By Lori Kersey | Deputy editor
“When we go around the state and when we talk with homeowners and business owners about their experiences around heavy rainfall, it is a pretty consistent story: It seems like it's raining harder, more frequently.” — Nicolas Zegre, director of the Mountain Hydrology Laboratory at West Virginia University
Several heavily damaged vehicles are shown in Wheeling Creek near Junior Avenue in Wheeling, West Virginia, after flooding Saturday, June 14, 2025. (Amy Essington | Essington Creative)
By Caity Coyne
In the decade since the devastating 2016 floods that cost 23 people their lives, West Virginia has seen the number of flooding events in the state more than double compared to the 10 years before, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s storm database.
NATIONAL
Attendees sit in the grass in front of the Ferris wheel at the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 Great American State Fair on the National Mall on Thursday, June 25, 2026. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
By Ashley Murray
WASHINGTON — Visitors from across the United States traveled to the National Mall Thursday for the opening day of the Great American State Fair, a days-long event that is part of President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial.
By Jennifer Shutt
WASHINGTON — Republicans have one more opportunity to use the complex process they relied on to enact their “big, beautiful” law and provide tens of billions in additional funding for immigration enforcement — a chance that becomes less likely the more divisions over a voter identification bill splinter the party.
By Robbie Sequeira
Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson decision — which allowed governments to enforce public camping bans without violating the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment — more than 350 cities and 14 states have adopted laws or measures to crack down on street homelessness.
By Jacob Fischler
John Bolton, a national security adviser to President Donald Trump in his first term, pleaded guilty Friday to a federal charge of mishandling classified information, the Department of Justice said in a news release Friday.
By Amelia Twyman
WASHINGTON — Members of the New Democrat Coalition asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday to provide fresh details about the nation’s screwworm outbreak and demanded that the Trump administration allocate more resources to containing the spread.
ICYMI
Trump refashions campaign rhetoric for Freedom 250 kickoff | Ashley Murray and Sam Gauntt
Narrowed Education Department definition of ‘professional’ degrees stopped in federal court | Shauneen Miranda
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