TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas must stop allowing transgender people to change the sex listed on their driver’s licenses, a state-court judge ordered Monday as part of a lawsuit filed by the state’s Republican attorney general.

District Judge Teresa Watson's order will remain in effect for up to two weeks, although she can extend it. But it's significant because transgender people have been able to change their driver's licenses in Kansas for at least four years, and almost 400 people have done it. For now, Kansas will be among only a few states that don't allow any such changes.

The judge issued the order three days after Attorney General Kris Kobach sued two officials in Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's administration. Kelly announced last month that the state's motor vehicles division would continue changing driver's licenses for transgender people so that their sex listing matches their gender identities.

Kobach contends that a law, which took effect on July 1, prevents such changes and requires the state to reverse any previous changes in its records. It defines “male” and “female” so that Kansas law does not recognize the gender identities of transgender, non-binary or gender non-conforming people.

Florida is America’s inflation hotspot, thanks to a persistent problem with sky-high housing costs.

The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area has the highest inflation rate of metro areas with more than 2.5 million residents, with a 9% inflation rate for the 12 months ended in April.

That’s more than double the national average of 4%, according to data from the Consumer Price Index. The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro had the third-highest inflation rate in the country, at 7.3% for the year ended in May.

Other metro areas, however, have seen some welcome progress. Minneapolis had an inflation rate of 1.8% in May from a year earlier, the lowest of the 23 metro areas for which the Labor Department publishes inflation data. Urban Hawaii had the second lowest inflation rate at 2% — mirroring the Federal Reserve’s target for its preferred inflation gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures index.

Here are some notable inflation trends for the biggest metros in the US and the dynamics behind those shifts.

Hernando County elementary school students no longer have access to the book “Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?”

The school board banned it in June, with two of the five members voicing concerns that it could expose children to the topic of gender identity. But the tie-breaking vote from board chairperson Gus Guadagnino is what has parent Kim Mulrooney most upset.

Guadagnino told Suncoast News, a subsidiary of the Times Publishing Company, that he thought the book was “stupid” and he’d rather see children reading something more substantial. That’s not a legally valid reason for removing materials, said Mulrooney, who sat on the Pine Grove Elementary advisory panel that unanimously backed the book after a resident challenged it.

Mulrooney wants to appeal, but the district says the board vote is final. Soon, though, that should change.

This past spring, lawmakers added a provision to the law governing book objections that would allow parents to request a state magistrate review if they disagree with a school board’s action on a challenge. After hearing information from all sides, the magistrate would recommend a resolution to the State Board of Education, which would make a final decision.

School districts would be responsible for the cost of the review.

Hernando County elementary school students no longer have access to the book “Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?”

The school board banned it in June, with two of the five members voicing concerns that it could expose children to the topic of gender identity. But the tie-breaking vote from board chairperson Gus Guadagnino is what has parent Kim Mulrooney most upset.

Guadagnino told Suncoast News, a subsidiary of the Times Publishing Company, that he thought the book was “stupid” and he’d rather see children reading something more substantial. That’s not a legally valid reason for removing materials, said Mulrooney, who sat on the Pine Grove Elementary advisory panel that unanimously backed the book after a resident challenged it.

Mulrooney wants to appeal, but the district says the board vote is final. Soon, though, that should change.

This past spring, lawmakers added a provision to the law governing book objections that would allow parents to request a state magistrate review if they disagree with a school board’s action on a challenge. After hearing information from all sides, the magistrate would recommend a resolution to the State Board of Education, which would make a final decision.

School districts would be responsible for the cost of the review.

WASHINGTON (AP) — After major blows to his agenda by the Supreme Court, President Joe Biden is intent on making sure voters will have the final say.

When the court's conservative majority effectively killed his plan to cancel or reduce federal student loan debts for millions of people, Biden said, “Republicans snatched away the hope that they were given.” When the justices ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, he said, “This is not a normal court.” When they overturned Roe v. Wade and a national right to abortion last year, the president said, “Voters need to make their voices heard.”

As Biden heads into the 2024 election, he is running not only against the Republicans who control one-half of Congress but also against the conservative bloc that dominates the nation's highest court. It's a subtle but significant shift in approach toward the Supreme Court, treating it more like a political entity even as Biden stops short of calling for an overhaul.

That shift is becoming apparent in everything from the White House's messaging to its legal strategy.

A New York state judge has issued a stay on a New York City rule that would require food delivery companies to pay drivers an almost $18 per hour minimum wage.

New York State Supreme Court Judge Nicholas Moyne issued a preliminary injunction on Friday to pause the rule from going into effect next week after lawsuits were filed jointly by DoorDash and Grubhub and separately by Uber on Thursday.

Moyne set a hearing for July 31 to hear arguments on whether the injunction should stand while the legal challenges play out.

The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection set the rule requiring food delivery workers for apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash to receive at least $17.96 per hour, a significant increase from the average $7.09 per hour that they currently make. Officials said this type of policy is a first for any place in the United States.

The minimum wage would be set to rise to $18.96 hourly in April 2024 and $19.96 hourly in April 2025.

As 2024 approaches, Republicans are struggling with how to defend abortion bans to the American people. Polls continue to show that the laws are deeply unpopular, and support for abortion rights is at the highest it’s ever been in the country’s history. It’s not so easy to talk up legislation that the vast majority of voters oppose—but conservative lawmakers and strategists think they may have the answer: Exceptions.

The only thing that Americans want more than broad access to abortion is access to abortion for sexual violence victims and those whose health and lives are in danger. The polling is downright astronomical—even in red states, even among Republicans. And so it makes sense that conservatives would focus on exceptions; they desperately need an abortion stance that’s popular.

Best of all for the GOP, exceptions aren’t real. They’re deliberately designed to be unusable. So when Republicans announce their support for so-called exceptions—loudly proclaiming that they’re willing to meet in the middle—they’re presenting a compromise that doesn’t actually exist. For them, it’s a win-win.

And while Republican legislators claim that they are ‘clarifying’ the laws, abortion bans will always be written so that no one can access care. Because the purpose of exceptions was never about allowing abortion in certain cases—but to make Republicans look better. As the Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash says, “Exceptions function mainly as PR tools to make abortion bans seem less cruel than they are and distract from the inhumanity of the ban itself.”

The end of a Supreme Court term always sparks a lively conversation about how to characterize what just happened, and this year was no exception. In refusing to weaken the Voting Rights Act any further, did the court show itself to be a bit less dogmatically conservative than the year before? Did the 6-to-3 rejection of a dangerous theory that would have stripped state courts of the authority to review election laws show that the justices could still build bridges across their ideological divide?

Yes, democracy survived, and that’s a good thing. But to settle on that theme is to miss the point of a term that was in many respects the capstone of the 18-year tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts. To understand today’s Supreme Court, to see it whole, demands a longer timeline. To show why, I offer a thought experiment. Suppose a modern Rip Van Winkle went to sleep in September 2005 and didn’t wake up until last week. Such a person would awaken in a profoundly different constitutional world, a world transformed, term by term and case by case, at the Supreme Court’s hand.

To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies.

These goals were hardly new, but to conservatives’ bewilderment and frustration, the court under the previous chief justice, the undeniably conservative William Rehnquist, failed to accomplish a single one of them. In fact, to any conservative longing for change, the situation in 2005 must have appeared grim indeed. Not only had the Rehnquist court reaffirmed the right to abortion in the 1992 Casey decision; in 2000 it overturned a state ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, a law aimed at enlisting the court in a graphic anti-abortion narrative.

On gun rights, the court was maintaining a decades-long silence despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s public call in 1997 to revisit the Second Amendment and the George W. Bush administration’s startling advice to the court five years later that the federal government was ready, for the first time, to support the individual-right position on the ownership of firearms when an appropriate case arrived.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has rejected county attorneys' request to undo a controversial executive order that hamstrings them from prosecuting cases related to abortion — a move that paves the way for a lawsuit over the order that even the Democratic governor acknowledges might never have any effect.

In a two-page letter responding to concerns from 12 of the state's 15 county attorneys, Hobbs wrote that she would not rescind her June 22 order attempting to give Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes sole authority to prosecute abortion cases. In practice, that order would prevent the filing of any cases because Mayes has said she will not prosecute any doctors who provide abortions.

Hobbs defended her order as a solution to the uncertainty created when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade a year ago, a precedent-altering decision that left it up to states to determine abortion laws. In Arizona, that left confusion because two conflicting laws were on the books.

Providers for a time halted all abortions in the state, before courts determined a ban on abortions after 15 weeks was the prevailing law, though an appeal is ongoing about whether a near-total ban that's existed since 1864 supersedes that law.

"It is against this backdrop that I issued this order, in an effort to provide consistency — and assurance to patients, providers, and the people of Arizona — on a critical issue of personal freedom and well-being," the governor wrote.

In her letter, Hobbs notes the reality that Republican Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell and other county attorneys have no active cases related to abortion, nor interest in bringing them.