Delaware
Would adding nuclear power solve Delaware’s energy needs?
Nuclear energy is seeing something of a renaissance, helped in part by executive orders from President Donald Trump boosting the industry. The four orders include rapid development and deployment of advanced nuclear technologies, reconsidering radiation exposure standards, eliminating or expediting environmental reviews of applications and funding for workforce-related opportunities. Big tech companies are also betting big on nuclear energy to fuel power-hungry data centers.
Investment firm Starwood Digital Ventures is currently pitching a massive data center for Delaware City. Critics are concerned it will drain large amounts of energy and water.
Kathryn Lienhard, an offshore wind energy research associate with Delaware Sea Grant, said nuclear power generates electricity through chain reactions that produce heat. That heat is used to make steam that spins a turbine to create the electricity. Reactors use uranium, which is radioactive, for nuclear fuel, and exposure can cause lung cancer and other diseases. Spent reactor fuel is a highly radioactive byproduct that is normally stored on site, but Lienhard said the U.S. has yet to develop a long-term storage solution for the waste.
Public anxiety about the harmful health effects of nuclear power plants grew after the worst commercial reactor accident in U.S. history at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. The partial core meltdown at the plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania, forced the evacuation of thousands of nearby residents. Numerous studies since then found no direct negative health effects on the nearby population. Microsoft is reopening the plant to power its data centers.
Union boilermaker Martin Willis, another task force member, said members should look at deploying a small nuclear reactor at the Dover Air Force Base. He also said the public is still resistant to adopting nuclear energy.
“I hate to say it, but even with America being in an electric generation crisis because of the demands of AI data centers, Bitcoin mining, cannabis farming and a robust economy, our nation will not embrace civilian nuclear power until parts of America suffer widespread blackouts and rolling brownouts,” he said.
The task force’s next meeting is Dec. 1. The group’s chair, state Sen. Stephanie Hansen, said the group will deliver a final report, but that date is yet to be determined.
Delaware
Tesla wins right to move lawsuits from Delaware to Texas. Here’s why
How can car buyers look for value in the used electric vehicle market
For those in the market for a used electric vehicle, looking beyond Tesla vehicles might offer good value.
Tesla has won the right to move lawsuits filed against the company from Delaware to Texas, where it’s presently headquartered.
A judge in Delaware sided with Tesla, which was founded in California but is now based in Austin in a case involving stockholders who sued to challenge Tesla’s relocation plans in 2024.
Tesla had asked the court to dismiss the motion from its stockholders who were upset at its plans to convert from a Delaware corporation for legal purposes to a Texas-based organization. Tesla had previously designated Delaware as its exclusive forum for cases involving shareholders who sue a company in which they own stock in, but the company was seeking to change the designation to Texas.
The court said Delaware law requires it to only deny forum-selection decisions by corporations such as Tesla “to the limited extent necessary” to avoid a result that would be inequitable to the automaker or any other company that was based in the state.
The court said on the “on the present facts, it is not inequitable” to Telsa to uphold Delaware laws regarding court case jurisdictions.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Why is Tesla being sued?
Tesla was sued by at least three of its stockholders in April 2024 after it announced plans to convert from a Delaware corporation to a Texas one.
Tesla stockholders voted to approve the move, but the people who filed the lawsuits argued that Delaware’s laws about the appropriate forum for shareholder cases should have been enforced over Texas’ laws because Tesla was still based in Delaware legally when they filed their lawsuits.
The lawsuits were combined by the court, and the court later ruled in favor of granting Tesla’s motion to dismiss the case.
What does Tesla being sued mean for car buyers?
Tesla has faced legal troubles and federal investigations for years. The company’s legal troubles could impact the availability of popular models like the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 if a court finds the company liable and requires a payment to victims that alters Tesla’s findings. Regulators could also declare Tesla’s parts or software defective and order recalls or force the company to stop selling specific models.
Tesla has been sued over its Autopilot and Full Self Driving software, and the company has also faced class action lawsuits and product liability cases for accidents in which people were injured or even killed.
Tesla is also the subject of five open federal investigations, including one the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced in December 2025 looking into potential issues with passengers having difficulty exiting Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles following crashes.
Delaware
Federal judge says Delaware labor officials must give data to ICE
What to know about jury duty in Delaware
Here are some tips and information about what to do when you receive a jury summons in the mail in Delaware.
A federal judge in Wilmington has ordered the Delaware Department of Labor to hand over confidential state employer data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators.
On April 13, U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly ordered Delaware labor officials to comply with a federal immigration subpoena they had “ignored,” writing that the state lacked legal grounds to resist it and that its political arguments were “wholly inappropriate.”
The subpoena seeks wage reports and employee rosters containing confidential employee information for 15 businesses and sought by ICE investigators as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Attorneys representing the state’s Department of Labor justified their noncompliance by arguing that local and federal regulators give state officials the authority to refuse federal investigators’ requests. They warned that allowing ICE to access employer data would discourage reporting and weaken the unemployment insurance program.
Local federal attorneys representing ICE argued the department is legally required to hand over the data targeting businesses that tip-line reports put under suspicion of employing undocumented individuals. In court filings, they said the state’s refusal to comply amounts to a legally unsound disagreement with federal immigration policy.
The arguments: Federal judge questions Delaware’s attempt to sidestep ICE subpoena
The contested subpoena was the last in a series that went unanswered by state labor officials during the first quarter of 2025. The subpoenas themselves are not legally confidential. However, Connolly, the presiding judge, sealed the final subpoena – the one at issue in the case – after federal officials sued the state to force compliance.
The state has produced redacted copies of some of the initial subpoenas to Delaware Online/The News Journal via a Freedom of Information Act request. Those early subpoenas targeted a Perdue facility in Seaford as well as a fencing company and a Mexican restaurant in northern New Castle County.
The final subpoena seeks data on the employees of 15 state businesses for the final two quarters of 2024 and is the subject of the current court wrangling. Connolly also denied the state’s argument that the document be unsealed so the businesses could exercise a right to fight the subpoena in court.
Breaking down the ruling
In assessing whether to enforce the subpoena, Connolly said the threshold question was whether it served a legitimate purpose, sought relevant information, and was not “unduly broad or burdensome.”
Connolly wrote that the investigation pertained to businesses suspected of employing undocumented people, which is in the scope of the agency that issued the subpoena, that the information sought is relevant to that inquiry and that it would not be “unduly burdensome” for the state to copy the 30 records sought by the subpoenas.
Connolly, who is the court’s chief judge and was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2018, also shot holes in what he described as the state’s “novel theory” that production of such records would endanger the state’s unemployment insurance program.
“I am neither willing nor able to adopt DDOL’s cynical view of the State’s employers,” Connolly wrote.
Editor’s note: The judge’s ruling can be read at the end of this article.
Having decided that, he turned to the question of whether the Department of Labor had proved the enforcement of the subpoenas would “undermine the integrity of the judicial process.”
The state argued that enforcement of the subpoena would step on confidentiality regulations in the state’s statue and that the subpoena flows from an “improper purpose” described as an “intense agenda of immigration enforcement.”
Prior coverage: Delaware to fight ICE, Trump administration demands for local businesses’ employee lists
Connolly ruled that the regulations do not override the subpoena power. He wrote that the state’s argument painting the subpoena as improper because of the current intensity around immigration enforcement is a “political argument, not a legal one.”
“This Court is not the proper ‘forum in which to air [DDOL’s] generalized grievances about the conduct of government,’ Connolly wrote. “It would be wholly inappropriate for me to consider this line of argument, and I decline to do so.”
Trump’s deportation agenda and Delaware
The legal fight is part of the front in Trump’s ever-expanding deportation agenda, which has seen the federal government seek new ways to leverage states’ and other datasets in its immigration roundups.
Trump, with the help of Congress, ballooned Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding nearly six-fold from $12 billion in the previous fiscal year to $75 billion in his budget legislation last year.
Recent: ICE detained a toddler in Delaware as arrests topped 500
The agenda has included workplace and neighborhood raids by masked ICE agents, arrests at jobs and courthouses, incidents resulting in deaths, fast‑tracked deportations and allegations of racial profiling and inhumane detention practices lacking due process.
In Delaware, ICE has more quietly doubled its number of detainments through October of last year compared with the year prior, rounding up more people in street arrests along with four children.
This is a breaking story and updates will follow.
Contact Xerxes Wilson at (302) 324-2787 or xwilson@delawareonline.com.
Delaware
ATVs and dirt bikes roar down Delaware Ave., lawmakers search for solutions
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — It’s just like clockwork. As the temperatures rise, ATVs and dirt bikes shift into gear in Buffalo.
New video shows a horde of ATVs and dirt bikes on Delaware Avenue Sunday afternoon. Some are seen driving on the incoming traffic lane, and one even pops a wheelie.
Fillmore District Councilman Mitch Nowakowski represents this area.
“This only leads to more chaos and disruption, and ultimately leads to potential fatalities for both those that are operating and those that are in the vehicles,” Nowakowski said. “And it’s wrong.”
These all-terrain vehicles have proven to be a persistent problem for drivers over the years in Buffalo. Nowakowski says once the snow melts, he starts hearing complaints about these vehicles from residents.
“It’s making our city’s streets unsafer and the velocity and the volume in which they congregate and the manner in which they drive not only jeopardizes their life, it jeopardizes the life of everyone around them,” Nowakowski said.
The councilman wrote a letter on Monday to Family Court Judge Brenda Freedman, requesting a meeting to discuss strengthening a collective response to reckless driving involving young people.
“Councilwoman Everhart and I want to sit down with the judge, explain what’s happening in our districts, where we see car thefts, we see the Kia boys, which I’ve even been a victim of,” Nowakowski said. “We see the violence on the 33 of drag racing where somebody has lost their life. And we want to know what programs are in place. But then, where’s the accountability once somebody is in your courtroom for a second, third or fourth time?”
Nowakowski said police using better equipment and technology has helped curtail all-terrain vehicles on city streets.
“If it comes from them being able to see it through a drone or people calling in. We’ve seen a curb in that,” Nowakowski said.
Those who see illegal activity or a public nuisance can contact Buffalo Police or the city’s 311 Call & Resolution Center.
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Patrick Ryan is an award-winning reporter who has been part of the News 4 team since 2020. See more of his work here and follow him on Twitter.
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