GOP spending bills run into intraparty friction in House

WASHINGTON — House Republican appropriators are running into headwinds in their attempt to move fiscal 2026 spending bills before the August break, struggling both with a tight schedule and intraparty differences on funding levels that threaten House passage.

House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., conceded Tuesday that his panel won’t meet its target of marking up all dozen bills before recess, with the final two — Labor-HHS-Education and Financial Services — likely punted until September.

And getting any more bills through the floor before August, beyond the $831.5 billion Defense measure that the House is taking up this week, may be a tall order as well.

Conservatives are starting to notice that bills being reported out of the Appropriations Committee are well over President Donald Trump’s request, which sought deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending — $163 billion, a nearly 23% reduction — while holding defense funding flat. Total cuts would net out at around 10% below final fiscal 2025 levels.

—CQ-Roll Call

‘A black hole’: Attorneys say they still can’t reach clients in Alligator Alcatraz

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — One week after the first detainees began arriving at the Florida-run detention center for migrants in the Everglades, Katie Blankenship, a Miami immigration attorney, showed up at the gates of Alligator Alcatraz with a list of five names and a demand: Let me in to see them.

She waited two and a half hours, only to be told to put her name on a list and to wait between 24 and 48 hours for a call back.

“These folks have due process and the right to counsel,” Blankenship told the employee manning the gate on July 10. “They cannot be denied counsel for this long and we cannot have a black hole of information where we do not know how to contact clients.”

That call has yet to come. Nearly two weeks since the site opened, lawyers say Florida’s pop-up detention facility has been something of a black box, with detainees going in and little information coming out, except for outgoing calls from the facility.

—Miami Herald

UT Dallas scientists create food sensor that detects unwanted bacteria, chemicals

DALLAS — Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have created a portable food safety device they hope will one day be used at every level of the food industry — from processing facilities to home kitchens.

Called READ FWDx, short for Rapid Electroanalytic Diagnostic Food Water Diagnosis, this proof-of-concept device is designed to detect unwanted foodborne bacteria such as E. coli, listeria and salmonella. It can also pick up on common herbicides including paraquat dichloride and glyphosate and chemicals like antibiotics.

“We have so many gadgets that measure all our body parameters, like heart rate, blood pressure and blood sugar,” said Shalini Prasad, a professor of bioengineering and biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas who cofounded EnLiSense to commercialize the device and other sensor technologies her lab has developed. “But what do we have in the context of our food?”

The research comes as food recalls are on the rise. According to some estimates, food recalls increased by 15% between 2020 to 2024.

—The Dallas Morning News

Netanyahu’s coalition shrinks after ultra-Orthodox party quits

An Israeli ultra-Orthodox party said it’s walking out of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, threatening to leave the government with a razor-thin majority in parliament.

The United Torah Judaism party announced late on Monday it would quit in protest at a bill seeking to curtail the exemptions from military draft, long enjoyed by ultra-Orthodox Jews on religious grounds.

Without the party’s seven lawmakers — whose departure comes into force on Wednesday — Netanyahu will wield just 61 of the 120 seats in parliament, making him vulnerable to no-confidence motions.

The loss of UTJ will also undermine Netanyahu’s ability to deliver on a truce with Iran-backed Hamas, forcing him to lean on far-right nationalists in the coalition who have balked at the Gaza ceasefire plan proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

—Bloomberg News