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A close-up of police lights. The Alabama Justice Information Commission Thursday threatened to revoke access to criminal justice database to four local law enforcement agencies for not reporting their crime data. (Getty) The Alabama Justice Information Commission Thursday voted to impose sanctions on four law enforcement agencies who did not appear at a meeting to explain the reasons for not reporting their crime numbers to the AJIC. The Napier Field and York police departments and the Perry County and Sumter County sheriffs’ offices will have 15 days to report their statistics or risk losing access to state criminal justice databases. “Agencies have to submit their crime reports to the state,” said Maury Mitchell, the state crime information director for the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, during the meeting. “In between the last commission meeting and today, there were 74 agencies that were still not compliant with submitting what they should have.” ...

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner speaks with reporters in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom) As Election Day approaches, top Democrats on the intelligence committees in Congress are preparing for the possibility that President Donald Trump will allege foreign interference to discredit unfavorable results. And they want leading U.S. intelligence officials to be immediately reachable if he does. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, outlined the scenario — one of among 50 they say they’ve considered — with reporters on Wednesday, less than two weeks before voting ends in the midterm elections. “So when the president makes that announcement, you answer your cellphone to give us information about what’s happening,” Himes said the Democrats have told Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. In recent week...

Members of the Colorado House of Representatives work on the floor during session in May 2022. Colorado has among the nation’s highest rates of women serving in the state legislature. (Pema Baldwin for Colorado Newsline) A record number of women are running for state legislative seats this November, more than two-thirds of whom are Democrats.  Across the 46 states with legislative seats on the ballot, a total of 3,824 women are running — up from 2022’s previous record of 3,621 women candidates, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Women make up 35.5% of all state legislative candidates this cycle. Currently, women hold about one-third of state legislative seats across the country — a record level of representation but nowhere near parity.  While some election cycles have seen spikes in the numbers of women running, the long-term trend has been defined by incremental progress, said Debbie Walsh, director of the research center. “It is a step...

An Avelo Airlines jet in October 2025 in Mesa, Ariz., for use by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation and detainee transfers. The second Trump administration deported nearly a million people as of July 31, according to a new analysis. (Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/Arizona Mirror) The current Trump administration claims its mass deportation efforts have expelled nearly a million people through July of this year, but those include both voluntary returns and people turned around at the border, according to a new analysis by the former chief statistician for the Department of Homeland Security. The level of deportations is sharply higher than during the Biden and first Trump administrations but well below the level of the 2000s. Deportations peaked at about 1.9 million in fiscal year 2000 as border enforcement ramped up under a sweeping immigration enforcement law in 1996. Former DHS official Marc Rosenblum did the analysis , using only public records, for the Migration P...

The U.S. Supreme Court on April 9, 2026. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom) WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday denied the Trump administration’s emergency request to implement a rule that would terminate gender-affirming care for transgender people incarcerated in federal prisons.  It means a lower court order that blocked the policy from going into effect will remain in place for now, and gender-affirming healthcare for transgender inmates will continue.  “This is a critical ruling for our clients and all transgender people in Bureau of Prisons custody,” Li Nowlin-Sohl, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said in a statement. “The denial of medically necessary health care, including gender-affirming health care, to people in prison is a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights.”   The order did not give an explanation. But conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas noted that they would ha...

Sarah Simmons, a midwife and co-owner of Maple Street Birth Center in rural Okanogan County, Wash., holds a newborn. Washington state has among the highest number of birth centers in the country, but a new report identifies 10 states that have none amid a spate of closures over the past three years and reported difficulties with state regulations and costs. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Simmons) Birth centers are an option for those with low-risk pregnancies and are correlated with more positive health outcomes, but 10 states do not have any birth centers at all, and more could be built with certain state policy solutions and different models of care, a new report suggests. Birth centers can be an attractive option for pregnant patients seeking fewer medical interventions and a more “home-like” childbirth experience that is still attended by professionals. Centers are often chosen by Black, Indigenous and Hispanic patients, who experience negative maternal and infant health outcomes at di...