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Detroit Schools to Continue $100 Weekly Perfect Attendance Payments, Add $50 for Middle Schoolers

Detroit Public Schools Community District is expanding an attendance incentive that officials say helped improve turnout among high school students.

Students in grades 6 through 8 can earn $50 for each week of perfect attendance, while high school students can still earn $100 a week.

The expansion comes as chronic absenteeism remains widespread. In 2024-25, 61% of district students missed at least 10% of the school year. Click here to learn more.

 

Meta Platforms faces pivotal trial as opening statements begin in California

OAKLAND, Calif. — Opening statements started Tuesday in a pivotal trial for Meta Platforms in a California federal court, where states are seeking billions of dollars in damages for social media harms to children.

Attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are seeking a financial penalty that could, in theory, total as much as $1.4 trillion plus changes to how the company operates Facebook and Instagram. Twenty-nine states sued the tech giant in 2023 over child safety and privacy — the other 25 will go to trial later. The company also faces lawsuits in state courts.

The lawsuit accuses the social media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms. It also argues that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law. Click here to read more.

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Abdul El-Sayed’s mother worked for designated terror group IARA that ‘provided direct financial support’ to Osama bin Laden, Taliban, Hamas

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed last month highlighted how his mother “taught me so much about both how to stand with others, and how to stand alone.”

In a video posted to TikTok, the former Wayne County health official chatted on a porch swing with Jacqueline El-Sayed, a highly accomplished engineer from Gratiot County, about how his stepmother helped shape his views on life as she helped raise the progressive firebrand in Bloomfield Hills, an upscale suburb of Detroit.

Jacqueline El-Sayed married El-Sayed’s father, Mohamed El-Sayed, not long after he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s with Fatten Fathy Elkomy, the U.S. Senate candidate’s birth mother.

“They ended up getting divorced,” El-Sayed said of his birth parents during a 2017 speech before the Islamic Foundation. “And my mother, she remarried a gentleman who was working as a translator in the Middle East and moved back to the Middle East.” Click here to read more.

 

Alleged kidnapper posed as babysitter on Facebook group, warrant says; video shows children rescued

Lakesha Brown, 42, is charged with kidnapping and cruelty to children. Her arrest warrants state she posed as a babysitter on a “pregnancy mom group” on Facebook to get close to the family.

Police said Brown spent the past year building a relationship with the children’s mother, Elica Redding.

According to arrest warrants, Redding agreed to let Brown babysit the girls on Saturday night. Brown told the mother she was taking the girls to Walmart and Candy Utopia, but failed to show up at a designated grandmother’s house afterward. Click here to read more.

 

Where are Michiganders moving to? U-Haul has some answers

Michigan senior citizens are moving South. The state’s young adults are heading to Chicago or Detroit.

But there are also some surprises in new U-Haul data looking at one-way U-Haul rentals from July 2025 to July 2026. The data includes moves originating in metro Detroit and Grand Rapids.

The analysis breaks the data down by metro area and age group. It shows the top five out-of-state net-gain destinations for each age group, as well as the top five metro areas, which includes in-state moves.

Nationally:

• Baby Boomers across the U.S. are heading to warm climes. Six of the top seven net-gain states for Boomers are in the Southeast and the other is Arizona.

• Generation X and Millennials flocking to Florida and Texas more than anywhere else, although several Midwest states are in the mix for Millennials.

• Generation Z is gravitating major metro areas, including those in Texas and California as well as New York City and Chicago. Click here to read more.

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Democratic AG nominee Eli Savit ignored 500-pound black market marijuana operation

Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit, the Democratic nominee for Michigan Attorney General, is facing criticism for his decision not to prosecute individuals involved in an illicit 500-pound marijuana operation.

“500 pounds of illegally trafficked marijuana. No investigation. No charges. Evidence destroyed,” Eaton County Prosecutor Doug Lloyd, Savit’s Republican competition in the race, posted to X on Friday. “A prosecutor does not get to pick and choose which laws to enforce. My opponent’s record makes clear he believes otherwise.

“Michigan needs an Attorney General who will enforce the law, support law enforcement, and take the job of Michigan’s top cop seriously,” Lloyd wrote. Click here to read more.

 

Murderers. Rapists. Fentanyl Traffickers. Abdul El-Sayed Wants to Abolish the Agency Arresting Them.

As Michigan’s U.S. Senate race heats up, Democratic progressive Abdul El-Sayed continues to embrace a position that few candidates are willing to own: abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On his campaign website, El-Sayed argues the agency “cannot be reformed or retrained” and says it should be dismantled and replaced with a new immigration enforcement structure.

What that new structure is and if criminals would continue to be arrested has not been identified by El-Sayed. Michigan News Source reached out to his campaign for more clarification on what that new structure would be but they did not return our request for comment. Click here to read more.

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5 non-citizens charged with voting in 2024 Michigan general election

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against five non-citizens alleged to have voted in Michigan’s 2024 November general election.

Her office also brought charges against one U.S. citizen accused of registering their non-citizen spouse to vote.

Non-citizens allegedly voting in Michigan

By the numbers:

Sixteen cases of non-citizens voting in the 2024 election were brought to Nessel’s office, in addition to 22 more cases involving non-citizens voting in elections between 2009 and 2025, by the Michigan Department of State.

In addition to the six charged, 10 have been closed without charges, and 22 remain under review. Click here to read more.

 

Flawed drug tests can separate mothers and newborns

Advocates and medical groups are pushing to end childbirth drug testing practices they say are leading tens of thousands of families to face child welfare investigations, criminal allegations and, in some cases, separation from their children.

The urine drug tests, done on both the mother and newborn at childbirth in hospitals, often without explicit consent, are faulty, producing false-positive results nearly half the time, according to The Marshall Project. Even if a positive result is later dismissed, hospitals may still be required to report it to child welfare agencies and, in some cases, to law enforcement.

The degree to which these false results are being reported is staggering.

The Marshall Project discovered more than 70,000 instances after reviewing state and federal data spanning six years in 21 states. Click here to read more.

 

Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing

A robot was on fire. Again.

It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week. Click here to read more.

 

 

Study for unarmed responder program cost Ann Arbor $100k

Ann Arbor officials paid more than $100,000 for a 49-page study considering the city’s new program for unarmed responders.

The Ann Arbor City Council unanimously approved a plan on July 20 for an unarmed response team, but Tree City officials have been considering such a program for five years.

In 2021, the council adopted a resolution to develop an unarmed public safety response program, saying it would ease the burden on police and firefighters.

The city has spent $104,918 in federal stimulus funds on the program, according to a document that Michigan Capitol Confidential obtained through a records request. That money paid for a report prepared by Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants. Click here to read more.

 

Senate kids’ safety probe targets Roblox gaming platform

Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) launched an investigation Wednesday into Roblox’s handling of child safety on its online gaming platform.

“Roblox appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children, and the alleged criminal activity on Roblox warrants congressional scrutiny,” Hawley and Durbin, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, wrote in a letter obtained by POLITICO.

“Roblox is built on the foundation of safety. We do not compromise on that commitment,” Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief safety officer, said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing the facts about how we protect children on the platform.” Click here to read more.

 

El-Sayed Proclaimed ‘Obligation’ To Follow Sharia Law Until the Day He Dies

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once declared his sacred “obligation” to follow Sharia law in every aspect of his life until he meets his maker on the day he dies, according to unearthed comments he made to the New York Times in 2009 as a young man buying his first home.

“Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation,” said El-Sayed, who the Times identified at the time as a 24-year-old medical student and Rhodes scholar who had just taken out a “Sharia-compliant” mortgage to purchase a $123,000 condominium in Ann Arbor. Click here to read more.

 

Doctors profit from gender care: Assistant Secretary for Health talks next steps

A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report released on Thursday alleged that doctors and hospitals pushed and profited from what it calls the fraud of gender medicine, focusing on the growth of medical interventions for gender dysphoria in minors.

The report, titled “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of Gender Medicine,” examines the expansion of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for minors. The report alleged that financial incentives and institutional pressures encouraged providers and hospitals to promote those interventions and that billing practices and clinical guidelines contributed to systemic fraud and harm. Click here to read more.

 

Flock will add privacy guardrails to camera systems amid backlash

Flock Safety will implement new privacy and data retention policies as pressure grows on the automated license plate operator to prevent its technology from being abused or used to conduct mass surveillance.

The company announced Thursday it will shorten the recommended default data retention window from 30 to seven days to cut the amount of time data will sit in Flock’s systems. Agencies can still set their own retention period in coordination with state or local policy.

It will also introduce an option for cities to control which types of offenses call for other agencies’ access to the Flock cameras, in an effort to give “communities more control over data sharing” while still permitting collaborations when needed. Click here to read more.