Search
Virginia, Maryland rejoin bid for Commanders stadium as DC Council lets exclusivity clause expire
Maryland and Virginia are reportedly off the bench as the state and commonwealth's bids to house the Commanders stadium have reportedly been resurrected. Hesitation within DC Council has pushed the District past a major deadline. While Washington, D.C. remained the frontrunner for the deal, with support from the Commanders franchise and NFL executives, the exclusivity clause that kept its stately neighbors from making their bids expired Tuesday. Leaving the ball in anyone's court -- or field, if you will. Despite the expiration of a key negotiation deadline, D.C. officials say a deal to bring the Washington Commanders back to the old RFK Stadium site is far from dead.
Rail Trail coalition makes push at Commonwealth Transportation Board meeting
A coalition of 12 local governments made their presence known at Wednesday morning’s Commonwealth Transportation Board meeting, voicing strong support for converting the Shenandoah Valley’s dormant rail corridor into a dedicated multi-use recreational trail. Shenandoah County Supervisor Tim Taylor delivered a coordinated message on behalf of the group at the meeting held at the George Washington Hotel in Winchester. ... “The vast majority of our community leaders, and our constituents, still believe the highest and best use of this corridor, at this time, is the creation of a multi-use trail.”
As federal job losses mount, Fairfax leaders sound alarm
Is Fairfax County — long the economic engine of the Northern Virginia and the state economy — facing an “unemployment crisis?” Fairfax Board Chairman Jeff McKay and Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, think so. They are pointing the finger at President Donald Trump for the county’s rising unemployment rate. They are faulting Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a close Republican ally of the president, for not doing more to protect the state and region from mounting losses of federal government jobs and contracts since Trump took office in January.
‘Somebody needs to be fired’: Petersburg vice mayor sharply critical of vape-shop opening
Petersburg’s vice mayor, Darrin Hill, is not known for public outbursts of anger or frustration. So, when he dressed down the city staff during City Council’s July 15 meeting, many ears in the room pricked up. A high concentration of vape and tobacco shops in Petersburg prompted the planning department last year to recommend restricting them to neighborhood business, commercial and industrial districts. Council voted in July 2024 to limit them to industrial-zoned districts. Hill, who represents Ward 2, took planners to the mat after a vape shop opened on South Crater Road after he and his colleagues voted last April to deny a rezoning request that would have allowed it.
Finkelstein: If the attorney general won’t defend Virginia, who will?
It’s not every day that George Mason University lands on the front page of The Washington Post, in an op-ed by Virginia’s U.S. senators and in a joint investigation by The Chronicle of Higher Education and ProPublica. In 2006, when Mason stunned the nation as the “Cinderella” team in the NCAA Final Four, the attention was exhilarating. Today, the spotlight feels far more threatening. Since July 1, Mason has been notified of two federal civil rights investigations by the U.S. Department of Education — one concerning allegations of antisemitism and the other focused on diversity-related hiring practices.
How a parasitic worm could help revive the Chesapeake Bay blue crab population
If you catch a female blue crab in the Chesapeake Bay — and know where to look — there’s a good chance you might find a tiny, parasitic worm embedded in its spongelike egg mass. The worm, scientifically known as Carcinonemertes carcinophila, relies on crab eggs to grow and survive. “They have a really interesting symbiotic relationship, where the worm cannot reach sexual maturity without consuming the eggs of its host, which is the blue crab,” said Alex Schneider, who recently earned a doctoral degree in marine science from William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Virginia casinos report $78.5M in June revenue
June gaming revenues from Virginia’s three casinos totaled $78.5 million, down $6.9 million from May, according to a Virginia Lottery report. Last month, Hard Rock Bristol casino reported about $21.44 million in adjusted gaming revenues (wagers minus winnings), of which about $17.24 million came from its 1,397 slots and about $4.2 million came from its 73 table games. ... Rivers Casino Portsmouth ... generated about $18.6 million in June from its 1422 slots and about $7.85 million from its 84 table games, for a total adjusted gaming revenues of about $26.46 million. The state’s newest permanent casino, the Caesars Virginia resort in Danville, reported almost $30.57 million in adjusted gaming revenues ...
AI data centers require massive amounts of power. Is new infrastructure driving up energy costs for everyone?
It’s a staggering statistic: Around 70% of the world’s internet traffic flows through Virginia. The state’s data centers, some of which feature hallways nearly a mile long with thousands of thrumming servers on either side, make possible the billions of retail transactions, videos streams, and artificial intelligence queries that happen around the world each day. But as more data centers are built to accommodate AI and other data-intensive processes, energy demand is expected to skyrocket. A single hyperscale data center can use the same amount of energy as a large city, and the stress this is placing on local power grids is expected to drive up energy costs for residents in Virginia—and around the country.
Virginia offers ‘historic’ funding for farm practices
Virginia cost-share programs intended to help farmers implement pollution prevention practices are getting a significant funding boost at the state level. The state Department of Conservation and Recreation said it will be funneling $223 million toward cost-share funding for fiscal year 2026, which began on July 1. This represents the highest level of funding in the history of the Virginia Agricultural Best Management Practices Cost-Share Program (VACS). The funding represents a $16 million increase over the fiscal year 2025 level, marking a fourth consecutive year of increases as the state strains to meet its pollution reduction goals on agricultural lands.
Virginia is for … data centers? Residents are increasingly saying no
The two dozen or so nondescript gray, white and blue buildings lining Virginia State Route 625 could be large warehouses. But community activist Elena Schlossberg can identify them literally a mile away by their telltale rows of backup diesel generators. The buildings are data centers. ... All internet data goes through facilities like these: massive, sometimes multistoried warehouses filled with servers where every webpage and shred of data lives. Demand for these centers has skyrocketed in the last two years as artificial intelligence usage has gone mainstream. Virginia is a data hot spot. It has the world's highest concentration of data centers — nearly 600 facilities of varying sizes, including roughly 150 of the largest kind, known as hyperscale data centers. Not all residents are happy about that.