Alan Greenblatt, David Kidd, Carl Smith, Governing

State lawmakers face a terrible hangover of problems from 2020. First and foremost is the pandemic, which is at its worst even as vaccinations are rolled out across the country. Caseloads and death tolls are adding uncertainty to the economy, which in turn is hampering state budgets.

Hansi Lo Wang, npr

In the last days of the Trump administration, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham has pressured employees at the agency to speed up the production of a data report about noncitizens, including unauthorized immigrants, the bureau's internal watchdog group says.

Eric Lipton, The New York Times

For decades, waves of electricity poured from this behemoth of a power plant on the high desert plateau of the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, lighting up hundreds of thousands of homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas as it burned 240 rail cars’ worth of coal a day.