NEXSTAR) — It’s nearly fall, which means it’s nearly time for the majority of the U.S. to switch their clocks back an hour as daylight saving time comes to an end. You’ll gain an hour of sleep for one day only, Nov. 2, but will otherwise see the sun set earlier for several weeks.

The approaching biannual change also prompts invigorated conversations about “locking the clocks” and putting the nation on a permanent, year-round time. 

There are arguments for both sides of the clock, largely focused on whether the “extra” hour of daylight should occur in the morning or at night. 

The value — or drawback — of either can vary depending on where you live.

Arizona, for example, is one of two states that observe year-round standard time, an option afforded them by Congress. By not jumping ahead an hour in spring, most of the state (the Navajo Nation does not follow permanent standard time) sees an earlier sunset that can offer quicker reprieve from hot summer days. 

In Phoenix, where temperatures have been in the 100s and 110s this month, the sun has been setting well before 7:30 p.m. local time. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, where temperatures have been about the same, the sun has been setting closer to 8 p.m. local time.

With earlier sunsets in Arizona, residents are able to get out and run errands in the cool mornings versus the hotter afternoons and evenings.

In states that have colder winters than Arizona and Nevada, however, the extra hour of sunlight later on in the day during summer can be welcoming. In Wisconsin, for example, the sun would set well before 8 p.m. — and sometimes before 7 p.m. — if the state observed year-round standard time like Arizona. That would mean fewer post-work hours to enjoy the short-lived summer temperatures.

For most of us, winters currently feature earlier sunrises and sunsets. Permanent daylight saving time would mean later sunrises and sunsets. 

That might be enjoyable if you dislike the sun setting before 5 p.m. However, for some parts of the country, like Wisconsin, sunrises would come after 8 a.m. In neighboring Michigan, the sun wouldn’t rise until after 9 a.m. on some days.

You can see how some of those winter sunrise and sunset times would look with and without permanent daylight saving time in the table below: Those dark mornings, which prompted concerns about crashes and the safety of children trying to board buses or walk to school, contributed to Americans souring on permanent daylight saving time in the 1970s. Health experts also largely agree that having more sunlight in the morning is better for our health than having later sunsets.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Bubba Wallace climbed out of the No. 23 car Sunday, pumped his fists, found his family and savored every precious moment of a historic Brickyard 400 victory.

He deserved every minute of it.

The 31-year-old Wallace overcame a tenuous 18-minute rain delay, two tantalizing overtimes, fears about running out of fuel late and the hard-charging defending race champ, Kyle Larson, on back-to-back restarts to become the first Black driver to win a major race on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 2.5-mile oval. No Black driver has won the Indianapolis 500, and Formula 1 raced on the track’s road course.“This one’s really cool,” Wallace said. “Coming off Turn 4, I knew I was going to get there — unless we ran out of gas. I was surprised I wasn’t crying like a little baby.”

His third career NASCAR Cup victory delivered Wallace’s first victory in the series’ four crown jewel events, the others being the Daytona 500, Coca-Cola 600 and Southern 500. It also snapped a 100-race winless streak that dated to 2022 at Kansas and locked up a playoff spot. His only other win came at Talladega in 2021.

The final gap was 0.222 seconds, but that was no measure of the consternation he faced.

Larson cut a 5.057-second deficit with 14 laps to go to about three seconds with six laps left as the yellow flag came out for the rain. The cars then rolled to a stop on pit lane with four laps remaining, forcing Wallace to think and rethink his restart strategy.

“The whole time I’m thinking are we going? Are we not?” he said. “I will say I leaned more towards ‘I know we’re going to go back racing. Be ready. Don’t get complacent here.”

Wallace made sure of it.

He beat Larson through the second turn on the first restart only to have a crash behind him force a second overtime, forcing his crew to recalculate whether they had enough fuel to finish the race or whether he needed to surrender the lead and refuel.

He beat Larson off the restart again and pulled away, preventing Larson from becoming the race’s fourth back-to-back winner.

The victory also alleviated the frustration Wallace felt Saturday when he spent most of the qualifying session on the provisional pole only to see Chase Briscoe claim the No. 1 starting spot with one of the last runs in the session.

On Sunday, he made sure there was no repeat, providing an added boost to the 23XI Racing team co-owned by basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan and last week’s race winner, Denny Hamlin, as it continues to battle NASCAR in court over its charter status.

“Those last 20 laps there were ups and downs and I was telling myself ‘You won’t be able to do it,’” Wallace said. “Once I’d seen it was Larson, I knew he won here last year and he’s arguably the best in the field. So to beat the best, we had to be the best today.”

The other big race — the In-Season Challenge — went to Ty Gibbs, who had a better car than Ty Dillon in qualifying and on race day. Gibbs finished 21st o win the inaugural March Madness-like single-elimination tournament and collect the $1 million prize.

Dillon, a surprise championship round entrant after making the field as the 32nd and final driver, finished 28th.

“They brought me money guns and they jammed so I decided to take all the money and throwing it to the fans and they were all wrestling and fighting over it,” said Gibbs, who also received a title belt and a ring. “But it’s super cool. It’s a cool opportunity.”

Tire troubles

At different points, Austin Cindric and three-time Cup champion Joey Logano appeared to be in control of the race, but tire problems took them out of contention. Eric Jones also was knocked out of the race when his right front tire came off between Turns 3 and 4, sending him hard into the outside wall on Lap 91.

They weren’t the only drivers who made early exits.

Ross Chastain was the first out after just 18 laps when a tap from Michael McDowell sent Chastain’s car spinning into the third turn wall and caused heavy damage.

Weathering the storm

Series officials were concerned enough about the threat of rain that they moved up the start time by 10 minutes. Fifteen minutes probably would have eliminated the rain delay.

But the threat of rain impacted the race long before the delay. Early in the second stage, some teams informed drivers rain was expected near the midway point and it seemed to increase the aggressiveness earlier in the race than expected.

Monster advice

Cookie Monster made it to the track Sunday, too. The beloved Sesame Street character, who served as the Brickyard’s grand marshal, attended driver introductions and took a handful of questions before the race and even offered some advice to the drivers.

“Don’t stop and ask for directions,” the furry blue character said.

Up next

Cup drivers will continue their brief Midwestern tour next Sunday when they race at Iowa.

Health insurance premiums are going way up next year for people who buy their insurance on Healthcare.gov or the state-based marketplaces, according to an analysis out Friday.

The average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium, according to the analysis from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

The insurers’ narrative

Summer is the time of year when health insurance companies set their rates for the following January and then submit those rates to state regulators.

Researchers at KFF then pore over those documents to make sense of what health insurance costs are going to look like for consumers in the coming year.

“These filings are usually hundreds of pages filled with math and equations,” explains one of those researchers, Cynthia Cox. “But sometimes they also add this narrative to explain why they’re raising their premiums.”

This year, instead of talking about rising drug costs or hospital charges, insurance companies were talking about federal policy, Cox says. “Pretty much every insurance company is talking about the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA markets.”

Those markets are where people go to buy Obamacare plans, which serve people who can’t get health insurance through their jobs and who don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare.

Pandemic-era help

The enhanced subsidies started during the COVID-19 pandemic under the Biden administration and helped dramatically decrease the cost of premiums for these plans. 

It turns out that people liked those lower premiums. “The number of people signing up for coverage has more than doubled,” says Cox, who directs the Program on the Affordable Care Act at KFF. In January, enrollment hit a record 24 million. That high enrollment helped drive the uninsured rate to its lowest level ever.

Now that those subsidies are going away for next year, premiums are going to spike. For example, if someone paid $60 a month for their health insurance this year, they might be looking at $105 a month next year. 

People who are generally healthy might well decide that the higher premium is not worth it. They’ll go without health insurance and risk it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that letting the subsidies expire would increase the number of uninsured by 4.2 million people over the next decade.

If healthy people opt out, the insurance pool is left with those who cost insurance companies more — people who can’t go without health insurance because of chronic conditions or expensive medications. “That’s why insurance companies are going ahead and charging a higher premium, with the expectation that the market is going to get sicker next year,” explains Cox.

Extension unlikely

Of course, Congress could extend the enhanced subsidies, but that would mean President Trump and Republican lawmakers supporting the Affordable Care Act, which is unlikely. The Republican Study Committee’s 2025 fiscal budget said the enhanced subsidies “only perpetuate a never-ending cycle of rising premiums and federal bailouts — with taxpayers forced to foot the bill.” The chair of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., last year urged Congress to reject an extension, saying the subsidies “hide the unsustainable skyrocketing cost of Obamacare.”

Cox of KFF points out that a big portion of the new people who got covered in the last few years live in Republican strongholds. “A lot of Southern states like Texas and Florida and Georgia have seen a tremendous amount of growth in their ACA marketplaces,” she says. That growth could be reversed if higher premiums price people out of coverage.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 8.2 million people who get ACA insurance now will become uninsured over the next decade due to the expiration of the enhanced tax credits along with other changes that the Trump administration and Congress have made to the marketplaces through regulations and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday passed President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could have major ramifications for Black Americans.

Among other things, the legislation would gut Medicaid, slash funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and limit access to federal student loans — outcomes that would disproportionately burden Black Americans, who rely on these services at higher rates.

Trump has given his allies in the House and Senate, both of which are controlled by Republicans, until July 4 to deliver the bill, which will now return to the House.

Here’s what Trump’s domestic policy agenda could mean for Black Americans, and how Black civil rights advocates and lawmakers are responding.

Medicaid

To pay for Trump’s policy priorities — which include tax breaks for wealthy households, more funding for deportations and the military, and clean energy disinvestment — the bill would cut spending in areas such as Medicaid.

While the proposed requirements vary, the legislation would generally tie eligibility for Medicaid to participation in a work program for at least 80 hours a month. 

Nearly 11 million more people could be left without health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of one version of the bill.

Black Americans would bear the brunt of the bill’s proposed changes. Some 20% of Medicaid enrollees are Black, though Black Americans make up 14% of the U.S. population. 

Food assistance

As with Medicaid, the bill would also tie eligibility for SNAP, previously known as the Food Stamps program, to 80-hour-a-month work requirements.

The Congressional Budget Office analysis estimates that 3 million more people could lose their eligibility for food assistance. Roughly 27% of adult and child SNAP recipients are Black, according to the Pew Research Center.

Student loans

The legislation would cap federal student loan borrowing at $100,000 for graduate students and $200,000 for law and medical students, and also restrict how much parents can borrow to help cover student tuition. Additionally, the bill would remove the option to defer repayment if borrowers are facing economic hardship or unemployment.

These changes, which could limit access to higher education or push students toward private loans with higher interest rates, could have an especially large impact on Black borrowers. They not only owe a disproportionate amount of the national student loan debt — they’re also more likely to struggle to repay their loans.

Clean energy

The bill would roll back tax breaks for wind and solar initiatives, effectively eliminating incentives that support clean energy. These breaks were a key part of former President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Trump’s effort to scale back clean energy efforts would endanger majority-Black “sacrifice zones,” areas that are already the most acutely affected by industrial pollution, dirty water, and severe weather. And experts say those communities are also beleaguered by environmental and public-health crises.

The national debt

The bill would increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion. One analysis of the legislation by Yale University’s Budget Lab found that households in the bottom 10% of incomes would see an average reduction of 6.5% of their income.

Lenwood V. Long Sr., the chief executive officer of an organization that focuses on Black economic well-being, argued in a recent article that Trump’s attempt to curtail government programs mirrors the efforts of some of his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

Long wrote that their domestic policy agendas “left urban, predominately Black communities susceptible to prolonged underinvestment and discrimination” and sought to “sway public opinion and justify the gutting of public assistance programs.” 

What’s been the response to the bill?

Black civil rights advocates and lawmakers have been raising the alarm about the potentially devastating impact of the legislation.

A June 26 letter — signed by eight organizations that represent Black communities — says that the bill would “cut programs that are lifelines to Black people and other communities of color and encroach on the rule of law and civil rights.” The letter calls the legislative effort both “fiscally reckless” and “morally indefensible.”

The signatories include the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Urban League, and the National Council of Negro Women.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware echoed some of these concerns in a statement to Capital B earlier this year.

“Medicaid has been a lifeline for millions of families in this country, but it has also helped us address critical disparities in health for Black communities,” she said, referring to how Medicaid has helped to address the Black maternal health crisis. “Without access to this care, we risk exacerbating deep-rooted inequalities and putting lives at risk.”

The origin of the Juneteenth celebrations marking the end of slavery in the U.S. goes back to an order issued as Union troops arrived in Texas at the end of the Civil War. It declared that all enslaved people in the state were free and had “absolute equality.”

Word quickly spread of General Order No. 3 — issued on June 19, 1865, when U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger landed in the South Texas port city of Galveston — as troops posted handbills and newspapers published them.

The Dallas Historical Society will put one of those original handbills on display at the Hall of State in Fair Park starting June 19.

Juneteenth became a federal holiday in the U.S. in 2021 but has been celebrated in Texas since 1866. As time passed, communities in other states also started to mark the day.

“There’d be barbecue and celebrations,” said Portia D. Hopkins, the historian for Rice University in Houston. “It was really an effort for people to say: Look at how far we’ve come. Look at what we’ve been able to endure as a community.”

Progression of freedom

On Jan. 1, 1863, nearly two years into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of “all persons held as slaves” in the still rebellious states of the Confederacy. But it didn’t mean immediate freedom.

“It would take the Union armies moving through the South and effectively freeing those people for that to come to pass,” said Edward T. Cotham Jr., a historian and author of the book “Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration.”

The proclamation didn’t apply to the border states that allowed enslavement but didn’t leave the Union, nor the states occupied by the Union at the time, said Erin Stewart Mauldin, chair of southern history at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg.

“You have to think of emancipation as a patchwork,” she said. “It doesn’t happen all at once. It is hyper local.”

Still, she said, the proclamation “was recognized immediately as this watershed moment in history.”

“The Emancipation Proclamation is the promise that the end of slavery is now a war aim,” Mauldin said.

Texas at the end of the war

As the war progressed, many enslavers from the South fled to Texas, causing the state’s enslaved population to balloon from about 182,000 in 1860 to 250,000 by the end of the war in 1865, Mauldin said.

Cotham said that while enslaved people were emancipated “on a lot of different dates in a lot of different places across the country,” June 19 is the most appropriate date to celebrate the end of slavery because it represents the “last large intact body of enslaved people to be freed.”

He said many enslaved people across the South knew of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that it didn’t mean anything until troops arrived to enforce it.

About six months after General Order No. 3 was issued, the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified.

General Order No. 3

The order begins by saying “all slaves are free” and have “absolute equality” of rights. Going forward, the relationship between “former masters and slaves” will be that of employer and hired laborer.

It advises freedmen to “remain at their present homes and work for wages,” adding that they must not collect at military posts and “will not be supported in idleness.”

The handbills were also handed out to church and local officials. Cotham said Union chaplains would travel from farm to farm to explain the order to workers, and many former enslavers read the order to the people they had enslaved, emphasizing the part about continuing to work.

The Dallas Historical Society’s handbill came from the collection of newspaperman George Bannerman Dealey, who founded the society, said Karl Chiao, the society’s executive director. Dealey began working at a Galveston newspaper in 1874 before being sent to Dallas by the publisher to start The Dallas Morning News.

Chiao said their handbill is the only one they know of that still exists. The National Archives holds the official handwritten record of General Order No. 3.