News Digest

  After several cash-flush pandemic years, school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, with pressure closing in on multiple fronts. A flow of federal dollars — $122 billion meant to help schools recover from the pandemic — is running dry in September, leaving schools with less money for tutors, summer school and other supports that have funded pandemic recovery efforts over the last three years. At the same time, declining student enrollment — a consequence of lower birthrates and a growing school choice movement — is catching up to some districts. The result: Districts across the country must make tough decisions about cuts that will affect millions of families as soon as the next school year. The cuts, which many districts put off during the pandemic, could interrupt the recovery of U.S. students, who by and large  have not made up their pandemic losses .

  Today, Vice President Harris announced the recipients of new grants under the Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO Housing) grant competition with the goal of building more housing, and lowering housing and rental costs for American families. The President and the Vice President know that the cost of housing is too high. That’s why the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) created PRO Housing a first-of-its-kind program that provides funding to communities actively addressing barriers to building new units. Funding will support updates to state and local housing plans, land use policies, permitting processes, and other actions aimed at building and preserving more affordable housing. We are starting to see some progress. More housing units are under construction during this Administration than at any time in the last 50 years, rents have fallen over the last year in many places, and the homeownership rate is higher now than before the pandemic. But rent...

  Construction of new homes in the United States dropped below expectations in May as builders pull back on new residential projects largely in response to high interest rates, reinforcing concerns about stubbornly high housing prices. Government  data  released on Thursday showed that new-home construction, or housing starts, fell 5.5 percent last month to an annualized rate of 1.28 million, a sign of more cracks in the already shaky housing market. Slower construction of both single-family and multifamily homes contributed to the overall drop. Building permits dipped 3.8 percent, pointing to less future construction. This downturn in home building comes as the average rate on 30-year mortgages, the nation’s most popular home loan, has reached  highs not seen in decades , though the rate  dipped slightly  this week to 6.87 percent, Freddie Mac reported on Thursday. The magnitude of the decrease in construction last month underscores that high interest rate...

  Thousands of auto dealers across the United States and Canada are suffering disruptions to their operations as a result of cyberattacks on a provider of critical software and data services used in auto retailing. The provider, CDK Global, said it was targeted in two attacks on Wednesday, prompting the company to shut down its systems to prevent the loss of customer data and to allow testing and other measures to restore its services. “We are assessing the impact and providing regular updates to our customers,” CDK Global said in a statement. “We remain vigilant in our efforts to reinstate our services and get our dealers back to business as usual as quickly as possible.” CDK provides services to more than 15,000 retail locations. Its dealer management systems store customer records and automate much of the paperwork and data involved in selling and servicing cars and trucks. Dealers said the outage had slowed sales and forced them to find alternative methods to produce the titles...

  In July 2016, a heat wave hit Boston, with daytime temperatures averaging 92 degrees for five days in a row. Some local university students who were staying in town for the summer got lucky and were living in dorms with central air-conditioning. Other students, not so much — they were stuck in older dorms without A.C. Jose Guillermo Cedeño Laurent, a Harvard researcher at the time, decided to take advantage of this natural experiment to see how heat, and especially heat at night,  affected the young adults’ cognitive performance . He had 44 students perform math and self-control tests five days before the temperature rose, every day during the heat wave, and two days after. “Many of us think that we are immune to heat,” said Dr. Cedeño, now an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health and justice at Rutgers University. “So something that I wanted to test was whether that was really true.” It turns out even young, healthy college students are affected by hi...

  Heather Massey brought Ladybird to the veterinarian when the 9-year-old mutt   began having seizures. A scan from an M.R.I. machine revealed bad news: brain cancer. With the prognosis grim, Ms. Massey decided against further treatment at the animal hospital near her home in Athens, Ga., and Ladybird died four months later. The M.R.I. scan and related care had cost nearly $2,000, which Ms. Massey put on a specialty credit card she had learned about at a previous vet visit. That was in 2018. She is still paying off the debt, with more than 30 percent interest. “Could I afford to do that? Not really,” said Ms. Massey, 52, who is disabled and does not work. “Was it worth it to me? Yes.” Ms. Massey’s experience illustrates the expensive new realities of owning a pet. For decades, veterinarians typically operated their own clinics, shepherding generations of pets from birth to death. They neutered, vaccinated and pulled thorns from paws and noses. When animals became seriously ill...

  Amy Conroy sat alone in a veterinary exam room, hands clutching a water bottle, eyes blinking back tears. Her 16-year-old cat, Leisel, had been having trouble breathing. Now, she was waiting for an update. The door opened, and Laurie Maxwell came in. Ms. Maxwell works for MedVet, a 24-hour emergency veterinary hospital in Chicago. But when she took a seat opposite Ms. Conroy on a Monday evening in May, she explained that she wasn’t there for the cat. She was there for Ms. Conroy. Ms. Maxwell is a veterinary social worker, a job in a little-known corner of the therapy world that focuses on easing the stress, worry and grief that can arise when a pet needs medical care. Pets no longer exist at the periphery of the human family — to take one example, a survey in 2022 found that almost  half of Americans  sleep with an animal in their bed. As that relationship has intensified, so has the stress when something goes wrong. Those emotions can spill over at animal hospitals, wh...

  When Nathanael was in kindergarten, he told his mother, Diana Lopez, that he did not want to return to school — ever. His teacher yelled at him, he said. And when Ms. Lopez picked him up from school, he would often immediately start to cry. Nathanael has autism, and in a busy classroom of 25 children, the teacher seemed to have few strategies for working with him, Ms. Lopez recalled. This year at a new school, Nathanael, 7, was happier. He shared a teacher with only six other students — not in one classroom, but in the entire school. Nathanael attended a microschool, an increasingly popular type of super-small, largely unregulated private school, often serving fewer students than are enrolled in a single classroom at a traditional school. The programs are benefiting from two trends: Since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted schooling, many parents have rethought their children’s education, and are open to nontraditional options. And Republican state lawmakers and donors, who have lon...

  For 49 years after   Roe v. Wade , Americans had the right to obtain an abortion if they became pregnant. Then, two years ago, with   Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , the Supreme Court put an end to it. The Biden administration and some blue states — supported by a network of nonprofits focused on reproductive care — aggressively sought to compensate, while many red states enacted near-total bans on abortion.  But  Dobbs  has nevertheless had a devastating effect on pregnant people in huge swaths of the country. While the number of abortions across the country  actually increased last year  — thanks in large part to increasingly cheap and accessible medication abortion — that has not changed the fundamental realities of post- Dobbs  America. Large reproductive care deserts have emerged in which there are no abortion providers for hundreds of miles. Pregnant people are being denied necessary medical care as their doctors fear t...

  Across the country, communities are experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change. From record-high average temperatures and extreme heat to changing precipitation patterns and sea-level rise, climate impacts – including disasters made worse by climate change – are affecting every corner of society and every community in America. The magnitude of challenges posed by the climate crisis was underscored last year when the nation endured a record 28 individual billion-dollar extreme weather and climate disasters that caused more than $90 billion in aggregate damage. Just this week, more than 82 million Americans have been under heat alerts due to extreme temperatures made worse by climate change. That is why President Biden is leading the most ambitious climate, conservation, and environmental justice agenda in history, which includes directing federal agencies to lead by example. Today, the Biden-Harris Administration released updated  Climate Adaptation Plans develope...