real time. Whoever finds your pet would need to take it to a vet or a shelter to can scan the device for contact details.

Air Tags and similar devices are another option

Many pet owners use Bluetooth trackers like Apple’s Air Tags, Samsung’s SmartTags or similar devices from Tile, Cube and Chipolo, which rely on low-power signals relayed by passing smartphones.

Bluetooth trackers have a range of 100 to 500 feet, depending on the model. The batteries last for months if not longer, and there’s no need to pay for a subscription.

However, they’re not specifically marketed for pets. That hasn’t stopped pet owners, judging from many recommendations they’ve posted in online forums.

Chipolo advises that its round plastic trackers are only for “in-house pets like house-trained cats and smaller dogs” and warns against using them on “larger dog breeds and outdoor cats.”

Still, they can be a solution for some pet owners.

“Bluetooth is a totally reasonable solution if you’re in a downtown urban core,” Bleiman said. “But pets move fast. And if you’re in a wooded park, or you’re in a suburban area — let alone a more rural or wilderness area — it’s pretty unlikely your pet is going to be close to a Bluetooth device.”

Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip.

By Nada Hassanein, Stateline.org

More American children and teens die from firearms than any other cause, but there are more deaths — and wider racial disparities — in states with more permissive gun policies, according to a new study.

The study, published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics on June 9, analyzes trends in state firearm policies and kids’ deaths since 2010, after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago. The ruling struck down the city’s handgun ban, clearing the way for many states to make it easier for people to buy and carry guns.

The study authors split states into three groups: “most permissive,” “permissive” and “strict,” based on the stringency of their firearm policies. Those policies include safe storage laws, background checks and so-called Stand Your Ground laws. The researchers analyzed homicide and suicide rates and the children’s race.

Using statistical methods, the researchers calculated 6,029 excess deaths in the most permissive states between 2011 and 2023, compared with the number of deaths that would have been expected under the states’ pre-McDonald rules. There were 1,424 excess deaths in the states in the middle category.

In total, about 17,000 deaths were expected in the post-decision period, but 23,000 occurred, said lead author Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in an interview.

Among the eight states with the strictest laws, four — California, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island — saw statistically significant decreases in their pediatric firearm death rates. Illinois, which was directly affected by the court’s decision in the McDonald case, and Connecticut saw increases in their rates. In Massachusetts and New Jersey, the changes were not statistically significant.

The rate increased in all but four (Alaska, Arizona, Nebraska and South Dakota) of the 41 states in the two permissive categories. (Hawaii was not included in the study due its low rates of firearm deaths.)

Non-Hispanic Black children and teens saw the largest increase in firearm deaths in the 41 states with looser gun laws. Those youths’ mortality rates increased, but by a much smaller amount, in the states with strict laws.

Experts say the study underscores the power of policy to help prevent firearm deaths among children and teens. The analysis comes less than a month after the release of a federal report on children’s health that purported to highlight the drivers of poor health in America’s children but failed to include anything on firearm injuries — the leading cause of death for children and teens in 2020 and 2021, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trauma surgeon Dr. Marie Crandall, chair of surgery at MetroHealth medical center and a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, researches gun violence. She previously practiced at a Jacksonville, Florida, urban trauma unit, where she frequently saw children and teens caught in gun violence.

“When I see children come in with 10 holes in them that I can’t save — that is a loss. That is a completely preventable death, and it is deeply emotionally scarring to have to have those conversations with families when we know, as a society, there are things we could do to de-escalate,” said Crandall, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

In her state of Ohio, firearm death rates among children and teens increased from 1.6 per 100,000 kids in the decade before the McDonald decision to 2.8 after it, according to the study. Ohio was categorized in the group with the most permissive laws.

The study adds to previous research that shows state laws around child access to firearms, such as safe storage and background checks, tend to be associated with fewer child firearm deaths.

“We know that child access prevention decreases unintentional injuries and suicides of children. So having your firearms locked, unloaded, stored separately from ammunition, decreases the likelihood of childhood injuries,” Crandall said. “More stringent regulation of those things also decreases childhood injuries.”

But she said it’s hard to be optimistic about more stringent regulation when the current administration dismisses gun violence as a public health emergency. The Trump administration earlier this year took down an advisory from the former U.S. surgeon general, issued last year, that emphasized gun violence as a public health crisis.

Faust, the lead author of the new study, stressed that firearm injuries and deaths were notably missing from the Make America Healthy Again Commission report on children’s health. He said the failure to include them illustrates the politicization of a major public health emergency for America’s kids.

“It’s hard to take them seriously if they’re omitting the leading cause of death,” Faust said. “They’re whiffing, they’re shanking. They’re deciding on a political basis not to do it. I would say by omitting it, they’re politicizing it.”

Faust and pediatric trauma surgeon Dr. Chethan Sathya, who directs the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at the Northwell Health system in New York, each pointed to the development of car seat laws and public health education, as examples of preventive strategies that helped reduce childhood fatalities. They support a similar approach to curbing youth gun deaths.

“We really have to apply a public health framework to this issue, not a political one, and we’ve done that with other issues in the past,” said Sathya, who wasn’t involved in the study and oversees his hospital’s firearm injury prevention programs. “There’s no question that this is a public health issue.”

In Louisiana, which the study categorized as one of the 30 most permissive states, the child firearm mortality rate increased from 4.1 per 100,000 kids in the pre-McDonald period to 5.7 after it — the nation’s highest rate. The study period only goes to 2023, but the state last year enacted a permitless carry law, allowing people to carry guns in public without undergoing background checks. And just last month, Louisiana legislators defeated a bill that would have created the crime of improper firearm storage.

Louisiana Democratic state Rep. Matthew Willard, who sponsored the safe storage legislation, said during the floor debate that its purpose was to protect children. Louisiana had the highest rate of unintentional shootings by children between 2015 to 2022, according to the research arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for stricter gun access. Willard cited that statistic on the floor.

But Republican opponents said Willard’s proposal would infringe on residents’ gun rights and make it more difficult for them to use guns in self-defense.

“Nobody needs to come in our houses and tell us what to do with our guns. I think this is ridiculous,” Republican state Rep. R. Dewith Carrier said during the debate.

Another Republican opponent, state Rep. Troy Romero, said he was concerned that having a firearm locked away would make it harder for an adult to quickly access it.

“If it’s behind a locked drawer, how in the world are you going, at 2 or 3 in the morning, going to be able to protect your family if somebody intrudes or comes into your home?” Romero said.

Gun violence researcher Julia Fleckman, an assistant professor, and her team at Tulane University in New Orleans have started to collect data on the impact of the state’s permitless carry law.

“It places a disproportionate impact on really vulnerable people, really, our most vulnerable people,” Fleckman said, noting kids bear the brunt of legislators’ decisions. “They don’t have a lot of control over this or the decisions we’re making.”

In South Carolina, another one of the most permissive states, the mortality rate increased from 2.3 to 3.9 per 100,000 kids in the time before and after the McDonald decision. South Carolina Democratic state Rep. JA Moore, who lost his adult sister in the 2015 racist shooting that killed nine at a Charleston church, said state policy alone isn’t enough. He implored his colleagues to also examine their perception of guns.

“We have a culture here in South Carolina that doesn’t lend itself to a more safe South Carolina,” said Moore, who added he’s been advocating for background checks and stricter carry laws. “There is a need for a culture change in our state, in our country, when it comes to guns and our relationships with guns as Americans, realizing that these are deadly weapons.”

And investing in safer neighborhoods is crucial, he said.

“People are hurt by guns in places that they’re more comfortable, like their homes in their own neighborhoods,” he said.

Community-based interventions are important to stemming violence, experts said. Crandall, the Cleveland surgeon, said there’s emerging evidence that hospital-based and community-based violence prevention programs decrease the likelihood of violent and firearm-related injury.

Such programs aim to break cycles of violence by connecting injured patients with community engagement services. After New York City implemented its hospital-based violence interruption program, two-thirds of 3,500 violent trauma patients treated at five hospitals received community prevention services.

After her 33-year-old son was killed in her neighborhood in 2019, Michelle Bell started M-PAC Cleveland — “More Prayer, Activity & Conversation” — a nonprofit collaborative of people who have lost loved ones to violent crime. She’s encountered many grieving parents who lost their children to gunfire. The group advocates and educates for safe storage laws and holds peer grief support groups.

She also partners with the school district in a program that shares stories of gun violence’s long-lasting impact on surviving children, families and communities and nonviolent interpersonal conflict resolution.

“Oftentimes, the family that has lost the child, the child’s life has been taken by gun violence, there are other children in the home,” she said.

“It’s so devastating. It’s just so tragic that the No. 1 cause of death for children 18 and under is gun violence,” Bell continued.

The decision to “pull a trigger,” she said, changes a “lifetime of not only yours, but so many other people.”

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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Anna Claire Vollers, Stateline.org

Nine months after Monroe County Hospital in rural South Alabama closed its labor and delivery department in October 2023, Grove Hill Memorial Hospital in neighboring Clarke County also stopped delivering babies.

Both hospitals are located in an agricultural swath of the state that’s home to most of its poorest counties. Many residents of the region don’t even have a nearby emergency department.

Stacey Gilchrist is a nurse and administrator who’s spent her 40-year career in Thomasville, a small town about 20 minutes north of Grove Hill. Thomasville’s hospital shut down entirely last September over financial difficulties. Thomasville Regional hadn’t had a labor and delivery unit for years, but women in labor still showed up at its ER when they knew they wouldn’t make it to the nearest delivering hospital.

“We had several close calls where people could not make it even to Grove Hill when they were delivering there,” Gilchrist told Stateline shortly after the Thomasville hospital closed. She recalled how Thomasville nurses worked to save the lives of a mother and baby who’d delivered early in their ER, as staff waited for neonatal specialists to arrive by ambulance from a distant delivering hospital.

“It would give you chills to see what all they had to do. They had to get inventive,” she said, but the mother and baby survived.

Now many families must drive more than an hour to reach the nearest birthing hospital.

Nationwide, most rural hospitals no longer offer obstetric services. Since the end of 2020, more than 100 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies, according to a new report from the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform, a national policy center focused on solving health care issues through overhauling insurance payments. Fewer than 1,000 rural hospitals nationwide still have labor and delivery services.

Across the nation, two rural labor and delivery departments shut their doors every month on average, said Harold Miller, the center’s president and CEO.

“It’s the perfect storm,” Miller told Stateline. “The number of births are going down, everything is more expensive in rural areas, health insurance plans don’t cover the cost of births, and hospitals don’t have the resources to offset those losses because they’re losing money on other services, too.”

Staffing shortages, low Medicaid reimbursement payments and declining birth rates have contributed to the closures. Some states have responded by changing how Medicaid funds are spent, by allowing the opening of freestanding birth centers, or by encouraging urban-based obstetricians to open satellite clinics in rural areas.

Yet the losses continue. Thirty-six states have lost at least one rural labor and delivery unit since the end of 2020, according to the report. Sixteen have lost three or more. Indiana has lost 12, accounting for a third of its rural hospital labor and delivery units.

In rural counties the loss of hospital-based obstetric care is associated with increases in births in hospital emergency rooms, studies have found. The share of women without adequate prenatal care also increases in rural counties that lose hospital obstetric services.

And researchers have seen an increase in preterm births — when a baby is born three or more weeks early — following rural labor and delivery closures. Babies born too early have higher rates of death and disability.

Births are expensive

The decline in hospital-based maternity care has been decades in the making.

Traditionally, hospitals lose money on obstetrics. It costs more to maintain a labor and delivery department than a hospital gets paid by insurance to deliver a baby. This is especially true for rural hospitals, which see fewer births and therefore less revenue than urban areas.

“It is expensive and complicated for any hospital to have labor and delivery because it’s a 24/7 service,” said Miller.

A labor and delivery unit must always have certain staff available or on call, including a physician who can perform cesarean sections, nurses with obstetric training, and an anesthetist for C-sections and labor pain management.

“There’s a minimum fixed cost you incur (as a hospital) to have all of that, regardless of how many births there are,” Miller said.

In most cases, insurers don’t pay hospitals to maintain that standby capacity; they’re paid per birth. Hospitals cover their losses on obstetrics with revenue they get from more lucrative services.

For a larger urban hospital with thousands of births a year, the fixed costs might be manageable. For smaller rural hospitals, they’re much harder to justify. Some have had to jettison their obstetric services just to keep the doors open.

“You can’t subsidize a losing service when you don’t have profit coming in from other services,” Miller said.

And staffing is a persistent problem.

Harrison County Hospital in Corydon, Indiana, a small town on the border with Kentucky, ended its obstetric services in March after hospital leaders said they were unable to recruit an obstetric provider. It was the only delivering hospital in the county, averaging about 400 births a year.

And most providers don’t want to remain on call 24/7, a particular problem in rural regions that might have just one or two physicians trained in obstetrics. In many rural areas, family physicians with obstetrical training fill the role of both obstetricians and general practitioners.

Ripple effects

Even before Harrison County Hospital suspended its obstetrical services, some patients were already driving more than 30 minutes for care, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported. The closure means the drive could be 50 minutes to reach a hospital with a labor and delivery department, or to see providers for prenatal visits.

Longer drive times can be risky, resulting in more scheduled inductions and C-sections because families are scared to risk going into labor naturally and then facing a harrowing hourlong drive to the hospital.

Having fewer labor and delivery units could further burden ambulance services already stretched thin in rural areas.

And hospitals often serve as a hub for other maternity-related services that help keep mothers and babies healthy.

“Other things we’ve seen in rural counties that have hospital-based OB care is that you’re more likely to have other supportive things, like maternal mental health support, postpartum groups, lactation support, access to doula care and midwifery services,” said Katy Kozhimannil, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, whose research focuses in part on maternal health policy with a focus on rural communities.

State action

Medicaid, the state-federal public insurance for people with low incomes, pays for nearly half of all births in rural areas nationwide. And women who live in rural communities and small towns are more likely to be covered by Medicaid than women in metro areas.

Experts say one way to save rural labor and delivery in many places would be to bump up Medicaid payments.

As congressional Republicans debate President Donald Trump’s tax and spending plan, they’re considering which portions of Medicaid to slash to help pay for the bill’s tax cuts. Maternity services aren’t on the chopping block.

But if Congress reduces federal funding for some portions of Medicaid, states — and hospitals — will have to figure out how to offset that loss. The ripple effects could translate into less money for rural hospitals overall, meaning some may no longer be able to afford labor and delivery services.

“Cuts to Medicaid are going to be felt disproportionately in rural areas where Medicaid makes up a higher proportion of labor and delivery and for services in general,” Kozhimannil said. “It is a hugely important payer at rural hospitals, and for birth in particular.”

And though private insurers often pay more than Medicaid for birth services, Miller believes states shouldn’t let companies off the hook.

“The data shows that in many cases, commercial insurance plans operating in a state are not paying adequately for labor and delivery,” Miller said. “Hospitals will tell you it’s not just Medicaid; it’s also commercial insurance.”

He’d like to see state insurance regulators pressure private insurance to pay more. More than 40% of births in rural communities are covered by private insurance.

Yet there’s no one magic bullet that will fix every rural hospital’s bottom line, Miller said: “For every hospital I’ve talked to, it’s been a different set of circumstances.”

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©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Farmington Hills City Council is holding a special study session on Monday, June 23, on the future of the Costick Activities Center.

The council will hear recommendations from The Sports Facilities Companies, a building management firm, at the meeting at 5 p.m. in the Mainstage Theatre at The Hawk, 29995 W. 12 Mile Road.

The public will have an opportunity to comment. The council will not make any decisions at this meeting.

The city doesn’t have a senior center, but offers programs for older adults at Costick, 28600 W. 11 Mile.

The city also converted the former Harrison High School into The Hawk, a recreation and performing arts center for all ages.

Monday’s council meeting is part of the city’s study on whether it needs a new recreation center focused on adults ages 55 and up.

The city surveyed older adults on their recreation needs earlier this year.

Ellen Schnackel, director of the city’s Special Services Department, said if a new center is built, the city would assess Costick’s future.

She said the cost of a new center and potential funding sources are under study.

Those who want to give the council input but can’t attend the meeting may comment at fhgov.com/costickinput.

You can also watch the meeting live at https://www.youtube.com/c/FarmingtonHillsMichigan.

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The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) Bureau of Aging, Community Living and Supports Health Services, Oakland University and the Michigan Falls Prevention Coalition have partnered with Michigan 211 to offer fall prevention resources on mi211.org. The information is designed to connect health care providers, community organizations and residents with vital fall prevention resources.

About 30% of Michiganders ages 65 and older report falling each year and most of these falls occur at home.

“This initiative aims to improve statewide access to evidence-based fall prevention programs, durable medical equipment and nutrition services that support older adults and individuals at risk of a fall,” said Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive. “Falls can lead to serious injuries, including head trauma and broken bones. By collaborating and sharing resources, we can work together to make Michigan a safer place for everyone.”

Individuals and health care professionals can access resources and services through the site or by calling 211. Searches for education and safety planning resources, physical health and wellness services, daily living supports and home accessibility modifications can be conducted by ZIP code. In addition, 211 specialists have been trained to assist callers in locating fall prevention services.

The website was made possible through a $408,499 grant from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund Healthy Aging Grant. Funding also supported development of the Michigan Falls Coalition website and an awareness campaign about the Michigan 211 resource. The coalition is supported through partnerships with MDHHS and Oakland University and brings together organizations and providers to collaborate to reduce fall risks among older adults and adults with disabilities, identify state or community needs, recommend policy changes and build capacity.

“Oakland University is proud to lead innovative research and community partnerships that improve the health and safety of Michiganders,” said Dr. Chris Wilson, lead author on the grant application and associate professor in the Physical Therapy Program at Oakland University’s School of Health Sciences. “Through our leadership within the Michigan Falls Prevention Coalition and initiatives like the 211 resource platform, we are committed to connecting older adults and individuals with disabilities to the services and supports they need to stay safe, active, and independent in their homes and communities.”

“The National Kidney Foundation of Michigan (NKFM), which provides falls prevention programs in the community, is excited to have this resource available so people can locate programs,” said Ann Andrews, MPH, senior program manager, National Kidney Foundation. “The MI Falls Prevention Coalition started in 2021 as a small advisory group for a federal grant the NKFM received. There was great interest in the group from among stakeholders across the state and it’s exciting to see what the coalition has grown into from these initial efforts.”

Health care providers and community organizations can help expand this resource by adding fall prevention programs to the website. Eligible programs include:

• Fall prevention education and exercise programs
• Senior-focused exercise programs
• Urinary incontinence prevention initiatives
• Nutrition services supporting fall risk reduction
• Durable medical equipment providers offering fall prevention-related items
• Home and environmental modification programs
• Other related fall prevention-focused programming

Organizations and providers interested in listing their programs or updating existing details can visit mi211.org/providers. Once a 211 representative speaks with the organization liaison directly, updates and new listings will typically be posted within 10 business days.

For more information, visit the 211 falls prevention page mi211.org or the Michigan Falls Prevention Coalition’s website at mifallsprevention.org.

Source: Michigan Department of Health and Human Services

By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday revived long-running lawsuits against Palestinian authorities from Americans who were killed or wounded in terrorism attacks in the Middle East.

The justices upheld a 2019 law enacted by Congress specifically to allow the victims’ lawsuits to go forward against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority.

The attacks occurred in the early 2000s, killing 33 people and wounding hundreds more, and in 2018, when a U.S.-born settler was stabbed to death by a Palestinian assailant outside a mall in the West Bank.

The victims and their families assert that Palestinian agents either were involved in the attacks or incited them.

The Palestinians have consistently argued that the cases shouldn’t be allowed in American courts.

The federal appeals court in New York has repeatedly ruled in favor of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, despite Congress’ efforts to allow the victims’ lawsuits to be heard.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals first ruled in 2016 against the victims of the attacks from 20 years ago, tossing out a $654 million jury verdict in their favor. In that earlier ruling, the appeals court held U.S. courts can’t consider lawsuits against foreign-based groups over random attacks that were not aimed at the United States.

The victims had sued under the Anti-Terrorism Act, signed into law in 1992. The law was passed to open U.S. courts to victims of international terrorism, spurred by the killing of American Leon Klinghoffer during a 1985 terrorist attack aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship.

The jury found the PLO and the Palestinian Authority liable for six attacks and awarded $218 million in damages. The award was automatically tripled under the law.

After the Supreme Court rejected the victims’ appeal in 2018, Congress again amended the law to make clear it did not want to close the courthouse door to the victims.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

By MICHAEL CASEY and REBECCA BOONE

BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars in transportation funds from states that don’t agree to participate in some immigration enforcement actions.

Twenty states sued after they said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened to cut off funding to states that refused to comply with President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. barred federal transportation officials from carrying out that threat before the lawsuit is fully resolved.

“The Court finds that the States have demonstrated they will face irreparable and continuing harm if forced to agree to Defendants’ unlawful and unconstitutional immigration conditions imposed in order to receive federal transportation grant funds,” wrote McConnell, the chief judge for the federal district of Rhode island. “The States face losing billions of dollars in federal funding, are being put in a position of relinquishing their sovereign right to decide how to use their own police officers, are at risk of losing the trust built between local law enforcement and immigrant communities, and will have to scale back, reconsider, or cancel ongoing transportation projects.”

On April 24, states received letters from the Department of Transportation stating that they must cooperate on immigration efforts or risk losing the congressionally appropriated funds. No funding was immediately withheld, but some of the states feared the move was imminent.

Attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin and Vermont filed the lawsuit in May, saying the new so-called “Duffy Directive” put them in an impossible position.

“The States can either attempt to comply with an unlawful and unconstitutional condition that would surrender their sovereign control over their own law enforcement officers and reduce immigrants’ willingness to report crimes and participate in public health programs — or they can forfeit tens of billions of dollars of funds they rely on regularly to support the roads, highways, railways, airways, ferries, and bridges that connect their communities and homes,” the attorneys general wrote in court documents.

But acting Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Sara Miron Bloom told the judge that Congress has given the Department of Transportation the legal right to set conditions for the grant money it administers to states, and that requiring compliance and cooperation with federal law enforcement is a reasonable exercise of that discretion. Allowing the federal government to withhold the funds while the lawsuit moves forward doesn’t cause any lasting harm, Bloom wrote in court documents, because that money can always be disbursed later if needed.

But requiring the federal government to release the money to uncooperative states will likely make it impossible to recoup later, if the Department of Transportation wins the case, Bloom said.

A house fire in Farmington Hills may have been caused by a lightning strike, officials say.

The fire broke out at about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 18, immediately following a lightning strike, in a two-story house in the area of 14 Mile and Drake roads, according to Fire Marshal Jason Baloga.

The occupants of the home told the Farmington Hills Fire Department they believed lightning hit the house; the blaze is under investigation.

Firefighters were extinguishing the fire in the attic when the roof began to collapse. They exited the building and crews used a ladder truck to regain control. Firefighters then re-entered the building to fully extinguish the fire.

The house was heavily damaged by heat, flames, smoke and water. The city has marked it as an unsafe structure, Baloga said. No one was injured.

He advised anyone affected by a house fire to go outside and call 911 from a designated meeting spot, as these residents did.

Farmington Hills to open cooling center as hot weather approaches

Halsted Road closed for reconstruction in Farmington Hills

 

By JOSEPH WILSON

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — A group of tourists were sitting at an outdoor table in the Spanish city of Barcelona, trying to enjoy their drinks, when a woman raised a cheap plastic water gun and shot an arc of water at them.

Her weapon of choice — the cheap, squirt-squirt variety — is an increasingly common fixture at anti-tourism protests in the southern European country, where many locals fear that an overload of visitors is driving them from their cherished neighborhoods.

How did the humble water gun become a symbol of discontent?

From refreshing to revolutionary

The phenomenon started last July, when a fringe, left-wing activist group based in Barcelona that promotes the “degrowth” of the city’s successful tourism sector held its first successful rally. Some brought water guns to shoot one another and stay cool in the summer heat.

“What happened later went viral, but in reality it was just kind of a joke by a group of people who brought water guns because it was hot,” Adriana Coten, one of the organizers of Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, told The Associated Press.

Then, some turned their water guns from each other to tourists. The images went around the world, becoming a publicity coup for the anti-tourism cause.

The guns reappeared in April when the same group stopped a tour bus in Barcelona, the Catalan capital.

Guns drawn

On Sunday, around a thousand people marched from a luxury shopping boulevard popular with affluent foreigners before police stopped them from getting closer to Barcelona’s top sight-seeing destination: La Sagrada Familia church.

The marchers spritzed unsuspecting tourists along the way, chanting slogans and carrying protest signs. One read: “One more tourist, one less resident!”

They left a trail of stickers on hotel doors, lampposts and outdoor café tables showing a squirting water gun encircled by a message in English: “Tourist Go Home!”

Still, the number of Barcelona protesters carrying water guns was a minority — and in the gun-toting group, many were only shooting in the air or at each other. One dad was toting his baby in a front-pack, water gun in hand.

Outside the protests, Barcelona locals are not toting water guns or taking aim at tourists. And many in the city still support tourism, which is a pillar of the local economy.

‘A symbol’

Can the water gun really change the minds of tourists, authorities or the businesses that drive the industry? Depends on who you ask.

Protester Lourdes Sánchez and her teenage daughter, each holding a water gun, said the gun “really isn’t to hurt anyone.”

“This is a symbol to say that we are fed up of how tourism industry is transforming our country into a theme park,” Sánchez said.

Another demonstrator, Andreu Martínez, acknowledged it was “to bother the tourists a bit.”

Laurens Schocher, a 46-year-old architect, said he didn’t shoot any suspected tourists but hoped that carrying a water gun would bring more attention to their cause.

“I don’t think the tourists will get it,” he said. “I think this is to send a message to authorities.”

A squirt can hurt your feelings

The marchers had no monster, pump-action water cannons most kids use for backyard battles in the summer. Theirs were the old-school, cheap-o water guns that send a slim jet of water not that far away.

Some tourists who were sprayed took it in stride, even claiming it was refreshing on a day with temperatures pushing up to around 87 Fahrenheit.

But there were moments of tension. When several marchers squirted workers at a large hostel, tempers flared and one worker spat at his attackers as he slammed the hostel door shut.

Nora Tsai, who had just arrived from Taiwan on a short visit, was among those spritzed on Sunday. She said she was a bit frightened and saddened. The “Tourist go home!” chants didn’t help either.

“I still like Barcelona,” she said. “I have met a lot of people who were kind.”

Ever since his childhood, Dean Van Nguyen has felt a connection with Tupac Shakur. 

The journalist and cultural critic first encountered the late rapper’s music as a student in an all-boys Catholic school in Ireland, and Shakur was a natural fit when Van Nguyen was deciding to write his second book, following his debut, “Iron Age: The Art of Ghostface Killah” in 2019. Van Nguyen knew he had a fresh angle on Shakur’s life and career.

“What made me really want to get into the book was the question of, ‘How does this happen?’” Van Nguyen says. “How does a guy who made music that you can play in the club become this figure on par with Che Guevara or a Bob Marley?”

Van Nguyen’s “Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur,” out now from Doubleday, seeks to answer those questions. The book looks at Shakur through a political lens, examining his childhood spent around members of the Marxist–Leninist Black Panther Party — especially his influential mother, the late activist Afeni Shakur. 

Van Nguyen talked about his book via Zoom from his home in Dublin, Ireland. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did you discover the music of Tupac Shakur?

It was back in school. When I was a kid, I had a bit more of a focused music taste than a lot of kids. A lot of the kids would just be into chart singles, but I quite liked R&B. I had young uncles and one young aunt, and they introduced me to a lot of stuff. It was the mid-’90s where the lines between R&B and hip-hop were starting to kind of blur and you were getting a lot of cross-genre collaborations. When I was a teenager, more in the late ‘90s, rap, gangsta rap was becoming quite popular in the schoolyard. This kind of music was a bit of an escape for us, especially because at that time, the videos were always really good and there always seemed to be stories around the music as well. Tupac was one of the artists that I grew up on, and I always maintained a fandom for him.

Q: What do you think made him so popular in Ireland?

He is the greatest icon the culture has ever produced. I think I’d say he’s probably one of the two most instantly recognizable artists alongside Eminem. But what I noticed, and one of the impulses behind this book, is that his icon is particularly strong in places of the world that have experienced colonial oppression or any sort of resistance, any sort of sense of rebellion or revolution. Ireland is in that vein; obviously, we were colonized by Great Britain for a long time. 

There’s also something about Tupac as a symbol of resistance that is particularly interesting to Irish people. In the early 2000s, I went to a Nelly gig and a bunch of guys were waving a Tupac flag. And when the DJ who was warming up the crowd played “Ambitionz az a Ridah,” they all went nuts. I was quite young when he died. And dying young and dying violently sealed his reputation because that’s what happened to a lot of Irish heroes. They were killed young. That’s happened to a lot of revolutionaries around the world, and I think that strengthened his icon too. There’s just something in that that appeals to the Irish psyche, I suppose.

Q: You did a lot of interviews for this book. 

Coming from a journalism background, the tenets of feature writing served me well. I like to talk to people, and for this, I was particularly keen to talk to people who may be voices in the Tupac story haven’t been heard quite as much. I wanted to chat with anyone who wanted to, but I found, for example, when you’re talking about a rap crew, sometimes it’s like the fourth or fifth most famous guy who’s actually got the most interesting things to say.

These guys aren’t recognized on the street, but they’re there observing history all the time. One of the real pleasures of doing the book was talking to the ex-Panthers and the other ‘60s and ‘70s activists who, at this stage of their life, are very eager to have their stories put down. Crucially, as well, they’ve gotten to a stage in their life where they’re no longer fearing any kind of government reprisal. They don’t think they’re going to get in trouble for speaking to me candidly. 

Q: When do you think that Tupac’s Panther background first became evident in his music, or was it always there?

It’s there from some of his earliest recordings. One of his early recordings that he made before he had a [record] deal was called “Panther Power,” and it was overtly about his background. This was always a part of his upbringing. But he was also raised in the backdrop of the revolution that never really came. The Panthers, by the mid- to late ‘70s and ‘80s, a lot of them were suffering from addiction, like Tupac’s own mother. A lot of them are still in prison on charges that were drummed up to stifle them. So I think he grew up in an environment where his elders are probably speaking a lot about regrets. I think he recognized that he needed to tailor his own worldview and his own message and his words to meet America. That was important in terms of his artistry, but certainly, I think that was always there in his music.

Toward the end of his career, his music became a little bit more macho and a little bit more violent. But then on the Makaveli album [“The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory”], which was released after he died, you can see he’s coming back to his roots, and he namechecks a lot of the activists who would’ve been his mother’s contemporaries, who he would’ve known growing up. So yeah, it was always there. He just took on different forms and shaped it for his own. He saw Los Angeles in the 1990s, which had specific issues in terms of racism, police brutality and all that. He had that spirit in him, but the music was very tailored for his own age as well.

By Gretchen McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Philadelphia is famous for its cheesesteak sandwiches.

Yet, if you’ve ever been to the city’s Reading Terminal Market on Arch Street in Center City (a favorite haunt when I was in paralegal school), you’ve probably also seen the long lines in front of Tommy DiNic’s. (If you know, you know.)

The star of this iconic sandwich counter, which has been drawing crowds since it opened in1977, is a succulent, slow-roasted Italian roast pork sandwich topped with sharp provolone and drippy, garlicky braised broccoli rabe (also known rapini). It’s a decidedly messy nosh as the ingredients can, and probably will, spill out as you eat it.

As tough as it is for a Pittsburgh girl to fall in love with something from Philly (my husband excluded), I have to admit it’s pretty incredible. I get the signature sandwich every time I’m in town, and never regret it.

This sub recipe (or should we say hoagie?) from America’s Test Kitchen is a riff on that storied sandwich served on a sesame-seeded Sarcone’s Bakery roll. Spicy Italian sausage stands in for the thinly sliced roasted pork that is a three-day process at DiNic’s. It also includes savory, tender slices of portobello mushrooms cooked with fennel, fresh rosemary and a touch of soy sauce. Shredded provolone goes right into the pan with the meat and veggies for a melty, we’re-all-friends finish.

Like DiNic’s, this recipe spotlights broccoli rabe. It’s a cruciferous green that looks like leafy broccoli, but as a member of the Brassicaceae family, is actually more closely related to the turnip. Its flavor is more bitter than broccoli, and the greens can also be fibrous, but the two veggies are interchangeable in this recipe. I used long, tender stalks of Broccolini instead of broccoli rabe, which I couldn’t find in my local grocery store.

Don’t skimp on the pickled red cherry hot peppers as a final flourish. They’re only mildly spicy, and you can’t beat that extra kick of flavor.

I used 6-inch (Mancini’s) sausage rolls instead of 8-inch sub rolls, so I had enough filling for five sandwiches. Be sure to toast the bread until it’s quite brown and crispy. Otherwise the filling could turn the sandwich into a (still delicious) soggy mess.

Wrapped in aluminum foil and reheated in a 350-degree oven for a few minutes, any leftovers make a great lunch the next day.

Philly-style Sausage and Broccoli Rabe Subs

PG tested

• 4 8-inch Italian sub rolls
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin oil, divided
• 3 garlic cloves, sliced thin
• 1 pound broccoli rabe, trimmed and cut into 1/2 -inch pieces
• 1/4 plus 1/8 teaspoon salt, divided
• 8 ounces hot Italian sausage
• 1 pound portobello mushroom caps, wiped clean, and sliced 1/4 -inch thick
• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds, cracked
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• 4 ounces shredded sharp provolone cheese
• 2 tablespoons chopped or slice jarred hot cherry peppers, optional

Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat to 450 degrees.

If needed, slice rolls to make them easier to open (without slicing all the way through). Use spoon or your fingers to scraped inside of rolls and remove all but 1/4 i nch of interior crumb; discard removed crumb or use to make bread crumbs or croutons. Set aside while you prepare filling.

Heat 1 tablespoon oil and sliced garlic in a 12-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat until garlic is light golden brown, 3-5 minutes.

Add broccoli rabe and 1/4 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until tender, 4-6 minutes. Transfer to bowl and cover to keep warm.

Heat 1 teaspoon oil in now-empty skillet over medium-high heat until just smoking. Add sausage and cook, breaking up meat into small pieces with wooden spoon, until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a bowl.

Add 1 tablespoon oil to fat left in skillet and heat over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add mushrooms and remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms have released their liquid, 3-5 minutes.

Uncover and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms are well browned, 5-7 minutes. Reduce heat to low.

Clear center of skillet and add remaining 2 teaspoons oil, fennel seeds and rosemary. Stir in soy sauce and cooked sausage, then stir in cheese until melted. Remove from heat and cover to keep warm.

Arrange reserved rolls on baking sheet and bake until lightly toasted, about 3 minutes.

Divide mushroom and broccoli rabe mixture evenly among rolls. Top with cherry peppers, if using, and serve.

Serves 4.

— adapted from “Mostly Meatless” by America’s Test Kitchen

©2025 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By TOM MURPHY

A small, growing number of employers are putting health insurance decisions entirely in the hands of their workers.

Instead of offering traditional insurance, they’re giving workers money to buy their own coverage in what’s known as Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements, or ICHRAs.

Advocates say this approach provides small companies that couldn’t afford insurance a chance to offer something. It also caps a growing expense for employers and fits conservative political goals of giving people more purchasing power over their coverage.

But ICHRAs place the risk for finding coverage on the employee, and they force them to do something many dislike: Shop for insurance.

“It’s maybe not perfect, but it’s solving a problem for a lot of people,” said Cynthia Cox, of the nonprofit KFF, which studies health care issues.

Here’s a closer look at how this approach to health insurance is evolving.

What’s an ICHRA?

Normally, U.S. employers offering health coverage will have one or two insurance options for workers through what’s known as a group plan. The employers then pick up most of the premium, or cost of coverage.

ICHRAs are different: Employers contribute to health insurance coverage, but the workers then pick their own insurance plans. The employers that use ICHRAs hire outside firms to help people make their coverage decisions.

ICHRAs were created during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Enrollment started slowly but has swelled in recent years.

What’s the big deal about ICHRAs?

They give business owners a predictable cost, and they save companies from having to make coverage decisions for employees.

“You have so many things you need to focus on as a business owner to just actually grow the business,” said Jeff Yuan, co-founder of the New York-based insurance startup Taro Health.

Small businesses, in particular, can be vulnerable to annual insurance cost spikes, especially if some employees have expensive medical conditions. But the ICHRA approach keeps the employer cost more predictable.

Yuan’s company bases its contributions on the employee’s age and how many people are covered under the plan. That means it may contribute anywhere from $400 to more than $2,000 monthly to an employee’s coverage.

How is this approach different?

ICHRAs let people pick from among dozens of options in an individual insurance market instead of just taking whatever their company offers.

That may give people a chance to find coverage more tailored to their needs. Some insurers, for instance, offer plans designed for people with diabetes.

And workers can keep the coverage if they leave — potentially for longer periods than they would be able to with traditional employer health insurance plans. They likely will have to pay the full premium, but keeping the coverage also means they won’t have to find a new plan that covers their doctors.

Mark Bertolini, CEO of the insurer Oscar Health, noted that most people change jobs several times.

“Insurance works best when it moves with the consumer,” said the executive, whose company is growing enrollment through ICHRAs in several states.

What are the drawbacks for employees?

Health insurance plans on the individual market tend to have narrower coverage networks than employer-sponsored coverage.

It may be challenging for patients who see several doctors to find one plan that covers them all.

People shopping for their own insurance can find coverage choices and terms like deductibles or coinsurance overwhelming. That makes it important for employers to provide help with plan selection.

The broker or technology platform setting up a company’s ICHRA generally does this by asking about their medical needs or if they have any surgeries planned in the coming year.

How many people get coverage this way?

There are no good numbers nationally that show how many people have coverage through an ICHRA or a separate program for companies with 50 workers or less.

However, the HRA Council, a trade association that promotes the arrangements, sees big growth. The council works with companies that help employers offer the ICHRAs. It studies growth in a sample of those businesses.

It says about 450,000 people were offered coverage through these arrangements this year. That’s up 50% from 2024. Council Executive Director Robin Paoli says the total market may be twice as large.

Still, these arrangements make up a sliver of employer-sponsored health coverage in the United States. About 154 million people were enrolled in coverage through work last year, according to KFF.

Will growth continue?

Several things could cause more employers to offer ICHRAs. As health care costs continue to climb, more companies may look to limit their exposure to the hit.

Some tax breaks and incentives that encourage the arrangements could wind up in a final version of the Republican tax bill currently under consideration in the Senate.

More people also will be eligible for the arrangements if extra government subsidies that help buy coverage on the Affordable Care Act’s individual marketplaces expire this year.

You can’t participate in an ICHRA if you are already getting a subsidy from the government, noted Brian Blase, a White House health policy adviser in the first Trump administration.

“The enhanced subsidies, they crowd out private financing,” he said.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By Lauren Schwahn, NerdWallet

The investing information provided on this page is for educational purposes only. NerdWallet, Inc. does not offer advisory or brokerage services, nor does it recommend or advise investors to buy or sell particular stocks, securities or other investments.

No, we’re not asking your name. And we promise we’re not trying to offend you.

HENRY isn’t an insult; it’s a nickname given to a certain demographic in the personal finance world. If you earn a decent income, but feel like you aren’t building enough wealth, you might be a HENRY.

What is a HENRY?

HENRY is an acronym that stands for “High Earner, Not Rich Yet.” But what does it mean to be high earning? The definition varies depending on who you ask.

We sifted through Reddit forums to get a pulse check on what users say about HENRYs. People post anonymously, so we cannot confirm their individual experiences or circumstances.

Over on Reddit in the r/HENRYfinance subreddit, HENRYs are defined as “people who earn high incomes, usually between $250,000 to $500,000, but have not saved or invested enough to be considered rich.”

Net worth is another key number to consider.

Trevor Ausen, a certified financial planner in Minneapolis, Minnesota, says that HENRYs often have “somewhere between negative net worth, thanks to student loans or early career costs, to around $1 million in assets.”

Having an income or net worth above these figures tips the scales toward “rich.”

Who is the typical HENRY?

HENRYs are often business professionals, doctors, lawyers or tech employees with equity compensation, Ausen says.

Many live in places like New York or the Bay Area, he adds, where it can be hard to accumulate wealth even with a high salary due to the high cost of living. They’re usually in their 20s, 30s or 40s.

In some cases, HENRYs are also the first in their families to earn a higher income. That can come with added pressure to provide financial support for relatives and create generational wealth.

How do you know if you’re a HENRY?

Now that you know what a HENRY is, let’s see if you fit the bill.

“If you’re earning well but still feel like you’re just getting by financially, you might be a HENRY,” Flavio Landivar, a CFP in Miami, Florida, said in an email interview.

You might be a HENRY if you:

• Earn an above-average income (typically in the low to mid six-figure range).
• Live in a high-cost area.
• Spend most of your income on costs such as housing, student loans, child care and discretionary expenses.
• Don’t feel financially secure.

But not all HENRYs are the same.

While many have trouble building wealth because student loans or living expenses eat up their income, others are saving aggressively, Ausen says.

“They’ve only been high earning for a short amount of time, and just have not had the time to really build up those assets and save enough where they can be considered rich,” he says.

Ausen says his HENRY clients generally have too much cash. After maxing out their 401(k)s or other retirement accounts, they aren’t putting their extra money to work in an investment account.

If you’re parking a lot of cash in a general savings or checking account, that’s a sign you might be a HENRY.

“While there certainly is an argument for how much emergency fund, essentially, someone should have, after a certain point, it starts to become not as efficient as it could be,” Ausen says.

What do HENRYs care about?

Like most people, HENRYs want more money and greater financial freedom. Online discussions in r/HENRYfinance and other forums often focus on lifestyle creep, career growth, investment options and strategies for minimizing tax burdens.

HENRYs are also looking for quick guidance and reassurance that they’re on the right track.

“These young professionals may be settling into their careers, gaining responsibilities and have less leisure time than they used to,” Yesenia Realejo, a CFP with Tobias Financial Advisors in Plantation, Florida, said in an email interview.

“They may be starting families, buying homes, saving for their children’s college. With so much on their plates, they may find that they’re saving, but have no planned financial direction.”

Is being a HENRY good or bad?

If you’re a HENRY, you may feel stuck. It might seem like you aren’t making enough progress toward your financial goals.

But it’s important to emphasize the “Y” in HENRY. You’re not rich yet — that doesn’t mean you’ll never be rich.

“With smart planning, managing expenses and focusing on long-term goals, HENRYs have a great opportunity to build real wealth down the road,” Landivar said.

“Without that focus, though, it’s easy to stay stuck living paycheck to paycheck despite a high income.”

Start by making, or revisiting, your financial plan. If you’re not sure where to begin, consider getting help from a financial advisor. Getting rich may happen sooner than you think.

More From NerdWallet

• Practical Ways to Tackle Overspending
• Where to Park Cash if You’re Worried about the Stock Market
• Here’s How I Made $360 Selling Stuff on Facebook Marketplace

Lauren Schwahn writes for NerdWallet. Email: lschwahn@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @lauren_schwahn.

The article Are You a HENRY? originally appeared on NerdWallet.

It was a chance of scenery for Billy Corgan when the Smashing Pumpkins frontman performed Thursday night, June 19, at Saint Andrew’s Hall in Detroit.

Less than 10 months ago — last Sept. 4 — he was on stage with the band a few blocks away at Comerica Park, playing for nearly 41,000 fans in an opening date for Green Day. On Thursday Corgan performed for about 40,000 fewer — but was even more exciting over the course of the two-hour-and-five-minute set.

This time the show was with a quartet Corgan dubbed Machines of God, which includes recent Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Kiki Wong. It was almost all Smashing Pumpkins, however, celebrating the 30th anniversary of its diamond-certified “Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” album as well as the 25th of the “Machina”/”The Machines of God and Machina II”/”The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music” package and further promoting last year’s “Aghori Mhori Mei.” That made it Smashing Pumpkins by another name, or the most valid Pumpkins tribute band in the world.

Either way it was a bona fide special night, and perhaps the most satisfying Corgan-related performance since perhaps the original “Melon Collie” shows back in 1995.

It was certainly a special night for Corgan, who sported his trademark ankle-length frock and was visibly relaxed in and charged by the intimate setting. “Standing on this stage brings back a lot of memories,” he told the packed Saint Andrew’s crowd, noting that his first time was in 1989 and also recalling the start of 1999’s Arising Tour there, “one of the greatest moments in Smashing Pumpkins history.”

“Detroit was the first city in the world to embrace my band, Smashing Pumpkins, so I will always be grateful for that,” noted Corgan, who shouted out original Saint Andrew’s booker Vince Bannon. “This is an amazing, wonderful city with such an incredible history, so it’s an honor to be here tonight, playing these songs.” (He later recalled a guitar was stolen from another show, in 1992, but subsequently recovered.)

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at Saint Andrew’s who didn’t feel the same on Thursday, as Corgan and company shredded through a high-octane set that demonstrated his gift for knitting together power and melody, nuance and ferocity. It was also a demonstration of his guitar acumen, particularly with extended solos on epic treatments of “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” and the main set-closing “The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right).”

Following a grungey half-hour from Los Angeles’ Return to Dust, the Corgan crew tore into the night with the pummeling triplet of “Glass’ Theme,” “Heavy Metal Machine” and “Where Boys Fear to Tread,” the former declaring “I betrayed rock and roll” even as the group well-served its punky furor. The tour has included some first-ever performances of “Machina II’s” “Here’s to the Atom Bomb” and “White Spyder” — as well as “Aghori’s…” “Sighommi” and “Edin,” while bassist Jenna “Kid Tigrrr” Fournier sang lead on a rendition of Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” and joined Corgan for an acoustic duet on “Tonight, Tonight.”

Corgan also surprised the crowd by picking up the bass himself for “Glass and the Ghost Children.”

The real highlight came mid-show, however, with a trio of “Melon Collie” favorites. “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and “Muzzle” practically melted the walls at Saint Andrew’s, while during “1979” Corgan’s two oldest children — Augustus, nine, and Philomena, six — came onstage for a Sumo-style wrestling match “won” by the devil’s horn-flashing latter in a take-down.

Corgan kept the pedal down throughout the night, finishing with an encore of “Zero” and “Everlasting Grace.” There was nary a negative to be said — save by Corgan, who cracked that “it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t say something negative.

“It may sound small, it may sound trite, it may sound petty, but since I’ve been playing this stage for 36 years, it is the same stage,” he explained, pointing out a center-stage spot “that they’ve never fixed in 36 (expletive) years. And I want to say that’s not a Detroit thing; it’s a Midwestern thing, where if it ain’t broke, don’t (expletive) fix it. But it is broke, and I wish they’d fix it so when I come back here in 36 years it’ll finally be proper.”

And you can bet everyone at Saint Andrew’s on Thursday will be happy to be back to see that.

Corgan performs again on Saturday, June 21, at the Intersection, 133 Cesar E. Chavez Ave., Grand Rapids. 616-723-8571 or sectionlive.com.

DETROIT — Tarik Skubal didn’t have his best stuff working on Thursday, but the Tigers’ offense made sure that didn’t matter in a 9-2 bludgeoning of Pittsburgh in Game 1 of a doubleheader at Comerica Park.

With runs coming early and often, the Tigers broke the game open with a crooked second inning, propelled by a three-run Riley Greene double, pulling away from the Pirates and giving Skubal and the bullpen plenty of breathing room.

Greene headlined the offense, finishing with four RBIs on a 2-for-4 performance. Zach McKinstry added two hits, including a solo home run. Javier Báez had two hits and scored once. Gleyber Torres continued to sizzle in the leadoff spot with three hits, two runs scored and two RBIs.

And while it won’t be a memorable performance for Skubal, he was solid. He went 5.2 innings, giving up two runs and striking out six while issuing a rare trio of walks.

It was the offense that shined from the jump, starting with back-to-back hits from Torres and Jahmai Jones, who roped a double down the left-field line to advance Torres to third, setting up Greene for an RBI opportunity before Pittsburgh recorded an out.

Greene obliged, scoring Torres from on a sacrifice fly to deep left field. In total, the Tigers scored four runs on sacrifice flies, one shy of tying the single-game MLB record.

“It’s the situational hitting, when you need something in the outfield with the guy on third,” manager AJ Hinch said. “So it says that we had a lot of traffic and less than two outs and the guy had a pretty good at bat to get the run in. If you can cash in those runs when you get the opportunity, you can separate yourself a little bit and we did that.”

Greene’s big hit of the game came in the second inning. With the bases loaded, he flung a pitch low and out of the zone softly into center field and under the mitt of a diving Billy Cook. Greene coasted into second base as all three runners scored easily, capping a four-run inning that put the Tigers firmly in control.

Adding two more runs in both the fourth and fifth innings proved to be insurance.

“Obviously some big hits along the way, Gleyber down the line, the near catch, diving catch in center from Riley, Riley got a double and a bunch of sac flies and we had a comfortable win,” Hinch said.

And Skubal, despite fighting his way through a subpar start relative to his 2025 performance, still managed to keep the Pirates offense at bay.

Throwing the first pitch after the start of the game was delayed 40 minutes by inclement weather, Skubal wasn’t his sharp self as he settled in. And whether it was a delayed warm-up regimen or issues gripping the ball as rain still fell, he did something he hasn’t done yet this season: Walk back-to-back hitters.

After the game, Hinch gave Skubal a bit of grace relative to the weather, and predicted, correctly, that his ace pitcher wouldn’t be so forgiving to himself.

“It wasn’t a great day for Tarik to pitch,” Hinch said, alluding to the rain and wet field. “And he certainly gets a pass on that. He won’t give it to himself, but I’ll give it to him. It was nasty to start the game. And it’s not an excuse, he’s not going to want me to make it for him, but that had to play part of it. The heavy drizzle that was going on, the late start.”

And Skubal’s take?

“I can sit here and make excuses of the weather or what the mound felt like,” Skubal said. “I can sit there and do that but it doesn’t do me any good, it doesn’t do our team any good.”

After opening with a swinging strikeout of Nick Gonzales, Andrew McCutchen knocked a single into right field off of Skubal after working ahead in the count. Joey Bart and Alexander Canario both worked walks on five and seven pitches, respectively, as Skubal struggled to find the zone consistently. It spurred a mound visit from catcher Dillon Dingler.

Whatever was said seemed to do the trick, as Skubal fanned Ke’Bryan Hayes on three pitches and got an immediate flyout from Isiah Kiner-Falefa to end the self-inflicted bases-loaded jam. After surviving that, Skubal was shown in the dugout, cursing in anger.

While he was even-keeled by the time he spoke about the moment, it was evident that Skubal’s distaste for pitching in the rain hadn’t abated.

“My hat is literally leaking water in front of my face as I’m pitching,” Skubal said. “It’s like, why didn’t we just wait? That’s kind of what I’m thinking and that’s where it’s frustrating to me.”

After his first-inning hiccups, Skubal snapped back to being the pitcher that has dominated opposing hitters.

He faced 10 batters to get the next nine outs. McCutchen managed a double in the third inning, as Skubal mowed through Pittsburgh hitters, striking out three in that span. Though he managed to get through the initial spell of rain, Skubal battled the conditions most of the game and changed his jersey almost every inning just to have a bit of dry fabric to get a better grip. And even when the rain relented, coming downhill on a torn up, rain-softened mound lived in the back of Skubal’s mind.

“It can impact the stuff that comes out of your hand for sure,” Skubal said. “Add it just felt like velocity was down, stuff kind of ticked down. It’s not that I wasn’t feeling good, it’s just, I didn’t feel comfortable to kind of let it go.”

When another hiccup cropped up in the fifth inning, with runners on second and third with one out, Skubal managed the situation deftly. He traded a groundball out for a run and then struck out Bart, ending the threat after surrendering just the lone run.

Skubal faced more traffic in the sixth inning, when he was chased from the game after 103 pitches and traded a sacrifice fly for the second out. He left runners on second and third with two outs for Carlos Hernández, a recently acquired righty reliever. And when Skubal couldn’t bail himself out of the jam, Hernández and the defense stepped up.

On his first pitch, Hernández got a ground out from Cook, as Báez corralled a bouncing ball up the middle and Spencer Torkelson corralled the throw to first base on a hop, ending the sixth and the threat.

It was far from Skubal’s most sterling effort, but he still finished throwing nearly six innings of two-run baseball.

And on a day where the offense scored in bunches all game, Skubal didn’t need to be great, just good enough.

“I just wasn’t very good today, but that’s OK,” Skubal said. “And it’s OK, we won, so who cares how I felt? On to the next day.”

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump honored Juneteenth in each of his first four years as president, even before it became a federal holiday. He even claimed once to have made it “famous.”

But on this year’s Juneteenth holiday on Thursday, the usually talkative president kept silent about a day important to Black Americans for marking the end of slavery in the country he leads again.

No words about it from his lips, on paper or through his social media site.

Asked whether Trump would commemorate Juneteenth in any way, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “I’m not tracking his signature on a proclamation today. I know this is a federal holiday. I want to thank all of you for showing up to work. We are certainly here. We’re working 24/7 right now.”

Asked in a follow-up question whether Trump might recognize the occasion another way or on another day, Leavitt said, “I just answered that question for you.”

On Wednesday, Black community leaders from across the country, senior Trump administration officials and other individuals met at the White House to discuss improving coordination between the leaders and federal, state and local partners, according to a senior White House official. Housing Secretary Scott Turner and Lynne Patton, director of minority outreach, were among those who attended, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss a private gathering.

The Republican president’s silence was a sharp contrast from his prior acknowledgement of the holiday. Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the United States by commemorating June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas. Their freedom came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln liberated slaves in the Confederacy by signing the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.

Trump’s quiet on the issue also deviated from White House guidance that Trump planned to sign a Juneteenth proclamation. Leavitt didn’t explain the change. Trump held no public events Thursday, but he shared statements about Iran, the TikTok app and Fed chairman Jerome Powell on his social media site.

He had more to say about Juneteenth in yearly statements in his first term.

In 2017, Trump invoked the “soulful festivities and emotional rejoicing” that swept through the Galveston crowd when a major general delivered the news that all enslaved people were free.

He told the Galveston story in each of the next three years. “Together, we honor the unbreakable spirit and countless contributions of generations of African Americans to the story of American greatness,” he added in his 2018 statement.

In 2019: “Across our country, the contributions of African Americans continue to enrich every facet of American life.” In 2020: “June reminds us of both the unimaginable injustice of slavery and the incomparable joy that must have attended emancipation. It is both a remembrance of a blight on our history and a celebration of our Nation’s unsurpassed ability to triumph over darkness.”

In 2020, after suspending his campaign rallies because of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump chose Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the place to resume his public gatherings and scheduled a rally for June 19. But the decision met with such fierce criticism that Trump postponed the event by a day.

Black leaders had said it was offensive for Trump to choose June 19 and Tulsa for a campaign event, given the significance of Juneteenth and Tulsa being the place where, in 1921, a white mob looted and burned that city’s Greenwood district, an economically thriving area referred to as Black Wall Street. As many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands were temporarily held in internment camps overseen by the National Guard.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal days before the rally, Trump tried to put a positive spin on the situation by claiming that he had made Juneteenth “famous.” He said he changed the rally date out of respect for two African American friends and supporters.

“I did something good. I made it famous. I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump said. “It’s actually an important event, it’s an important time. But nobody had heard of it. Very few people have heard of it.”

Generations of Black Americans celebrated Juneteenth long before it became a federal holiday in 2021 with the stroke of President Joe Biden’s pen.

Later in 2020, Trump sought to woo Black voters with a series of campaign promises, including establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

He lost the election, and that made it possible for Biden to sign the legislation establishing Juneteenth as the newest federal holiday.

Last year, Biden spoke briefly at a holiday concert on the South Lawn that featured performances by Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle. Vice President Kamala Harris danced onstage with gospel singer Kirk Franklin.

Biden was spending this year’s holiday in Galveston, Texas, where he was set to speak at a historic African Methodist Episcopal church.

Associated Press writer Calvin Woodward contributed to this report.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles Dodgers organization said Thursday that it asked federal immigration agents to leave the Dodger Stadium grounds after they arrived at a parking lot near one of the gates.

Dozens of federal agents with their faces covered arrived in SUVs and cargo vans to a lot near the stadium’s Gate E entrance. A group of protesters carrying signs against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement started amassing shortly after, local media reported.

“This morning, ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lots. They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization,” the team said in a statement posted on X.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted on X that its agent were never there.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agents were with Customs and Border Protection and that they were not trying to enter the stadium.

“This had nothing to do with the Dodgers. (Customs and Border Protection) vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement,” she said in an email.

The team said the game against the San Diego Padres later Thursday will be played as planned.

Television cameras showed about four agents remained at the lot Thursday afternoon while officers with the Los Angeles Police Department stood between them and dozens of protesters, some carrying signs that read “I Like My Ice Crushed” and chanting “ICE out of LA!”

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez arrived at the stadium and said she had been in communication with Dodger officials and the mayor’s office.

“We’ve been in communication with the mayor’s office, with the Dodgers, with Dodgers security, about seeing if they can get them moved off their private property,” she told KABC-TV. “Public property is different. Private property — businesses and corporations have the power to say, ‘Not on my property,’ And so we’re waiting to see that movement happen here.”

Protests began June 6 after federal immigration raids arrested dozens of workers in Los Angeles. Protesters blocked a major freeway and set cars on fire the following days, and police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades.

The team has yet to make a statement regarding the arrests and raids. The Dodgers’ heavily Latino fan base have been pushing for the team to make a public statement and ignited a debate online about its stance on the immigration crackdown happening in Los Angeles.

The Trump administration has activated more than 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines over the objections of city and state leaders. Dozens of troops now guard federal buildings and protect federal agents making arrests.

The demonstrations have been mostly concentrated downtown in the city of around 4 million people. Thousands of people have peacefully rallied outside City Hall and hundreds more protested outside a federal complex that includes a detention center where some immigrants are being held following workplace raids.

Despite the protests, immigration enforcement activity has continued throughout the county, with city leaders and community groups reporting ICE present at libraries, car washes and Home Depots. School graduations in Los Angeles have increased security over fears of ICE action and some have offered parents the option to watch on Zoom.

In anticipation of the extreme temperatures predicted across metro Detroit, Farmington Hills will open the Costick Activities Center as a cooling center from Saturday, June 21-Tuesday, June 24.

The center is at 28600 W. 11 Mile Road, between Middlebelt and Inkster roads. It is open on Saturday from 7 a.m.-6 p.m., Sunday from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. and Monday and Tuesday from 6 a.m.-10 p.m.

For more information about the cooling center at the Costick Activities Center, call 248-473-1800 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays. If you have an emergency, call 911.

For additional information about cooling center locations throughout Oakland County, visit oakgov.com/community/emergency-management/need-to-know/safety/warming-and-cooling-centers.

Summer heat can contribute to adverse air quality conditions and can also impact the health conditions of older adults, children and those with respiratory concerns. Community members are encouraged to check on family, friends, neighbors and pets to ensure everyone stays healthy and safe.

The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments encourages community members to take action to voluntarily lower emissions to help minimize ozone formation, including:

– Delay mowing the lawn until evening or another day: Exhaust from lawn mowers and other gas-powered yard equipment contributes to ozone formation.

– Drive less, telecommute, bike or walk: These options help to minimize traffic congestion and air pollution, as well as save money.

– Avoid refueling vehicles during daylight hours. Fumes released at the gas pump contribute to ozone formation.

– Delay or combine errands: This will reduce traffic congestion and air pollution.

– Reduce electricity use: Adjust thermostats a few degrees warmer and turn off lights, computers and other electrical devices when not in use.

Halsted Road closed for reconstruction in Farmington Hills

Ramp metering on I-96 will create a new way of entering freeway

 

Residents and landowners in Holly will be paying higher taxes so the village can stay solvent and prevent a takeover by the state.

Facing a deficit of over $600,000, the village council voted unanimously, 6-0, to approve a special assessment millage to balance the budget before June 20 as required by state law. President April Brandon was absent.

The one-year, 4-mill assessment is for  “all lands and premises” in the village and equals $4 per $1,000 of taxable value. It will raise $658,710 in revenue.

“The reason why we are looking at a special assessment rather than a vote, is because in order to get the money in to finance our village and in order to get a balanced budget which we are legally obligated to do, we have to get everything into the state by June 20,” said Village Manager Tim Price. “Even if we had found out about this on our first day in office, there would have been no time for a special election to put this on a ballot.”

“This is literally a tourniquet to stop the bleeding at this point,” said Trustee Amber Kier, who chaired the meeting in place of Brandon.

Price said the problem has not been with the village spending beyond their means but a lack of revenue.

The village’s millage rate has decreased over the past 43 years due to Headlee Rollbacks, which was established in 1982 to protect home owners by limiting the amount of property tax increases.

The millage rate has dropped to 11.32 mills for fiscal year 2025, while inflation and need for public services have escalated, according to Price, who took over as village manager in January. The assessment will appear on village residents’ tax bills next month.

“The can has been kicked down the road progressively for 43 years,” Price said. “This (assessment) is not going to answer all the financial questions right now, this just gets our heads above water. It allows us more time to develop some more strategies in order to meet these responsibilities.”

Holly resident Amber DeShone told the board the new assessment is happening too quickly.

“This increase with barely a month to prepare would be devastating for us,” said DeShone. “This will add $361.32 (to our expenses) with only a month to prepare. It feels rushed, it feels thoughtless and it feels unfair.”

Price said previous councils had borrowed money from the village fund balance to keep from going into a deficit and ignored warnings from their auditor Plante Moran.

“If you look back at previous meetings in previous years, such as 2020, this (budget deficit) information was presented to them (during audits) at the time and they were told they were facing this kind of environment and council chose not to do anything at that time,” said Price. “There was no sense of urgency for it and I don’t know why that is.”

Trustee Kier read a statement from Brandon.

“We (the council) did not create this problem, we inherited it,” said Brandon. “The deficit was hidden, though we don’t think it was intentional. None of us knew about it until this year.”

She added, “Now this council has to make a difficult decision, either cut essential services like fire and police… or we can raise taxes on residents that are already struggling.”

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ICE raids and their uncertainty scare off workers and baffle businesses

 

Simple Minds is still very much an active band. In fact, its 20th studio album is in motion, according to frontman Jim Kerr.

But this year, the Scottish group is enjoying the 40th anniversary of an eventful 1985, which included the chart-topping hit “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” from the film “The Breakfast Club,” a performance at Live Aid and the release of its best-selling album, “Once Upon a Time.” Kerr’s oldest daughter — Yasmin, with the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde — was also born that year.

“You just can’t believe when you hear that it’s 40 years — there’s that for a start,” Kerr, 65, says via Zoom during Simple Minds’ first North American tour in seven years. “And then the other thing is you just feel so blessed after all this time that you’re allowed to get out and play, and in our case make people jump up and down.

“It’s just all so unexpected, in a sense.”

Kerr acknowledges that Simple Minds — including guitarist Charlie Burchill, the only other remaining founding member — was initially unsure about recording “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” He says the band felt “we had songs up our sleeve” for “Once Upon a Time” and was initially loathe to embrace something written by others. Nevertheless — and with a degree of pushing from its record company — the group took it on and felt able to make the song its own.

“What we brought to it was 10 years of playing live, and we put our heart and soul into it and we put our lifeblood into the record,” Kerr recalls. “It would’ve been a different song if OMD did it, or the Psychedelic Furs — it would’ve been a different record, rather. So it’s not our song, but it is our record.

“And lo and behold, here we are 40 years later, still talking about it.”

Simple Minds, Soft Cell and Modern English perform at 7 p.m. Saturday, June 21 at Pine Knob Music Theatre, 33 Bob Seger Drive, Independence Township. 313-471-7000 or 313Presents.com.

Other music events of note this weekend (all subject to change) include …

FRIDAY, JUNE 20

• The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Pops series presents “Let’s Misbehave: The Songs of Cole Porter” with four shows through Sunday, June 22 at Orchestra Hall, 3711 Woodward Ave., Detroit. 313-576-5111 or dso.org.

• Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan headline this year’s Outlaw Music Festival 10th Anniversary Tour at 4 p.m. at Pine Knob Music Theatre, 33 Bob Seger Drive, Independence Township. Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Trampled By Turtles and Kalamazoo’s Myron Elkins also perform. 313-471-7000 or 313Presents.com.

• The New York rock quartet Brand New celebrates its 25th anniversary with two shows — tonight and Saturday, June 21 — at the Masonic Temple Theatre, 500 Temple St., Detroit. Doors at 7 p.m. 313-548-1320 or themasonic.com.

• The country duo Maddie & Tae performs at District 142, 142 Maple St., Wyandotte. Doors at 7 p.m. Audrey Ray opens. district142live.com.

• Acclaimed singer-songwriters Will Sexton and Amy LaVere double-bill at 8 p.m. at the Trinity House Theatre, 38840 W. Six Mile Road, Livonia. 734-436-6302 or trinityhousetheatre.org.

• The New York trio Sunflower Bean plants itself at 8 p.m. at Third Man Records, 441 W. Canfield St., Detroit. 313-209-5205 or thirdmanrecords.com.

• The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival continues throughout the weekend, including a free Friday Night Live! performance at 7 p.m. in the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit. 313-833-7900 or dia.org.

• Indiana indie rock troupe Murder By Death brings its farewell tour to Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit. Doors at 6 p.m. 313-961-8961 or saintandrewsdetroit.com.

• Former WDIV news anchor Devin Scillian & the Arizona Sun will be up with the KufflinKs at 7 p.m. at the Cadieux Cafe, 4300 Cadieux Road, Detroit. 313-882-8560 or cadieuxcafe.com.

• The Crofoot complex celebrates its late staffer Justin Roettger with performances by Tyler Common, Greg and the Degends, Racquel Soledad and others, starting at 6 p.m. 1 S. Saginaw St., Pontiac. Doors at 7 p.m. 248-858-9333 or thecrofoot.com.

• The Americana trio Barnaby Bright lights up at 8 p.m. at 20 Front Street in Lake Orion. 248-783-7105 or 20frontstreet.com.

• The Science Fair and Endless Vacation set up in the Garden Bowl Lounge, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit. Doors at 9 p.m. 313-833-9700 or themajesticdetroit.com.

• Seattle’s Bug Hunter and the Narcissist Cookbook arrive at the Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff, Hamtramck. Doors at 6:30 p.m. 313-462-4117 or sanctuarydetroit.com.

• Summer Fest 2025 features Nurvcore, Through Our Eyes, Metal Mustangs and more at the Diesel Concert Lounge, 33151 23 Mile Road, Chesterfield Township. Doors at 6 p.m.  586-933-3503 or dieselconcerts.com.

• Pigeon Pit, Rent Strike, Popolis and Fat Angry Heads roost at Small’s, 10339 Conant, Hamtramck. Doors at 7 p.m. 3130873-1117 or smallsbardetroit.com.

• Jae Skeese and B.A. Badd throw down at El Club, 4114 W. Vernor Highway, Detroit. Doors at 7 p.m. 313-757-7942 or elclubdetroit.com.

• Guitarist Kris Kurzawa is in residence through Saturday, June 21 at the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe, 97 Kercheval, Grosse Pointe. 313-882-5399 or dirtydogjazz.com.

• Trumpeter Karim Gideon and his Quartet plays through Saturday, June 21, at Cliff Bell’s, 2030 Park Ave., Detroit. 313-961-2543 or cliffbells.com.

• Soraia & the Idiot Kids and SeaHag open the weekend at the Lager House, 1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit. Doors at 7 p.m. 313-500-1475 or thelagerhouse.com.

• The Roxy hosts The Pretenders Tribute at 8 p.m. 401 Walnut Blvd., Rochester. 248-453-5285 or theroxyrochester.com.

• Baltimore singer-songwriter Cris Jacobs plays at 8 p.m. at The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Lost Mary opens. 734-761-1818 or theark.org.

• The 2025 Detroit Jazz Festival All-Stars Generation Sextet gathers for shows at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at the Blue Llama Jazz Club, 314 S. First St., Ann Arbor. 734-372-3200 or bluellamaclub.com.

• Virtual: Billy Strings livestreams at 7:30 p.m. from Lexington, Kentucky, and again on Saturday, June 21, for subscribers to nugs.net.

• Virtual: The jam band Goose livestreams at 7:30 p.m. from Cleveland, and on Saturday. June 21 from Canandaigua, New York, for subscribers to nugs.net.

• Virtual: Umphrey’s McGee premieres its April 20 performance in Marrakech, Morocco, at 8 p.m. for subscribers to nugs.net.

• Virtual: “American Masters — Janis Ian: Breaking Silence” premieres nationwide at 9 p.m. on PBS. Check pbs.org/americanmasters for local stations and showtimes.

• Virtual: The Gibson Sisters host a “Slumber Party” at 9 p.m., streaming via veeps.com.

SATURDAY, JUNE 21

• Royal Oak Live! a two-day music festival, starts at 1:30 p.m. and again on Sunday, June 22 at Centennial Commons, 204 S. Troy St. Performers include Kim Waters, Ben Sharkey, Alexander Zonjic, Paul Taylor, Special EFX and others. 248-547-4000 or royaloakchamber.com.

• A Flock of Seagulls headlines the I Love the 80’s tour, joined by Bow Wow Wow and Animotion at 7 p.m. at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, 2600 Atwater St. at Chene, Detroit. 313-393-7128 or TheAretha.com.

• Hit-making songwriter and producer David Foster and trumpeter Chris Botti, along with vocalist (and Foster’s wife) Katharine McPhee, team up at 8 p.m. at the Detroit Opera House, 1526 Broadway St., Detroit. 313-237-7464 or detroitopera.org.

Diverse musical trio bring their happy music to Detroit

• Alabama-born vocalist Lamont Landers has hit the road and comes to the Magic Bag, 22920 Woodward Ave., Ferndale. The Vig Arcadia opens. Doors at 7 p.m. 248-544-1991 or themagicbag.com.

• Last Night Saved My Life celebrates the release of a new album, "The First Hello," in the Pike Room at the Crofoot complex, 1 S. Saginaw St., Pontiac. Doors at 6 p.m. 248-858-9333 or thecrofoot.com.

• A pair of duos — the Rough and Tumble and Flagship Romance — team up at 8 p.m. at 20 Front Street in Lake Orion. 248-783-7105 or 20frontstreet.com.

• Toed hits the stage at the Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale, supported by Strictly Fine and Sancho. Doors at 7 p.m. 248-820-5596 or thelovingtouchferndale.com.

• The Virginia thrash group Deceased joins Jail and Mortal Disguise at 7 p.m. at the Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff, Hamtramck. 313-462-4117 or sanctuarydetroit.com.

• The Soap Girls, Decyhered and Over Medicated trip-bill at 7:30 p.m. at the Token Lounge, 28949 Joy Road, Westland. 734-513-5030 or tokenlounge.com.

• Millyz brings his Blanco 7 Tour to town at El Club, 4114 W. Vernor Highway, Detroit. Doors at 8 p.m. 313-757-7942 or elclubdetroit.com.

• True Devil, Tangerine Time Machine and eight others perform on two stages for Rock N Core at the Diesel Concert Lounge, 33151 23 Mile Road, Chesterfield Township. Doors at 5:30 p.m. 586-933-3503 or dieselconcerts.com.

• Another set of duos — Miles and Mafaie, and Dave Boutette and Kristi Lynn Davis — pair up at 8 p.m. at the Trinity House Theatre, 38840 W. Six Mile Road, Livonia. 734-436-6302 or trinityhousetheatre.org.

• Ann Arbor is among the cities taking part in the global Make Music Day, with performances in and around the area all day long. Find schedules and other information via makemusicday.org.

• The Out Loud Chorus performs a 1 p.m. matinee at The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. The trio Darlingside, along with Clovers Daughter, follows at 8 p.m. 734-761-1818 or theark.org.

• The Sean Dobbins Quintet plays at 6:30 and 9 p.m. at the Blue Llama Jazz Club, 314 S. First St., Ann Arbor. Guitarist Noah Hogan and his Quartet follow with a 10:30 p.m. late-nighter. 734-372-3200 or bluellamaclub.com.

• Virtual: It's a double shot Oasis' Liam Gallagher as his "Live at Knebworth — Concert Film" streams at 3 p.m. and a "Knebworth Documentary" follows at 5 p.m. both via veeps.com.

• Virtual: The 2020 concert film "Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace" returns to stream at 3 p.m. via veeps.com.

SUNDAY, JUNE 22

• Keith Urban brings his High and Alive Tour to town at 7 p.m. at Pine Knob Music Theatre, 33 Bob Seger Drive, Independence Township. He'll be joined by Chase Matthew, Alana Springsteen and Karley Scott Collins. 313-471-7000 or 313Presents.com.

Keith Urban’s rolling with new album, tour and TV show 

• Detroit's own Suicide Machines joins Less Than Jake, Fishbone and Bite Me Bambi on the Summer Circus Tour stop at the Royal Oak Music Theatre, 318 W. Fourth St. Doors at 6 p.m. 248-399-2980 or royaloakmusictheatre.com.

• The Detroit Blues Society hosts its International Blues Challenge showcase at 3 p.m. at the Cadieux Cafe, 4300 Cadieux Road, Detroit. 313-882-8560 or cadieuxcafe.com.

• The world music octet In the Tradition performs at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. at Cliff Bell's, 2030 Park Ave., Detroit. 313-961-2543 or cliffbells.com.

• Lauren Sanderson drops in at the Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale. Doors at 7 p.m. Emeryld opens. 248-820-5596 or thelovingtouchferndale.com.

• Bega, Captain Tallen and the Benevolent Entitites, Conor Lynch and Jackamo stack up at 7 p.m. at the New Dodge Lounge, 8850 Jos Campau, Hamtramck. 313-638-1508 or thenewdodgelounge.com.

• The all-female tribute band the Iron Maidens rocks at 6:30 p.m. at the Token Lounge, 28949 Joy Road, Westland. 734-513-5030 or tokenlounge.com.

• The Nashville quartet Birdtalker finishes the weekend at 7:30 p.m. at The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Curtis Ford opens. 734-761-1818 or theark.org.

• William Hill III presents solo piano performances at 6 and 7:30 p.m. at the Blue Llama Jazz Club, 314 S. First St., Ann Arbor. 734-372-3200 or bluellamaclub.com.

• Virtual: Sweden's Ghost streams "Rite Here Rite Now — All Access Watch Party" at 8 p.m. via veeps.com.

EAST LANSING – Lake Orion’s Connor Fox doesn’t want to think or talk about repeating in the Michigan Junior State Amateur Championship presented by Imperial Headware, but he admitted it’s cool that Michigan State University’s Forest Akers West Golf Course is hosting.

“It would be cool to win my last GAM junior event at my future place,” said Fox, who over a year ago committed to the Michigan State golf program and this week is playing in the Michigan Amateur Championship in Charlevoix.

He said he plans to approach the 47th Michigan Junior the same way he approached the 46th, which he won a year ago at Ferris State University’s Katke Golf Course.

“I go in wanting to play my best golf, taking it one shot at a time, get into match play and then take it one shot at a time,” he said. “It doesn’t help to start thinking about that trophy or anything like that.”

He did acknowledge winning the title a year ago means a lot to him, and the exemption it earned from the USGA for the U.S. Junior Amateur was something he would love to have happen again.

“It was all very cool, but I just have to approach it all the same way,” he said.

The field of 108 golfers, ages 18-and-under, has been determined by past performance and through sectional qualifiers. They will compete starting Sunday, June 22, for the overall championship or in an age 15-and-under division on Monday.

The golfers playing in the overall division will play 36 holes of stroke play Sunday to determine a medalist and top seed to lead the low-scoring 32 golfers into the match play bracket. The 15-and-under division starts with 18 holes of stroke play on Monday to determine an eight-golfer bracket for match play. The semifinal and championship match rounds for both age divisions will be held on Wednesday.

Forest Akers West is home to the successful Michigan State golf teams. It is one of two courses at the facility (East and West), both of which were redesigned by Michigan State alumnus and highly regarded golf course designer Arthur Hills in 1992.

The West plays from 5,278 yards to 7,013 yards with five tee positions and hosts the Big Ten home competition for the Spartans.

The players in the field are familiar with the Forest Akers properties, which have hosted several GAM junior events and high school state championship tournaments over the years.

Bryan Harris is the PGA golf professional and general manager at Forest Akers and Ben Keeler is the golf course superintendent. Learn more at golf.msu.edu.

Last year in Big Rapids, Fox turned back future MSU teammate Julian Menser, a South Lyon native and Detroit Catholic Central grad, 7 and 6, in the title match. Menser has aged out of the competition and is a current member of the MSU team.

In the 15-and-under bracket, Julian Sinishtaj of Macomb and Warren De La Salle earned the 15-and-under championship with a 9 and 8 win over David Han of Midland in the championship match.

By MARIA SHERMAN

NEW YORK (AP) — What makes a great song of the summer? Is it an up-tempo pop banger? Something with an earworm chorus? Does it need to feature the words “summer,” “sunshine,” or another synonym — “California” — in the title? How could anyone attempt a song of the summer after the late, great Beach Boy Brian Wilson composed them so expertly, anyway?

It very well may be subject to the eye (well, ear) of the beholder, but The Associated Press views the song of the summer as the one that takes over those warm months between June and August, the kind that blasts out of car speakers and at beach barbecues in equal measure. And that means many different things for many kinds of listeners.

So here are AP’s 2025 song of the summer predictions across categories, with past victors for reference.

Find your song of the summer and then listen to our Spotify playlist, here.

Song of the summer that inexplicably came out in January: “NUEVAYoL,” Bad Bunny

A song of the summer doesn’t actually have to arrive in summer, or even in spring. History has proved this time and time again, lest anyone forget Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license” hit at the top of the year in 2021. But this summer, like every summer, is about Bad Bunny. On his latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio pulls from Puerto Rico’s rich musical history and hybridizes it. He does so from the very opener, “NUEVAYoL,” which samples the fittingly named 1975 salsa hit from El Gran Combo, “Un Verano en Nueva York” (“A Summer in New York”).

Past champion: “Boy’s a Liar PT. 2,” PinkPantheress, Ice Spice (2023)

Song of the summer for the chronically online: “Tonight,” PinkPantheress

An internet hero releases another super hit: PinkPantheress’ “Tonight” is an undeniable good time; all bassline house meets hyperpop vocals with a naughty chorus. The 24-year-old British singer-songwriter has proved she’s got so much more to offer than a few viral hits — but her huge songs that blow up online? They tend to stay. That’s more than can be said about past winners in this category.

Past champion: “Million Dollar Baby,” Tommy Richman (2024)

Breakup song of the summer: “What Was That,” Lorde

Lorde’s first new single in four years recalls the clever synth-pop of her 2017 album “Melodrama,” casting aside the folk detour of 2021’s “Solar Power.” “What Was That” is reserved revelation, introspective electropop that takes a measured look at a relationship’s dissolution. It feels good, and bad, which is the point.

Past champion: “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” Bee Gees (1971)

Song of the summer for the girls and all those who love them: “Gnarly,” KATSEYE

KATSEYE, the global girl group born out of K-pop development techniques, are “Gnarly,” and they’d like you to be, too. The song is asymmetrical pop with a cheerleading cadence and extensive, expensive product placement. You’re here for the girls, or you’re not. Gnarly!

Past champion: “Bills, Bills, Bills,” Destiny’s Child (1999)

Song for singles ready to mingle this summer: “WASSUP,” Young Miko

Flirting is central to these hot months; no other season has a fling named after it. Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko knows this better than most, and her track “WASSUP” is all about charisma — and it doesn’t hurt that it interpolates “Lollipop” by Lil Wayne featuring Static Major and “Chulin Culin Chunfly” by Voltio featuring Residente.

Past champion: “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’),” T-Pain featuring Yung Joc (2007)

Song of the summer for those who love British boy ballads performed by an American: “Ordinary,” Alex Warren

Last year brought Benson Boone’s glossy soft pop-rock; this year, Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” is inescapable. A big, inoffensive ballad with loosely religious themes, it is meticulously designed to the pull at heartstrings. And it does — the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Past champion: “Beautiful Things,” Benson Boone (2024)

Song of the summer for when you lose the beef but still have fight left in ya: “Nokia,” Drake

For the last year, Drake has mostly made headlines for his rivalry with Kendrick Lamar, one of the biggest beefs in modern rap music history. He was no victor, but on “Nokia,” he’s certainly a winner. The song is a return to what Drizzy knows best: a massive rap-R&B-pop song for the ages, one that will live inside the minds of listeners for the whole year. Just, you know, replete with the nostalgic sounds of a Nokia ringtone.

Past champion: The difference here, of course, is that Drake won his beef with Meek Mill. But nonetheless: “Back to Back,” Drake (2015)

The TikTok-approved, blast-of-dopamine song of the summer: “Boots on the Ground,” 803Fresh

Social media is the wild west and inevitably sources its own song of the summer. Usually, there’s an element of humor in the track — like 2023’s “The Margarita Song” by That Chick Angel, Casa Di & Steve Terrell. This year is a bit different: 803Fresh’s “Boots on the Ground” is an organic hit that centers a kind of soulful line dance — it’s country-pop with trap hi-hats and fun for the whole family.

Past champion: “The Spark,” Kabin Crew & Lisdoonvarna Crew (2024)

Song of the summer for it girls: “Fame Is A Gun,” Addison Rae

Charli xcx fans, fear not. Addison Rae’s debut album is stuffed with bejeweled, hypnotic pop songs for the post-“BRAT” crowd. Best of all is the Grimes-esque “Fame Is a Gun,” a sunglasses-in-the-club banger with synthetic vocal textures and an unignorable chorus. For fashionable listeners, and those who aim to become more fabulous.

Past champion: “Bad Girls,” Donna Summer (1979)

Song of the summer of revenge: “Manchild,” Sabrina Carpenter

Does it sound strikingly similar to “Please, Please, Please” at times? Sure. But has Sabrina Carpenter cornered the market on country-tinged, satirical pop songs about heterofatalism, an internet neologism for those who find heterosexuality embarrassing and hopeless? Also, yes. But you know, with a wink, vengeance and a danceable quality. Amen, hey men!

Past champion: “Before He Cheats,” Carrie Underwood (from her 2005 debut album, but released as a single in 2006)

Biggest song of the year, and therefore the default song of the summer: “Luther,” Kendrick Lamar and SZA

Is a song released in November too dated to qualify for song of the summer? Perhaps. But here’s the rub: Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther” held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for 13 weeks in 2025 — over half the year so far. Popularity makes the contender. It doesn’t hurt that “Luther” is also one of the best songs of both this year and last, a tender R&B ballad that samples Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn’s 1982 rendition of “If This World Were Mine.” “Luther” has since been dethroned on the charts, but no other song has come close to its run this year.

Past champion: “Last Night,” Morgan Wallen (2023)

Country crossover song of the summer: “What I Want,” Morgan Wallen and Tate McRae

If terrestrial country radio is your leading metric for selecting the song of the summer, then Morgan Wallen’s “I’m The Problem” is likely your pick. But a catchier track with true country crossover appeal is “What I Want” with Wallen and pop singer Tate McRae. It is the first time Wallen has featured a female vocalist on one of his songs. It’s a rare embrace for the chart topper, who historically prefers to buck country duet tradition and double down on his vocal style — warm, muscular, masculine.

Past champion: “You’re Still the One,” Shania Twain (from her 1997 album, but released as a single in 1998)

Song of the summer released half a decade ago: “party 4 you,” Charli xcx

The data doesn’t lie and what is old is new is old is new again. In the year after “BRAT” summer, desire for more Charli xcx is still strong. As a result, fans have dug up a cut from her 2020 album, “How I’m Feeling Now,” and turned it into their own summer anthem … five years later. So much so, in fact, that Charli released a music video for it in May.

Past champion: “Cruel Summer,” Taylor Swift (released in 2019, crowned song of the summer in 2023)

Song of the summer with a canine-themed title: “Mutt,” Leon Thomas

Look, “Mutt” also arrived in 2024, but in 2025 — bolstered by a deluxe release and a recent Chris Brown remix — makes “Mutt” an easy song of the summer pick for some listeners. It’s difficult to hear that chorus and not sing along: “She said, ‘Take your time, what’s the rush?’ / I said, ‘Baby, I’m a dog, I’m a mutt.’”

Past champion: “Bird Dog,” The Everly Brothers (1958)

An Oakland County district judge facing a misconduct complaint will have fewer cases on her docket at her own request and following action taken by a supervising judge.

A Michigan judicial tenure commission investigation found evidence of misconduct by 52-4 District Judge Kirsten Hartig, according to a complaint made public earlier this month. The report, signed on June 4, said Hartig dismissed at least four criminal cases “to punish the prosecution rather than on the merits of the cases” and created a “climate of fear” among court officials and employees. Hartig also took months to share with the commission an April 2024 state-ordered mental-health evaluation that found she was unsafe to practice.

Bruce Goldberg, president of River’s Bend and a social worker working with Hartig’s sobriety program team, wrote to the commission in June 2024 to defend Hartig. He wrote that he did not believe Hartig was unsafe to practice.

Since April, 52nd District Court Chief Judge Travis Reeds has twice asked the commission to remove Hartig from the bench before the complaint is resolved. Each request was denied.

Hartig had denied county prosecutor’s office attorneys’ requests for her to recuse herself from hearing their cases. But on Tuesday, she rescued herself.

The Oakland Press asked Judge Hartig’s spokesman for comment on Thursday morning, but courts and county offices are closed in observance of Juneteenth.

On Wednesday, Reeds responded to Hartig’s recusal with an administrative order moving certain cases to other 52nd District judges.

The 52nd District Court has four divisions: 52-1 in Novi, 52-2 in Clarkston, 52-3 in Rochester Hills and 52-4 in Troy. District court judges handle traffic violations such as driving under the influence, speeding and reckless driving; civil cases, such as evictions, land forfeitures, garnishments for up to $25,000; and civil cases with claims above $25,000 assigned by the Circuit Court. District judges also hear criminal cases with maximum penalties of up to a year in jail. They preside over preliminary and probable cause hearings for criminal cases that are sent for Circuit Court trial.

Reeds said the individual requests for recusals and appeals were creating unnecessary confusion and delays that were unfair to everyone, especially litigants and attorneys. Reed’s order created a temporary procedure to streamline the case-assignment process.

“I want to thank my fellow 52nd District Court judges and the outstanding staff in all four divisions for stepping up to handle the extra cases without complaint,” he said.

Reeds said the court’s priority is to serve the public to the best of its ability.

“We will continue to work together to make that happen,” he said.

All cases involving state-law violations and misdemeanor civil cases will be divided between 52-4 Presiding Judge Maureen McGinnis and Reeds.

McGinnis will hear all of Clawson’s criminal and civil cases normally heard by Hartig and all felony cases.

Reeds will be at the 52-4 District Court in Troy three Tuesdays a month to hear cases. The judge for the four Tuesday remains to be named.

Hartig will continue to hear general civil, landlord-tenant and small-claims cases filed in the 52-4 District Court.

The complaint against Hartig, filed on June 4, requires a response to the judicial tenure commission within 14 business days. Hartig’s response is due June 25.

By MARK SCOLFORO

GARDNERS, Pa. (AP) — Sam Cooper had just trekked 7 miles through a rain-sodden stretch of the Appalachian Trail when he sat down outside a little country store in Pennsylvania to take on its ice cream challenge.

Nearly 40 minutes and 2,500 calories later, the dairy farmer from Chapel Hill, Tennessee, was polishing off the final titanium sporkful of chocolate chip cookie dough on Tuesday and adding his name to the list of “thru-hikers” who have celebrated the trail’s halfway point by downing a half-gallon of ice cream.

By the end Cooper, 32, whose trail name is Pie Top, was calling the experience “pure misery.”

“I don’t think anybody should be doing this,” Cooper said cheerfully. “This is not healthy at all.”

The ice cream challenge is thought to have begun more than four decades ago at the Pine Grove Furnace General Store in Gardners, a few miles north of the current true halfway point on the 2,197-mile trail. Thru-hikers, as they’re known, are the fraction of the trail’s 3 million annual visitors who attempt to walk its entire length in a single, continuous trip.

As they slog their way north through Virginia and Maryland, the ice cream challenge is a regular topic of conversation among thru-hikers at shelters and campfires, said Stephan Berens, 49, a psychiatric nurse from Nuremberg, Germany.

Berens, whose trail name is Speedy, polished off his black cherry and vanilla in about 25 minutes after completing 17 miles on the trail that day — and with seven more to go that afternoon.

‘The most free I’ve ever felt’

Trail experts say hikers can need up to 6,000 calories a day, a practical challenge when food needs to be carried up and down rocky terrain. The slender Berens figures he’s lost about 20 pounds since starting April 8.

“I thought it would be worse, but it’s OK,” said Berens, smiling and patting his stomach after finishing the half-gallon. “Such a crazy idea.”

Zeke Meddock, trail name Petroglyph, didn’t bother timing himself but finished his choice of a quart and a half carton of chocolate chip cookie dough and a pint of strawberry. The diesel mechanic from North Amarillo, Texas, began his hike on March 27, two months after finishing a stint in the U.S. Army.

“You’re basically walking away from life,” said Meddock, 31. “It’s the most free I’ve ever felt.”

So far this year, about 50 thru-hikers have finished the challenge, earning the honor of having their photos posted on a store bulletin board. In a notebook to record their thoughts, Chicken Louise wrote on May 24: “Life choices?” The next day, Seagull weighed in with, “I feel bad,” and Hyena issued a cry for help: “It was very fun for the first 15 minutes. Now, I (and my family) want to die.”

The ice cream challenge record, less than 4 minutes, was set two years ago by a man with the trail name Squirt. Two decades ago, the mark to beat was about 9 minutes.

Thru-hikers who want to attempt the record may only allow the $12 worth of ice cream to start to melt in the sun for a few minutes. They must be timed by a store employee.

“It’s called the half-gallon challenge,” Cooper said. “Very appropriately named.”

Bragging rights and a spoon

Bruce Thomas, a 41-year-old disability support worker from Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada, passed on the ice cream challenge, opting instead for a breakfast sandwich and another one for the road.

“It’s early morning and I’m pretty sure I cannot do it,” said Thomas, trail name Not Lazy.

Those who do finish in a single sitting are awarded a commemorative wooden spoon — and bragging rights for the rest of their hike. Some people get sick. Others wash down the ice cream with a hamburger.

The ice cream challenge is one of several quirky traditions and places along the trail. There’s a shelter in Virginia where hikers confess their sins in a logbook, a two-hole outhouse in Maine with a cribbage board between the seats and a free canoe ferry across the Kennebec River that’s considered an official part of the trail. And at Harriman State Park in Tuxedo, New York, hikers encounter the renowned “Lemon Squeezer,” a narrow rock formation.

About one in three people who launch a thru hike take the roughly 5 million steps required to go the distance. They most often walk from south to north, starting in Springer Mountain, Georgia, and wrapping up 13 states later at Maine’s Mount Katahdin.

The trek typically takes six months but the current speed record is about 40 days, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Meddock said there’s talk that a man on the trail behind him may be on pace to break it.

There’s also been a lot of discussion among hikers about the extensive damage along the trail in southern states from September’s Hurricane Helene. But mostly they think and talk about walking.

“It’s always hard,” Thomas said. “It’s going to be hard. I never think about quitting. I only think about how I can do it.”

By BILL BARROW, OLIVIA DIAZ and MIKE CATALINI

HENRICO COUNTY, Va. (AP) — Abigail Spanberger opened her general election bid for Virginia governor Wednesday using her high school alma mater near Richmond.

“I grew up walking the halls of Tucker High School,” the former congresswoman says as she walks past a bank of lockers in her first ad since securing the Democratic nomination. Later, she notes her experience as a CIA case officer, then in the halls of Congress as a tough-minded, get-things-done lawmaker.

The same kind of message is echoing in New Jersey from Rep. Mikie Sherrill, as she also makes a bid for governor. Both women are selling themselves as Democrats who can rise above the rancor of Donald Trump’s Washington.

For national Democrats who have spent months debating how to counter the president’s aggressive second administration, it’s a reminder of what worked for the party during Trump’s first term. Spanberger and Sherrill were headliners in the 2018 roster of center-left Democrats who helped flip House control from Republicans with balanced appeals to moderates, progressives and even anti-Trump conservatives. Now, they’re leading statewide tickets in races that could offer Democrats a back-to-the-future path forward as they look toward next year’s midterms.

“There are a lot of similarities” in Democrats’ current position and the 2018 campaigns, said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., who, as a House member, chaired his party’s congressional campaign arm during Trump’s first midterm election cycle.

The 2018 Democratic freshman class yielded a net gain of 40 seats with a lineup that featured record numbers of women and plenty of candidates with national security and business backgrounds. A similar effort yielded a net gain of six governors.

The party’s 2018 winners also included outspoken progressives like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, elected in more liberal, urban districts. But the balance of power shifted on the backs of centrist candidates who carried the nation’s suburbs and improved Democrats’ performance in exurbs and even small-town, GOP-dominated areas.

Among Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s freshman colleagues were Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, another former CIA analyst, who won a suburban Detroit seat before her elevation to the Senate last November; Rep. Jason Crow, a former Army officer, who represents suburban Denver; and Rep. Angie Craig, who flipped a GOP-held seat in greater Minneapolis and now is running for Senate. Crow is now co-chairman of candidate recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Similar resumes are popping up among new Democratic recruits. In Michigan, for example, Bridget Brink, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, announced her bid for Slotkin’s old 7th Congressional District on Wednesday by leaning into her international experience as a counter to Trump.

Luján said the common thread has been recruiting “real people, regular folks” with “incredible credentials” and an ability to hold “a real conversation with people around economic issues … around the kitchen table” and campaign in any area.

So even as New Jersey’s Sherrill calls her Republican rival Jack Ciattarelli a “Trump lackey” and Spanberger pledges in a fundraising email to “defeat Trump’s agenda at the ballot box,” their wider appeal depends on different arguments.

Sherrill has from the start touted her biography: a Naval Academy graduate, Navy Sea King helicopter pilot, federal prosecutor and mother of four. Her blue and gold yard signs have a chopper hovering above her name. She is also promising an “Affordability Agenda” to address voters’ economic concerns.

Spanberger, part of the Problem Solvers Caucus when she was on Capitol Hill, leans into her deal-making centrism, promises to confront economic gaps and has pledged to campaign in every Virginia congressional district, including where Trump has dominated.

“It’s not the job of the governor of Virginia to cater to President Trump,” Spanberger said in one of her final primary campaign speeches. “It’s not the job of the governor of Virginia to cater to a political party.”

In an Associated Press interview earlier this spring, Spanberger even criticized former President Joe Biden for “posturing” by promising to eliminate student debt — something he could not accomplish by presidential action alone. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said.

She also bristled when asked to describe her place on the political spectrum. She instead said she set goals by asking, “How do I impact the most people in the fastest way possible?”

Jared Leopold, a Democratic strategist who worked as a senior staffer for the Democratic Governors Association during the 2018 cycle, said it’s notable that Spanberger and Sherrill avoid getting mired in the internal party tussle among progressives, liberals and moderates.

“Most voters aren’t really thinking about things along a simple left-right political spectrum,” especially in statewide races, Leopold said. “People are looking for politicians who they think understand them and can get things done to help them.”

He pointed to another 2018 Democratic standout: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Now a potential 2028 presidential candidate, Whitmer first gained national attention as a state legislator who spoke out about abortion rights and her experience of being raped as a college student. But she became a juggernaut in the governor’s race with what Leopold called a “brilliant and simple” slogan: “Fix the damn roads!”

Of course, Democrats do not dispute that a candidate’s military and national security experiences help neutralize routine Republican attacks of all Democrats as too liberal or out of touch.

“These credentials for how they’ve served the country — they’re just sharing who they are,” Luján said.

Said Leopold: “It certainly gives a different definition of what the Democratic Party is to some voters.”

In Virginia, Republican nominee and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who like Spanberger would become the first woman to serve in the state’s top elected office, is trying to tie the Democratic nominee to her national party.

Earle-Sears’ social media accounts frequently share pictures of Spanberger and Biden hugging and wearing masks. She accuses Spanberger of effectively rubber-stamping Biden’s legislative agenda while in Congress.

“Part of the challenge,” Spanberger retorts, “is that either my opponent or people who might be running anywhere, who don’t necessarily have things to run on, are going to try and distract.”

Spanberger, Sherrill and Democrats like them hope that most voters assess the GOP attacks and their own branding efforts like Fred Martucci, a retired glazier who voted early in Trenton, New Jersey.

The 75-year-old expressed a visceral distaste for Trump. As for what impresses him about Sherrill, he said: “She was a Navy helicopter pilot. You can’t be a dummy — she’s sharp.”

Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Barrow reported from Atlanta, Catalini from Trenton, New Jersey.

By SEUNG MIN KIM

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he plans to tap Chad Meredith, a former state solicitor general in Kentucky, for a federal judgeship in the state — and this time, he is facing no objections from Sen. Rand Paul, who opposed his nomination three years ago.

Meredith was the starring player in a bit of judicial nominations drama in the previous administration, when then-President Joe Biden had agreed to nominate Meredith, who was enthusiastically supported by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader. It was a curious move at the time, because Meredith had a track record of defending Kentucky’s anti-abortion laws and the nomination would come in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court decision that eliminated a constitutional right to the procedure.

But Paul indicated to the Biden White House at the time that he would block Meredith’s confirmation proceedings from moving forward, so the former president never formally nominated him. Biden’s decision to back off Meredith was also a relief to Democrats and abortion rights groups who had been enraged at the prospect of Biden tapping an anti-abortion lawyer for a lifetime judiciary seat.

This time, Paul recommended Meredith for the judgeship to the White House, and plans to support his confirmation, Paul’s office said Thursday.

In his social media post Wednesday announcing the nomination, Trump called Meredith “highly experienced and well qualified.”

“Chad is a courageous Patriot who knows what is required to uphold the Rule of Law, and protect our Constitution,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday night.

McConnell said in a statement Wednesday that Trump made an “outstanding choice” in choosing Meredith, who also served as chief deputy general counsel for former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin.

“His demonstrated devotion to the rule of law and the Constitution will serve the people of Kentucky well on the federal bench,” McConnell said. “I look forward to the Senate confirming his nomination.”

Three years ago, Paul accused McConnell of cutting a “secret deal” with the White House as a reason why Meredith’s nomination never moved forward under Biden. Paul never made any substantive objections about Meredith himself at the time.

“Unfortunately, instead of communicating and lining up support for him, Senator McConnell chose to cut a secret deal with the White House that fell apart,” Paul said at the time.

Paul had effective veto power over a judicial pick in his home state because the Senate continues to honor the so-called blue slip rule, a decades-old custom that says a judicial nominee won’t move forward if there is opposition from his or her home-state senator. The Biden White House also deferred to that custom, which is why Biden never ended up nominating Meredith.

Though the rule has been eroded in part, namely for appellate court judges whose seat spans several states, the custom has remained intact for district court nominees who are more closely tied to their home states. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has so far made no indication that he would deviate from that longstanding custom.

Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of a fair courts program and an adviser at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, criticized Trump’s selection of Meredith given his “disturbing anti-abortion record.”

“The nomination of Chad Meredith to a lifetime judgeship should trouble everyone,” Zwarensteyn said.

By The Associated Press

A SpaceX rocket being tested in Texas exploded Wednesday night, sending a dramatic fireball high into the sky.

The company said the Starship “experienced a major anomaly” at about 11 p.m. while on the test stand preparing for the tenth flight test at Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site at the southern tip of Texas.

“A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for,” SpaceX said in a statement on the social platform X.

It marked the latest in a series of incidents involving Starship rockets. On Jan. 16, one of the massive rockets broke apart in what the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” sending trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean. Two months later, Space X lost contact with another Starship during a March 6 test flight as the spacecraft broke apart, with wreckage seen streaming over Florida.

Following the back-to-back explosions, one of the 403-foot (123-meter) Starship rockets, launched from the southern tip of Texas, tumbled out of control and broke apart on March 27. SpaceX had hoped to release a series of mock satellites following liftoff, but that got nixed because the door failed to open all the way. Then the spacecraft began spinning and made an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean.

At the time, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called the launch “a big improvement” from the two previous demos and promised a much faster launch pace moving forward, with a Starship soaring every three to four weeks for the next three flights.

SpaceX said Wednesday night’s explosion posed no hazards to nearby communities. It asked people not to try to approach the site.

The company said it is working with local officials to respond to the explosion.

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By PAUL WISEMAN, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Farmers, cattle ranchers and hotel and restaurant managers breathed a sigh of relief last week when President Donald Trump ordered a pause to immigration raids that were disrupting those industries and scaring foreign-born workers off the job.

“There was finally a sense of calm,’’ said Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition.

That respite didn’t last long.

On Wednesday, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin declared, “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine (immigration enforcement) efforts. Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability.’’

The flipflop baffled businesses trying to figure out the government’s actual policy, and Shi says now “there’s fear and worry once more.”

“That’s not a way to run business when your employees are at this level of stress and trauma,” she said.

Trump campaigned on a promise to deport millions of immigrants working in the United States illegally — an issue that has long fired up his GOP base. The crackdown intensified a few weeks ago when Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, gave the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, up from 650 a day in the first five months of Trump’s second term.

Suddenly, ICE seemed to be everywhere. “We saw ICE agents on farms, pointing assault rifles at cows, and removing half the workforce,’’ said Shi, whose coalition represents 1,700 employers and supports increased legal immigration.

One ICE raid left a New Mexico dairy with just 20 workers, down from 55. “You can’t turn off cows,’’ said Beverly Idsinga, the executive director of the Dairy Producers of New Mexico. “They need to be milked twice a day, fed twice a day.’’

Claudio Gonzalez, a chef at Izakaya Gazen in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district, said many of his Hispanic workers — whether they’re in the country legally or not — have been calling out of work recently due to fears that they will be targeted by ICE. His restaurant is a few blocks away from a collection of federal buildings, including an ICE detention center.

“They sometimes are too scared to work their shift,” Gonzalez said. “They kind of feel like it’s based on skin color.”

In some places, the problem isn’t ICE but rumors of ICE. At cherry-harvesting time in Washington state, many foreign-born workers are staying away from the orchards after hearing reports of impending immigration raids. One operation that usually employs 150 pickers is down to 20. Never mind that there hasn’t actually been any sign of ICE in the orchards.

“We’ve not heard of any real raids,’’ said Jon Folden, orchard manager for the farm cooperative Blue Bird in Washington’s Wenatchee River Valley. “We’ve heard a lot of rumors.’’

Jennie Murray, CEO of the advocacy group National Immigration Forum, said some immigrant parents worry that their workplaces will be raided and they’ll be hauled off by ICE while their kids are in school. They ask themselves, she said: “Do I show up and then my second-grader gets off the school bus and doesn’t have a parent to raise them? Maybe I shouldn’t show up for work.’’

The horror stories were conveyed to Trump, members of his administration and lawmakers in Congress by business advocacy and immigration reform groups like Shi’s coalition. Last Thursday, the president posted on his Truth Social platform that “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”

It was another case of Trump’s political agenda slamming smack into economic reality. With U.S. unemployment low at 4.2%, many businesses are desperate for workers, and immigration provides them.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, foreign-born workers made up less than 19% of employed workers in the United States in 2023. But they accounted for nearly 24% of jobs preparing and serving food and 38% of jobs in farming, fishing and forestry.

“It really is clear to me that the people pushing for these raids that target farms and feed yards and dairies have no idea how farms operate,” Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association, said Tuesday during a virtual press conference.

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, estimated in January that undocumented workers account for 13% of U.S. farm jobs and 7% of jobs in hospitality businesses such as hotels, restaurants and bars.

The Pew Research Center found last year that 75% of U.S. registered voters — including 59% of Trump supporters — agreed that undocumented immigrants mostly fill jobs that American citizens don’t want. And an influx of immigrants in 2022 and 2023 allowed the United States to overcome an outbreak of inflation without tipping into recession.

In the past, economists estimated that America’s employers could add no more than 100,000 jobs a month without overheating the economy and igniting inflation. But economists Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson of the Brookings Institution calculated that because of the immigrant arrivals, monthly job growth could reach 160,000 to 200,000 without exerting upward pressure on prices.

Now Trump’s deportation plans — and the uncertainty around them — are weighing on businesses and the economy.

“The reality is, a significant portion of our industry relies on immigrant labor — skilled, hardworking people who’ve been part of our workforce for years. When there are sudden crackdowns or raids, it slows timelines, drives up costs, and makes it harder to plan ahead,” says Patrick Murphy, chief investment officer at the Florida building firm Coastal Construction and a former Democratic member of Congress. “ We’re not sure from one month to the next what the rules are going to be or how they’ll be enforced. That uncertainty makes it really hard to operate a forward-looking business.”

Adds Douglas Holtz Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now president of the conservative American Action Forum think tank: “ICE had detained people who are here lawfully and so now lawful immigrants are afraid to go to work … All of this goes against other economic objectives the administration might have. The immigration policy and the economic policy are not lining up at all.’’

AP Staff Writers Jaime Ding in Los Angeles; Valerie Gonzalez in McAllen, Texas; Lisa Mascaro and Chris Megerian in Washington; Mae Anderson and Matt Sedensky in New York, and Associated Press/Report for America journalist Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed to this report.

A 77-year-old Troy woman died Wednesday, three days after her vehicle was hit by another in Rochester Hills.

The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office said Julianne McClure was driving a Chevrolet Trax southbound on Rochester Road near Hickory Lawn Street when a Toyota Highlander headed northbound crossed the centerline and hit her car head-on. A crew from the Rochester Hills Fire Department extricated McClure and transported her to a hospital where she subsequently died from her injuries, the sheriff’s office said.

McClure’s 15-year-old granddaughter, a Minnetonka, Minnesota resident, was a front seat passenger in the car and sustained a broken ankle. She was released from the hospital on Wednesday, the sheriff’s office said.

The driver of the Toyota Highlander, a 31-year-old Lincoln Park man wasn’t injured in the crash, but two backseat passengers in his car, ages 7 and 9, were taken to a hospital for treatment, the sheriff’s office said.

Neither alcohol nor drugs appear to have been factors in the incident, the sheriff’s office said. An investigation continues by the sheriff’s Crash Reconstruction Unit.

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More than 50 years on, these are fresh times for “The Wiz” — if not entirely a brand new day.

The current touring production of the seven-time Tony Award-winning musical — which staged its first preview performances in Detroit during 1974 — straddles a line between revival and reimagination, with changes both substantial and subtle but still staying true to the spirit of a Big Broadway Musical.

Proof of that is in the extravagant dance production pieces, primarily during Act II, and Dana Simone’s lung-busting performances, as Dorothy, of torchy anthems such as “Soon As I Get Home,” “Wonder, Wonder Why” and “Home.”

But this take on “The Wiz” — directed by Schele Williams, with music supervision by Joseph Joubert and “new material” by Amber Ruffin — streamlines and contemporizes the African-American take on Frank Baum’s 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

There are crisp new sections of dialogue, particularly smack talk that blends 1970s and 2020s attitudes and modern musical flavors — the latter particularly evident as the “Matrix”-like “The Emerald City” sequence that opens the second act moves from disco to clubby EDM flavors. There’s also a little more steam-punk in the scenery this time, with a floor-to-ceiling video screen that gives the production greater visual depth.

Weighing in at a tidy hour-and-50-minutes, plus intermission, the new “Wiz” loses a few scenes and songs (bad news for fans of the Funky Monkeys) without compromising the narrative. And, of course, you’d still be hard-pressed to find a more joyous moment in all of theater than the Luther Vandross-composed “Everybody Rejoice”/”Brand New Day” couplet after the death (is that really a spoiler alert?) of evil witch Evillene — staged this time as a “Hair”-like exposition of hippie bonhomie.

The good news is that this tale as old as (post-industrial) time still works, from the bullet-proof story itself to the original songs from Charlie Smalls and others. And it has a solid cast, from Simone’s Dorothy to the 14-member dance company, to deliver those goods with theater-filling charisma.

They fill “The Wiz” with a series of show-stopping moments, starting with Simone and Kyla Jade’s (Aunt Em) “The Feeling We Once Had.” Tin Man D. Jerome’s “What Would I Do If I Could Feel” is a soulful highlight, while Kyla Jade, as Evillene, lights things up with the tambourine-shaking New Orleans romp through “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” And Alan Mingo Jr. is, as he’s supposed to be, a scene-stealer as Wiz, channeling his inner Samuel L. Jackson during performances of “Meet the Wiz” and “Y’all Got It.”

Coming on the heels of the successful movie adaptation of “Wicked,” “The Wiz” is a reclamation of the first iteration of the story — as familiar now as it was audacious during the mid-70s. And it proves that you can go “Home” again, even if the place has been remodeled a bit since the last time we were there.

“The Wiz” runs through June 29 at the Fisher Theatre, 3011 W. Grand Blvd., Detroit. 313-872-100 or broadwayindetroit.com.

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This year, the Macomb Area Conference Bronze ran through Hazel Park, as the Vikings went undefeated in the league en route to earning the MVP and Coach of the Year honors.

Lillian Griffiths earned the league’s highest award while the Vikings’ skipper, Greg Richardson, earned the coaching award. The league’s second-place finisher, Fitzgerald, whose only league losses came to HP, earned the sportsmanship award.

Final standings

1. Hazel Park (16-17 overall, 12-0 league)

2. Fitzgerald Spartans (15-10, 10-2)

3. Sterling Heights Stallions (9-8, 8-4)

4. Madison Eagles (6-7, 6-6)

5. Eastpointe Shamrocks (4-9, 4-8)

6. Clintondale Dragons (2-10, 2-10)

7. Lincoln Abes (0-13, 0-12)

Superlatives

MVP: Lillian Griffiths, Hazel Park

Coach of the Year: Greg Richardson, Hazel Park

Sportsmanship award: Fitzgerald Spartans

All-conference team

La’onna Otis, junior, Hazel Park

Maddi Platt, junior, Hazel Park

Kathryn Chappell, senior, Hazel Park

Ryleigh Adams, junior, Hazel Park

Camilla Polanco, freshman, Hazel Park

Lydia Yokel, sophomore, Fitzgerald

Taylor McCants, junior, Fitzgerald

CaSaundra Smith, senior, Fitzgerald

Aziya Marks, junior, Fitzgerald

A’Nyah Hillie, sophomore, Madison

DaMia Harvey, sophomore, Madison

R’Lea’Sha Currie, senior, Eastpointe

Tyra Thompson, senior, Eastpointe

Kacey Zabel, senior, Clintondale

Honorable mentions

Clintondale: Kylie Violet

Hazel Park: Maddie Meade; Hannah Truba.

Madison: DaNylea Paige; Adeline Klank

Fitzgerald: Brianna Parsons; Aubree Stafford.

DETROIT — Wenceel Perez’s face lit up when he was asked where his confidence level was right now.

“Oh my gosh,” he said. “It’s so high right now.”

Admittedly, minutes after he produced a homer, triple and knocked in three runs in the Tigers’ 7-3 win Tuesday, that was a leading question. But his answer wasn’t bravado. His confidence has been hard-earned.

“I’ve worked so much during the offseason,” he said. “I’ve worked so much my entire career. That’s why I have that confidence. I work so much, I know what I’m able to do.”

The switch-hitting Perez, still only 25 years old, is off to a sizzling start, with five homers in 62 plate appearances and hitting .316 with a .702 slug and 1.057 OPS.

“He’s a really good hitter,” Javier Báez said. “He takes almost every at-bat deep, like to 3-2. He sees a lot of pitches. And he’s really focused on what we try to work on every day here.”

We are watching a hitter mature right before our eyes and the real growth has come from the right side of the plate. That’s always been his least productive side of the plate. Not so much any more.

“He’s messing up some scouting reports that have him stronger from the left side,” manager AJ Hinch said. “And he has been. But there’s some pop in that bat and he flexed it tonight.”

He flexed it two games in a row. He doubled and homered off Reds’ lefty Wade Miley on Sunday before lining a pull-side homer off Pirates’ lefty Bailey Falter on Tuesday.

Perez went into Wednesday 5 for 12 with two homers and two doubles against left-handed pitching. Last season, albeit in a much larger sample size, he slashed .209/.292/.302 with one home run.

Two things have helped him get to his right-handed A-swing more often. One is a mindset. He’s no longer just trying to put the ball in play from the right side.

“He going to make contact,” Hinch said. “And that’s huge. But now he’s hunting damage, which is encouraging as he’s trying to contribute in different ways. He’s an energy at-bat and in the last couple games, he’s been a difference-maker.”

The second adjustment has been mechanical.

“I’ve turned my front (left) foot in trying to stay more inside to the ball,” Perez said. “I had been opening up a little too quickly.”

If you open your hips too quickly, you pull off the ball and lose the power in your swing. Statcast data shows Perez, batting right-handed, is standing three inches deeper in the box than he was last year and is getting off his fast swing 3% more often.

Additionally, he’s squaring up 66.7% of the balls he’s put in play in the small sample, compared to 28.9% last season.

“Last year was my first year and I was just trying to adjust to everything,” Perez said. “I got through that last year and now I have a better routine and a better idea of what I’m doing now.”

It shows.

Vierling pushing it

Matt Vierling, for the second day in a row, increased the intensity of his throwing program. He was simulating throwing on the run and was throwing nearly full speed.

“Just trying to do my best to stack heavy days,” he said. “So when I come back, I am used to the volume and intensity and be prepared to filter in wherever AJ needs me and not have to hold back.”

Vierling has missed all but four games this season working his way through a rotator cuff injury. He is expected to rejoin the Toledo Mud Hens in St. Paul and resume his rehab assignment.