More On Scott Brown, And I Think I May Be In Love. ...in A Manly Way Of Course...

The Colorado legislature is meeting this week in a special session on property taxes — for the second time in a year. Given the twists and turns in the state’s property tax debate, it’s easy to be confused about why lawmakers — who are on the verge of passing a breakthrough deal — have convened again.

The department that runs Colorado’s Medicaid program overshot its budget for the most recent fiscal year by more than $120 million after underestimating how sick its members would be. Medicaid rolls were in flux over the last year as states started removing people for the first time since early 2020. During the COVID-19 public health emergency, states couldn’t kick people off Medicaid, meaning they spent much of the last year determining who still qualifies. For the fiscal year that ended in June, the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing had to attempt to project not only how many people would lose Medicaid coverage, either because they weren’t eligible or didn’t return the paperwork, but also how much the remaining members’ medical care would cost. The forecast was close in terms of the number of people who would keep their coverage, but slightly underestimated how much care they would need, department spokesman Marc Williams said.

A deal to avert a ballot box battle over property taxes cleared the halfway point of the legislative process Wednesday, setting it up for final passage later this week. Just after noon, the Colorado House passed the measure, which would provide homeowners and other property owners with modest additional tax relief, on a 45-18 vote, as 15 of the majority Democrats voted against it.

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. There were days the pair talked to each other more than they spoke to the people who slept under their roofs. Kamala Harris was the state attorney general of California and Beau Biden was in the same role over in Delaware, where so many of the banks she was fighting were based.

Last week, Donald Trump sat down with former-MTV-reality-star-turned-comedian-turned-podcaster Theo Von. The interview was surreal. Von repeatedly called Trump “homie” and explained how much he had previously enjoyed/hated cocaine—”You think it’s going to be easy, and then you’re go-kart racing with hookers and stuff, and it gets bad,” Von explained. The interview and and its implications are complicated to unwind—Trump himself looked befuddled for large parts of it—and Von is not without his own issues.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As record-breaking heatwaves continue across parts of the United States, a new report shows that heat-related deaths in the country rose by 117 percent between 1999 and 2023. The report, released on Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that from 1999 to 2023, there have been more than 21,500 heat-related deaths recorded in the US. The researchers used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also found that 1,069 deaths were heat-related in 1999, compared with 2,325 in 2023—representing a 117 percent increase. “As temperatures continue to rise because of climate change, the recent increasing trend is likely to continue.” The lowest number of heat-related deaths in the study period was 311 in 2004, the researchers said, whereas the highest was 2,325 in 2023. Before 2016, the researchers said that the number of heat-related deaths showed “year-to-year variability,” with spikes in 2006 and 2011.