Reclamation's two official August 24-Month Studies disagree about the 1,010 ft trigger. The 6.0 maf run bottoms at 1,005.63 ft, the 7.0 maf run at 1,013.92 ft
Reclamation published the August 2026 24-Month Study as two simultaneous official reports. The 6.0 maf Lake Powell run puts Lake Mead at 1,005.63 ft in July 2027, below the 1,010 ft consultation trigger written into the new 2027-2028 guidelines; the 7.0 maf run bottoms at 1,013.92 ft and stays clear.
Twenty comments on OPM's reduction-in-force rule are posted, numbered and unreachable. The rule takes effect on 2 September
OPM says it received 721 comments on the rule that puts performance ahead of seniority in federal layoffs. Regulations.gov numbered 721 and lists 701. The other twenty load at their own addresses — including the Wounded Warrior Project's — and appear in no list and no search.
The federal fire scoreboard passed 7 million acres in a single overnight step. Ninety-seven per cent of it was one column catching up
The daily federal situation report’s year-to-date total jumped 653,852 acres between its 14 and 15 August editions — the largest one-day step of 2026. The Bureau of Land Management’s column supplied 636,749 of it, on a morning its own Northwest fires reported almost no growth.
Reclamation’s projection for Lake Mead on 1 January 2027 fell 19 feet in a single edition. The rulebook that would have turned that into a water cut expires first
Twelve consecutive 24-Month Studies show the Bureau of Reclamation’s forecast for the date that sets Lower Basin shortage tiers. It dropped 19.33 feet between the April and May editions — and the 2007 guidelines that gave the number its force run out on 31 December.
USAspending shows two Pentagon accounts obligating more money than they have. One of them to six decimal places of exactly double
The federal spending site’s own account pages report the Payment to DoD Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Care Fund obligating $37.108bn against $18.554bn of budgetary resources. Forty-four Defense accounts show the same integer-multiple pattern, and none did a year ago.
The federal fire scoreboard says 6.35m acres. NIFC’s own forecasters put the season past 7m on 31 July
The daily situation report and the agency’s August outlook describe two different fire seasons. NIFC wrote the discrepancy down itself, ten days ago, and the two totals have still not met.
The Pueblo of Acoma waited 251 days for a disaster declaration, the longest in FEMA’s record
FEMA publishes the date a request arrives and the date it is answered. Put them end to end and DR-4918 is the slowest of 2,870 major disasters going back to 1953.
USGS earthquake alerts pick their historical comparisons from a spreadsheet that ends in 2007
Every significant earthquake gets a PAGER alert naming up to three previous nearby quakes. Across 730 alerts since 2018 the alerts printed 1,712 such comparisons, and not one is dated later than 20 December 2007.
Cyclospora outbreak triples to 6,358 cases in 15 states after the CDC widened what counts as a case
The count had not moved for twelve days. Then the CDC expanded the outbreak from people who ate at Taco Bell to anyone who ate the recalled lettuce, and it tripled — largely with illnesses that began before the recall.
OPM gave 30 days of comment on the rules taking appeals off the MSPB, and 60 on the one that left it alone
Four civil-service rules landed in a single Federal Register issue on Monday. The two that replace the Merit Systems Protection Board as adjudicator were open for 30 and 31 days. Commenters called that unlawfully short, and OPM’s answer is printed in the rule.
America’s two largest wildfires have cost less between them than one Colorado fire a third their size
A single query against the federal incident feed puts Aspen Acres at $97m on 101,961 acres. Rowe Creek Complex and Big Grass, 699,000 acres between them, come to $82m. What a fire costs turns out to have very little to do with how much of it burns.
FEMA has started releasing disaster declarations in batches. All 35 this year came on seven days
FEMA approved five major disaster declarations at once on Monday. Every one of 2026's 35 has landed on one of seven days, and the median wait from a state's request is now 47 days.
Cyclospora’s first two deaths, and Michigan alone reports six times the national outbreak count
Michigan attributes the deaths to its own 11,234-case outbreak, not to the nine-state outbreak the CDC has been counting at 1,947. One state is reporting 67% more cases than the CDC records for the whole country.
Tariff refunds have reached $119bn, and the trade court is taking cases at a pace it has seen once before
Treasury’s daily ledger shows $118.9bn paid out through the Customs and Border Protection account in the first ten months of this fiscal year, against $10.8bn in all of the last one. The money started moving in May.
The FDA’s drug shortage database holds 1,181 open records. They are 73 drugs
The agency writes one shortage record per package, per manufacturer, so the same drug can appear ninety times. Counted properly, half the list has been in shortage for more than four and a half years, and four entries date from early 2012.
The lettuce outbreak now accounts for under a third of confirmed cyclospora cases, down from about half
The CDC’s named outbreak has been frozen at 1,947 cases since 24 July, while its national surveillance page — updated on the 28th — moved from 4,173 laboratory-confirmed cases to 6,707 across 45 states.
The national wildfire scoreboard says this year is 130% of normal. In the Northwest it is missing more acres than it counts
The federal situation report’s year-to-date table credits the Northwest with 776,014 acres burned. Its own active-incident table, on the same page, puts the fires currently assigned there at 1,835,823 — a gap of more than a million acres, and the report footnotes why.
COVID emergency-room visits hit their lowest level on record in June, and the summer rise is starting from there
CDC’s emergency-department surveillance recorded COVID at 0.09% of visits in mid-June, the lowest in the series’ 1,400-day history. Late July is running at 0.21% — a rise, but 71% below the same week last year.
West Virginia and Kentucky are waiting on three disaster declarations. FEMA’s own records show the median wait this year is 53 days
Two governors have three pending requests between them, one of them expedited. The federal register of declarations shows what usually happens next — and that emergency declarations arrive in a day while the ones that pay households take months.
CDC figures show the lettuce recall accounts for under half of this year’s confirmed cyclospora cases
The Taco Bell-linked outbreak has grown to 1,947 cases across nine states. But the CDC has logged 4,173 laboratory-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases nationally since 1 May, plus more than 7,400 awaiting confirmation — which resolves the case-count gap this site reported last week.
Cyclospora: Michigan alone reports 7,171 cases as FDA retracts its only positive test
Michigan’s state count of 7,171 is more than four times the federal outbreak figure, and the FDA has withdrawn the one lettuce sample that tested positive.
Cyclospora outbreak tied to Taco Bell lettuce reaches 1,644 cases in five states
Cyclospora infections linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell have reached 1,644 reported cases across five states, with 94 hospitalisations. The FDA traced the lettuce to a single Mexican supplier.
Andrew and Tristan Tate arrested in Miami as UK seeks extradition on 38 new charges
US Marshals arrested the Tate brothers in Miami on Saturday on a sealed warrant. British prosecutors have brought 38 further charges including rape and sex trafficking, taking the total to 59.
Heat Dome's Record Tally Comes Into Focus as Relief Nears for the East
As the Fourth of July heat dome that put more than 185 million Americans under alerts begins to break down, the record tally is coming into focus — from Newark's 105°F to Atlantic City's 105°F — with cooler air set to reach the East by midweek.
Sail250 Fills New York Harbor With Tall Ships for America's 250th Fourth of July
The Sail250 parade sent 45 tall ships and more than 40 warships up the Hudson on the Fourth of July — organizers' pick for the largest maritime gathering in U.S. history, and the biggest tall-ship fleet New York has seen since the 1976 Bicentennial.
AI Screen Turns Up New Weapons Against Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea
A machine-learning search through millions of molecules has identified two experimental antibiotics that kill drug-resistant gonorrhea in new ways — including one that disables a bacterial enzyme no existing drug targets, a lab at Harvard, MIT and the Broad reports.
Heat dome peaks for July Fourth with 185 million under alerts and 300-plus records in reach
The heat dome The Fold tracked building in late June crested over the holiday weekend, with more than 185 million Americans under heat alerts and over 300 daily records expected to fall from the Plains to the East Coast by Saturday.
A study of 720,000 patients finds most referred for a kidney transplant never reach the waitlist
Analyzing records from 720,348 adults referred for kidney transplantation, researchers found nearly half never began the evaluation and only about 19 percent made the waitlist — a bottleneck the authors say the usual referral count conceals.
US declines to renew USMCA, pushing North American trade pact into a decade of annual reviews
The Trump administration refused to renew the USMCA at its July 1 deadline, triggering yearly reviews of a pact covering $1.6 trillion in trade. Without a deal, it expires in 2036.