Newton

• The City of Newton Street Division will temporarily close eight residential streets June 23-25 for a slurry seal resurfacing project. →
• Newton City Manager Daniela Rivas requested $85,000 in the 2027 budget to hire a management analyst to ease administrative workloads. →
• Newton plans to launch a seasonal abatement crew and is considering hiring a second code enforcement officer to target blight. →
• The Newton City Commission expressed support for funding local nonprofits using the city's economic development sales tax fund. →
• Newton proposed adding a full-time tourism coordinator to be funded entirely by the city's transient guest tax fund. →
• The City of Newton is installing access-controlled doors and upgrading parking lot lighting to improve security at Newton City Hall. →
• We've got a beautiful day ahead in Newton with partly sunny skies and a very comfortable high of 79°F.

Click here for local obituaries

Click here for local jail logs

🌾 Kansas

• Four Republican candidates for Kansas governor clashed at a June 19 KNSS radio forum in Wichita, with Charlotte O'Hara pledging to fire all Kansas State Department of Education staff and Ty Masterson defending his vote for state bonds tied to a Chiefs stadium. →

• A 2025 Kansas law could allow a governor's appointee to fill Sen. Roger Marshall's seat for up to two years without facing voters if Marshall resigned after May 1 of an even-numbered year, though Marshall has said he plans to seek reelection. →

• One person was killed when an EF2 tornado with 135 mph winds struck northern Sedgwick County around 1:14 a.m. June 21, destroying a manufactured home with no active tornado warning in effect at the time. →

• Kansas feedlots held about 2.42 million cattle on June 1, up 3% from a year earlier, while May placements fell 10% and marketings dropped 11%, according to USDA's monthly Cattle on Feed report. →

• The Kansas Board of Regents voted June 17 to adopt formal definitions of DEI-related content and Critical Race Theory for university courses, clarifying that discussions of race, racism, or Civil Rights history do not by themselves constitute DEI content. →

🇺🇸 US

• Two new studies published in Nature found AI systems matched or outperformed physicians in simulated medical tasks, with Google's AMIE system rivaling primary care doctors and the MIRA agent diagnosing emergency cases correctly 88% of the time versus doctors' 78%. →

• Sen. Mark Warner testified that NSA chief Gen. Joshua Rudd told him Anthropic's Mythos model breached nearly all agency classified systems within hours during a red-team exercise, prompting the U.S. to ban foreign nationals from accessing Mythos 5 and Fable 5 — the first American export controls applied directly to an AI model. →

• Valar Atomics' Ward 250 reactor achieved self-sustaining criticality at a Utah energy lab June 18, becoming the second advanced reactor to hit the milestone under the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program as the government races to meet a July 4 deadline for three designs. →

• President Trump unveiled a converted Qatari-owned Boeing 747-8 at Joint Base Andrews on June 19 as an interim Air Force One, with the $400 million conversion filling the gap left by Boeing's repeated delays on two purpose-built Air Force One replacements, now not expected until roughly 2028. →

• The U.S. men's national soccer team clinched first place in World Cup Group D with a 2-0 win over Australia on June 19, advancing to the knockout round with back-to-back victories for the first time since 1930. →

Weather

JUNE 22 1944: FDR SIGNS G.I. BILL

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the G.I. Bill, provided returning World War II veterans with education funding, unemployment support, and low-interest home and business loans. By opening college and homeownership to millions of veterans, it reshaped the American middle class and helped power decades of postwar economic growth.