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Indian Health Service to Phase Out Use of Dental Fillings Containing Mercury by 2027

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — The federal agency that provides health care to Native Americans and Alaska Natives has announced it will phase out the use of dental fillings containing mercury.

The Indian Health Service has used fillings, known as dental amalgams, that contain elemental mercury to treat decayed and otherwise damaged teeth for decades. Native American rights and industry advocates have called for an end to the practice, arguing it exposes patients who may not have access to private dentistry to a harmful neurotoxin.

The use of mercury-containing amalgams, also known as “silver fillings” due to their appearance, has declined sharply since 2009 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reclassified the devices from low to moderate risk. The industry has largely abandoned them in favor of plastic resin alternatives, which are also preferred for aesthetic reasons.

The Indian Health Service says it will fully implement the move to mercury-free alternatives by 2027. Already, the percentage of the Indian Health Service’s roughly 2.8 million patient user population receiving them has declined from 12% in 2005 to 2% in 2023, the latest year of available data, agency documents show.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees IHS, said growing environmental and health concerns about mercury exposure, and global efforts to reduce materials containing the hazardous heavy metal prompted the change announced this month.

“This is a commonsense step that protects patients and prevents harm before it starts,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said in a statement.

The agency’s switch to mercury-free alternatives also upholds legal responsibilities the U.S. government has to the 575 federally recognized tribes, he said.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, dental amalgam fillings can release small amounts of mercury vapor during placement, removal, teeth grinding and gum chewing. It recommends that certain people at high risk for adverse effects of mercury exposure, including pregnant women, children under 6, and those with existing neurological conditions avoid the fillings. But the administration, along with the American Dental Association, says available evidence does not link mercury-containing fillings to long-term negative health outcomes.

The World Health Organization has created a plan to encourage countries around the world to phase out the use of dental amalgams, citing potential for mercury exposure. In 2013 several countries, including the U.S., signed onto the Minamata Convention, a global agreement targeting the adverse health and the environment effects of mercury. In November, signatories to the convention agreed to phase out the use of mercury-containing dental amalgams by the year 2034.

While Kennedy’s decision to stop its use within the IHS by 2027 puts the U.S. ahead of the global schedule, the country is still behind many other developed nations that have already banned the practice.

“The rest of the world is light years ahead of us,” said Rochelle Diver, the U.N. environmental treaties coordinator for the International Indian Treaty Council, adding that IHS patients should not receive treatment that is considered antiquated by many dentists.

In a statement, the American Dental Association acknowledged declining use of mercury-containing fillings, but said they remain a “safe, durable and affordable material.”

The use of mercury in other medical devices, including thermometers and blood pressure devices, has also declined sharply in recent decades. While mercury-containing amalgams have fallen out of favor in the U.S. private dental sector, patients relying on government services may not have a say, according to Charles G. Brown, president of the World Alliance for Mercury-Free Dentistry.

Many state-administered Medicaid programs continue to cover mercury-containing fillings as a treatment for tooth decay, Brown said.

“If you’re on Medicaid, if you are stuck in the Indian Health Service, if you were stuck in a prison or other institution, you just don’t have any choice,” Brown said.

Brewer reported from Oklahoma City.

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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February 15, 2026
Forecasters Warn of a ‘Major Winter Storm’ With Ice Threat From Texas to the Carolinas

ATLANTA (AP) — With many Americans still recovering from multiple blasts of snow and unrelenting freezing temperatures in the nation’s northern tier, a new storm is set to emerge this weekend that could coat roads with ice and knock down power lines across the South.

Forecasters on Tuesday expressed fears that an ice storm arriving late this week and into the weekend could weigh down power lines, sending them crashing and causing widespread power outages. Temperatures will be slow to warm in many areas, meaning ice that forms on roads and sidewalks might stick around, forecasters say.

The exact timing of the approaching storm — and where it is headed — remained uncertain on Tuesday. Forecasters say it can be challenging to predict precisely which areas could see rain and which ones could be punished with ice.

Cold air clashing with rain to fuel a ‘major winter storm’

An extremely cold arctic air mass is set to dive south from Canada, setting up a clash with the cold temperatures and rain that will be streaming eastward across the southern U.S.

“This is extreme, even for this being the peak of winter,” National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Jackson said of the cold temperatures.

When the cold air meets the rain, the likely result will be “a major winter storm with very impactful weather, with all the moisture coming up from the Gulf and encountering all this particularly cold air that’s spilling in,” Jackson said.

An atmospheric river could set up across the southern U.S.

An atmospheric river of moisture could be in place by the weekend, pulling precipitation across Texas and other states along the Gulf Coast and continuing across Georgia and the Carolinas, forecasters said.

“Global models are painting a concerning picture of what this weekend could look like, with an increasingly strong signal for ice storm potential across North Georgia and portions of central Georgia,” according to the National Weather Service’s Atlanta office.

If significant accumulations of ice strike metro Atlanta, it could be a problem through the weekend since low temperatures early Monday are expected to be around 22 degrees (minus 5.6 Celsius) in Atlanta. The city’s high temperature on Monday is forecast to be around 35 degrees (1.7 Celsius).

Highway and air travel could be tangled by the storm

Travel is a major concern, as southern states have less equipment to remove snow and ice from roads, and extremely cold temperatures expected after the storm could prevent ice from melting for several days. In Michigan, more than 100 vehicles crashed into each other or slid off an interstate southwest of Grand Rapids on Monday.

The storm is also expected to impact many of the nation’s major hub airports, including those in Dallas; Atlanta; Memphis, Tennessee; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Polar air from Canada to keep northern states in a deep freeze

Unusually cold temperatures are already in place across much of the northern tier of the U.S., but the blast of arctic air expected later this week is “will be the coldest yet,” Jackson said.

“There’s a large sprawling vortex of low pressure centered over Hudson Bay,” Jackson said of the sea in northern Canada that’s connected to the Arctic Ocean. “And this is dominating the weather over all of North America.”

Texas could be a harbinger for other parts of the South

Some of the storm’s earliest impacts could be in Texas on Friday, as the arctic air mass slides south through much of the state, National Weather Service forecaster Sam Shamburger said in a briefing on the storm.

“At the same time, we’re expecting rain to move into much of the state,” Shamburger said.

Low temperatures could fall into the 20s or even the teens in parts of Texas by Saturday, with the potential for a wintery mix of weather in the northern part of the state.

Forecasters cautioned that significant uncertainty remains, particularly over how much ice or snow could fall across north and central Texas.

“It’s going to be a very difficult forecast,” Shamburger said.

Panjwani reported from Washington, D.C.

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January 20, 2026
Oklahoma Black Lives Matter Leader Indicted for Fraud, Money Laundering

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A federal grand jury indicted the leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Oklahoma City over allegations that millions of dollars in grant funds were improperly spent on international trips, groceries and personal real estate, prosecutors announced Thursday.

Tashella Sheri Amore Dickerson, 52, was indicted earlier this month on 20 counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering, court records show.

Court records do not indicate the name of Dickerson’s attorney, and messages left Thursday at her mobile number and by email were not immediately returned.

According to the indictment, Dickerson served since at least 2016 as the executive director of Black Lives Matter OKC, which accepted charitable donations through its affiliation with the Arizona-based Alliance for Global Justice.

In total, BLM OKC raised more than $5.6 million dating back to 2020, largely from online donors and national bail funds that were supposed to be used to post bail for individuals arrested in connection with racial justice protests after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer in 2020, the indictment alleges.

When those bail funds were returned to BLM OKC, the indictment alleges, Dickerson embezzled at least $3.15 million into her personal accounts and then used the money to pay for trips to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, retail shopping, at least $50,000 in food and grocery deliveries for herself and her children, a personal vehicle, and six properties in Oklahoma City deeded to her or to a company she controlled.

The indictment also alleges she submitted false annual reports to the alliance stating that the funds were used only for tax-exempt purposes.

If convicted, Dickerson faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for each count of wire fraud and 10 years in prison and fines for each count of money laundering.

In a live video posted on her Facebook page Thursday afternoon, Dickerson said she was not in custody and was “fine.”

“I cannot make an official comment about what transpired today,” she said. “I am home. I am safe. I have confidence in our team.”

“A lot of times when people come at you with these types of things … it’s evidence that you are doing the work,” she continued. “That is what I’m standing on.”

The Black Lives Matter movement first emerged in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. But it was the 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, that made the slogan “Black lives matter” a rallying cry for progressives and a favorite target of derision for conservatives.

The Associated Press reported in October that the Justice Department was investigating whether leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement defrauded donors who contributed tens of millions of dollars during racial justice protests in 2020. There was no immediate indication that Dickerson’s indictment is connected to that probe.

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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December 11, 2025
One of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre’s Last Survivors, Viola Ford Fletcher, Dies Age 111

DALLAS (AP) — Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma spent her later years seeking justice for the deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving Black community where she lived as a child, has died. She was 111.

Her grandson Ike Howard said Monday that she died surrounded by family at a Tulsa hospital. Sustained by a strong faith, she raised three children, worked as a welder in a shipyard during World War II and spent decades caring for families as a housekeeper.

Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols said the city was mourning her loss. “Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” he said in a statement.

She was 7 years old when the two-day attack began on Tulsa’s Greenwood district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensationalized report about a Black man accused of assaulting a white woman. As a white mob grew outside the courthouse, Black Tulsans with guns who hoped to prevent the man’s lynching began showing up. White residents responded with overwhelming force. Hundreds of people were killed and homes were burned and looted, leaving over 30 city blocks decimated in the prosperous community known as Black Wall Street.

“I could never forget the charred remains of our once-thriving community, the smoke billowing in the air, and the terror-stricken faces of my neighbors,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”

As her family left in a horse-drawn buggy, her eyes burned from the smoke and ash, she wrote. She described seeing piles of bodies in the streets and watching as a white man shot a Black man in the head, then fired toward her family.

She told The Associated Press in an interview the year her memoir was published that fear of reprisals influenced her years of near-silence about the massacre. She wrote the book with Howard, her grandson, who said he had to persuade her to tell her story.

“We don’t want history to repeat itself so we do need to educate people about what happened and try to get people to understand why you need to be made whole, why you need to be repaired,” Howard told the AP in 2024. “The generational wealth that was lost, the home, all the belongings, everything was lost in one night.”

“For as long as we remain in this lifetime, we will continue to shine a light on one of the darkest days in American history,” Fletcher and Randle said in a statement at the time. Van Ellis had died a year earlier, at the age of 102.

The city has been looking for ways to help descendants of the massacre’s victims without giving direct cash payments. Some of the last living survivors, including Fletcher, received donations from groups but have not received any payments from the city or state.

Fletcher, born in Oklahoma on May 10, 1914, spent most of her early years in Greenwood. It was an oasis for Black people during segregation, she wrote in her memoir. Her family had a nice home, she said, and the community had everything from doctors to grocery stores to restaurants and banks.

Forced to flee during the massacre, her family became nomadic, living out of a tent as they worked in the fields as sharecroppers. She didn’t finish school beyond the fourth grade.

At the age of 16, she returned to Tulsa, where she got a job cleaning and creating window displays in a department store, she wrote in her memoir. She then met Robert Fletcher, and they married and moved to California. During World War II, she worked in a Los Angeles shipyard as a welder, she wrote.

She eventually left her husband, who was physically abusive, and gave birth to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher, she wrote. Longing to be closer to her family, she returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville.

Fletcher wrote that her faith and the close-knit Black community gave her the support she needed to raise her children. She had another son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from other relationships.

She worked for decades as a housekeeper, doing everything in those homes from cooking to cleaning to caring for children, Howard said. She worked until she was 85.

She eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard said his grandmother hoped the move would help in her fight for justice.

Howard said the reaction his grandmother got when she started speaking out was therapeutic for her.

“This whole process has been helpful,” Howard said.

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November 24, 2025
States Are Pushing for More Scrutiny of Antisemitism in Schools

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas two years ago, high school teacher Josh Hirsch posted comments on social media in support of Israel. It was unrealistic for Hamas to expect a ceasefire, he wrote, as long as they were holding hostages.

Soon afterward, a former student called for his firing. A note taped outside the door of his Adams County, Colorado, classroom contained his wife’s name and their home address. And a sticker that appeared on his chair read: “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

The reaction startled Hirsch, the only Jewish teacher in his school building. For the first time in his 14-year career, he considered quitting. He stayed and joined an educators’ advocacy network created by the Anti-Defamation League, a way he saw to make schools more inclusive of diverse viewpoints.

“I’ve been a teacher and tried to keep my focus on being the best teacher I could,” he said.

Tensions over the Israel-Hamas war have spilled into schools around the U.S., with advocates reporting a rise in antisemitic harassment since the 2023 surprise attack on Israel. While some argue school leaders have failed to take the threat seriously, others warn criticism of Israel and the military campaign in Gaza are interpreted too often as hate speech.

The Trump administration has not punished school systems the way it has hit colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism, but schools are still facing pressure to respond more aggressively. Several states have pressed for new vigilance, including legislation that critics say would stifle free speech.

Both conservative and liberal states apply more scrutiny

Lawmakers in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee have passed measures to increase school accountability for complaints of antisemitism, and a law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, will provide training to identify and prevent antisemitism in schools. In Arizona, the Democratic governor vetoed a bill on how to deal with reports of antisemitism in schools, calling it an attack on educators.

Many of the measures, including one signed by Oklahoma’s Republican governor, call for adoption of a definition of antisemitism that casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech.

“These bills make it clear that Oklahoma stands with our Jewish communities and will not tolerate hatred disguised as political discourse,” said Kristen Thompson, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma who authored the legislation.

Dozens of states have adopted the definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is also recognized by the U.S. State Department. It lists 11 examples of antisemitic conduct, such as applying “double standards” to Israel or comparing the country’s policies to Nazism.

While supporters of this definition of antisemitism say it is necessary to combat evolving forms of Jewish hate, civil liberties groups warn it suppresses pro-Palestinian speech.

Trump administration approach contrasts with attacks on colleges

The Trump administration has leveraged antisemitism investigations in its efforts to reshape higher education, suspending billions of dollars in federal funding to Harvard, Columbia and other universities over allegations they tolerated hate speech, especially during protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

The White House has not gotten as involved at the K-12 level. At congressional hearings, House Republicans have taken some large school systems to task over their handling of antisemitism, but the administration largely has left it to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to address complaints.

In one of the cases under investigation, a complaint described students at the Berkeley Unified School District in California asking Jewish classmates what “their number is,” referring to numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust. It also said teachers made antisemitic comments and led walkouts that praised Hamas.

The district did not respond to a request for comment.

In another California case, the family of a 14-year-old girl filed a federal lawsuit last year alleging she had to leave University Preparatory Academy, a charter school in San Jose, in 2023 because of antisemitic bullying. After the Hamas attack, she said students called her names, including “terrorist.” The California Department of Education and the school said they could not comment on pending litigation.

Nationwide, the ADL recorded 860 antisemitic incidents in non-Jewish schools last year, ranging from name-calling and swastikas etched on lockers to antisemitic materials being taught in classrooms. The number was down from over 1,100 recorded in 2023, but well above numbers in prior years, according to the ADL.

A Massachusetts state commission formed last year to combat antisemitism found it was a “pervasive and escalating problem” in schools.

At one meeting, a commission co-chair, Democratic state Rep. Simon Cataldo, said the Massachusetts Teachers Association was sharing antisemitic resources with teachers, including a kindergarten workbook that describes Zionists as “bullies” and an image of a Star of David made of dollar bills. The union said those were singled out among hundreds of images in art and posters about Palestinians, and links to those materials were removed.

The union said it has engaged in efforts to confront increases in both antisemitism and Islamophobia and accused the commission of “offensive political theater.”

“Those who manipulate antisemitism to achieve political objectives — such as undermining labor unions and public educators — are following the lead of the Trump administration,” the union said in a statement.

Margaret Litvin, an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University, said the commission was “deliberately conflating criticism of Israel with prejudice against Jews and bias against Jews.” That approach will be used to justify “heavy-handed” interference by the state in school district affairs, said Litvin, co-founder of the Boston-area Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff group.

Controversy reaches the biggest teachers union

The tension reached the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, which this summer weighed a proposal to drop ADL classroom materials that educators use to teach about the Holocaust and bias. Backers said the ADL had an outsize influence on school curricula and policy, with an underlying pro-Israel viewpoint.

Delegates at the union’s representative assembly narrowly voted to approve the proposal, but they were overruled by the NEA board of directors. Union President Becky Pringle said the proposal “would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.”

In the aftermath, the ADL invited K-12 educators to join a new network called BEACON: Building Educator Allies for Change, Openness, and Networks, which it said is intended to help educators learn from each other how to address and combat antisemitism and other forms of hate.

Hirsch, the teacher in Colorado, was among hundreds who expressed interest.

Some of the blowback he faced stemmed from his online commentary about local activist organizations. After donating money to Black Lives Matter groups and supporting them with a sign in his yard, he expressed feelings of betrayal to see the groups expressing support for Palestinians and not Israel.

He said he was surprised by the reaction to the posts in his predominantly Hispanic school community. A former debate coach, he aims through his work with the ADL network to help students share their opinions in constructive ways.

“If we’re giving them the opportunity to hate and we’re giving them the opportunity to make enemies of someone, it really is counterproductive to what we’re trying to do as a society,” he said.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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November 8, 2025
Divided Oklahoma Board Recommends Clemency for Man Scheduled for Lethal Injection

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 on Wednesday to recommend the governor spare the life of a man scheduled to be executed next week for the 2001 stabbing death of a man during a botched robbery.

Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt must now consider whether to commute the death sentence of Tremane Wood, 46, to life in prison. Stitt has granted clemency only once during his nearly seven years in office, to death row inmate Julius Jones in 2021. He has rejected clemency recommendations in four other cases. A total of 16 men have been executed during Stitt’s time in office. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the board’s decision.

Wood is scheduled to receive a lethal injection next week for his role in the killing of Ronnie Wipf, a 19-year-old migrant farmworker from Montana, during an attempted robbery at a north Oklahoma City hotel on New Year’s Eve in 2001.

Wood’s attorneys don’t deny that he participated in the robbery but maintain that his brother, Zjaiton Wood, was the one who actually stabbed Wipf. Zjaiton Wood, who received a no-parole life sentence for Wipf’s death and died in prison in 2019, admitted to several people that he killed Wipf, said Tremane Wood’s attorney, Amanda Bass Castro Alves.

Castro Alves said Tremane Wood had an ineffective trial attorney who was drinking heavily at the time and who did little work on the case. She also said trial prosecutors concealed from jurors benefits that witnesses received in exchange for their testimony.

“Tremane’s death sentence is the product of a fundamentally broken system,” Castro Alves said.

Prosecutors painted Wood as a dangerous criminal who has continued to participate in gang activity and commit crimes while in prison, including buying and selling drugs, using contraband cellphones and ordering attacks on other inmates.

“Even within the confines of maximum security prison, Tremane Wood has continued to manipulate, exploit and harm others,” Attorney General Gentner Drummond said.

Wood, who testified to the panel via video link from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, accepted responsibility for his prison misconduct and his participation on the robbery, but denied being the one who killed Wipf.

“I’m not a monster. I’m not a killer. I never was and I never have been,” Wood said.

“Not a day goes by in my life that I do not think about Ronnie and how much his mom and dad are suffering because they don’t have their son any more.”

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November 5, 2025
SNAP Has Provided Grocery Help for 60-Plus Years; Here’s How It Works

Originally known as the food stamp program, it has existed since 1964, serving low-income people, many of whom have jobs but don’t make enough money to cover all the basic costs of living.

Public attention has focused on the program since President Donald Trump’s administration announced last week that it would freeze SNAP payments starting Nov. 1 in the midst of a monthlong federal government shutdown. The administration argued it wasn’t allowed to use a contingency fund with about $5 billion in it to help keep the program going. But on Friday, two federal judges ruled in separate challenges that the federal government must continue to fund SNAP, at least partially, using contingency funds. However, the federal government is expected to appeal, and the process to restart SNAP payments would likely take one to two weeks.

Here’s a look at how SNAP works.

There are income limits based on family size, expenses and whether households include someone who is elderly or has a disability.

Most SNAP participants are families with children, and more than 1 in 3 include older adults or someone with a disability.

Nearly 2 in 5 recipients are households where someone is employed.

Most participants have incomes below the poverty line, which is about $32,000 for a family of four, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, says nearly 16 million children received SNAP benefits in 2023.

People who are not in the country legally, and many immigrants who do have legal status, are not eligible. Many college students aren’t either, and some states have barred people with certain drug convictions.

Under a provision of Trump’s big tax and policy law that also takes effect Nov. 1, people who do not have disabilities, are between ages 18 and 64 and who do not have children under age 14 can receive benefits for only three months every three years if they’re not working. Otherwise, they must work, volunteer or participate in a work training program at least 80 hours a month.

How much do beneficiaries receive?

On average, the monthly benefit per household participating in SNAP over the past few years has been about $350, and the average benefit per person is about $190.

The benefit amount varies based on a family’s income and expenses. The designated amount is based on the concept that households should allocate 30% of their remaining income after essential expenses to food.

Families can receive higher amounts if they pay child support, have monthly medical expenses exceeding $35 or pay a higher portion of their income on housing.

The cost of benefits and half the cost of running the program is paid by the federal government using tax dollars.

States pay the rest of the administrative costs and run the program.

People apply for SNAP through a state or county social service agency or through a nonprofit that helps people with applications. In some states, SNAP is known by another, state-specific name. For instance, it’s FoodShare in Wisconsin and CalFresh in California.

The benefits are delivered through electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, cards that work essentially like a bank debit card. Besides SNAP, it’s where money is loaded for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program, which provides cash assistance for low-income families with children, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

The card is swiped or inserted in a store’s card reader at checkout, and the cardholder enters their PIN to pay for food. The cost of the food is deducted from the person’s SNAP account balance.

SNAP benefits can only be used for food at participating stores — mostly groceries, supermarkets, discount retail stores, convenience stores and farmers markets. It also covers plants and seeds bought to grow your own food. However, hot foods — like restaurant meals — are not covered.

Most, but not all, food stores participate. The USDA provides a link on its website to a SNAP retail locator, allowing people to enter an address to get the closest retailers to them.

Items commonly found in a grocery and other participating stores that can’t be bought with SNAP benefits include pet food, household supplies like toilet paper, paper towels and cleaning products, and toiletries like toothpaste, shampoo and cosmetics. Vitamins, medicines, alcohol and tobacco products are also excluded.

Sales tax is not charged on items bought with SNAP benefits.

Are there any restrictions?

There aren’t additional restrictions today on which foods can be purchased with SNAP money.

But the federal government is allowing states to apply to limit which foods can be purchased with SNAP starting in 2026.

All of them will bar buying soft drinks, most say no to candy, and some block energy drinks.

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October 31, 2025
Oklahoma’s GOP Governor Opposes Sending Out-Of-State Troops to States That Don’t Welcome Them

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, the chair of the National Governors Association, said Thursday that he opposes sending National Guard troops across state borders without the permission of the state receiving them.

The position from a sitting Republican official posed a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump’s push to send National Guard troops to cities in states where Democrats are in charge, including Chicago where Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are waging a court fight to try to halt the deployment of Texas Guard members.

Abegail Cave, a spokesperson for Stitt, said he supports Trump’s effort to help impose law and order in some cities and to aid federal agents removing immigrants who have committed crimes, but that National Guard troops from one state should not be deployed to another over the objection of the receiving state’s governor.

“When it’s governors working together, it’s a very different story, but this whole situation where one state’s governor is sending their national Guard troops over the objections of another state’s governor, that sets a very dangerous precedent,” Cave said.

Speaking to The New York Times on Thursday, Stitt said “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”

Stitt drew one key distinction: While he opposes sending groups across state lines where they’re not welcomed by the governors, he said that Trump should have federalized National Guard from Illinois instead to protect federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. That’s the approach Trump took over the summer went he sent National Guard to Los Angeles during protests there.

The National Governors Association, a bipartisan group, has experienced turmoil, with Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom threatening to leave the organization because of its silence over the troop deployments. The organization has still not taken a stance.

Stitt’s position puts him at odds with the state’s Republican Attorney General and officials in most other Republican-controlled states.

Oklahoma’s Gentner Drummond was among 20 Republican attorneys general to file a brief Wednesday supporting Trump’s administration in its legal battle to allow him to deploy Oregon and California National Guard troops in Portland.

In the filing, they say the president needs to be able to federalize National Guard and send troops to Oregon so that federal immigration resources are not diverted there. “Otherwise, states will continue to bear the costs of nonenforcement of federal immigration laws,” they said.

Most Republican-controlled state including Oklahoma, have also requested permission to file similar papers in the Illinois court case.

The Democratic attorneys general or governors of 24 states also filed jointly Wednesday to side with California and Oregon.

There’s a similar partisan split over the use of troops in Washington, D.C.

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October 9, 2025
OSBI makes multiple arrest in marijuana grow robberies – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — A murder and several robberies at marijuana grows in Okfuskee County and Stephens County has now resulted in the arrest of 10 people.

However, state agents say they are not stopping with just the 10, they are still looking for more people involved.

“It was on March 7th when we were able to come together and identify multiple suspects who were involved in each of these crimes,” Hunter McKee, PIO for OSBI said.

10 total suspects arrested in two separate marijuana grow robberies

Multiple robberies and assaults at marijuana grows have created a months long investigation. 10 people have been arrested so far.

“We’re still looking for suspects,” McKee said.

The OSBI is working with Okfuskee County, Stephens County and the US Marshal’s saying they believe the same group of people are involved.

“Each of our robberies had slightly different modes, but they were all very violent, very sudden, and were out of our county very quickly,” Rick Lang, Undersheriff for Stephens County said.

“We’ve had a few robberies in the past at grows, but not to the extent that they accelerated to a homicide,” Roy Wilbourn, Sheriff for Okfuskee County said. “Again, this was a brutal and in my words, a tactical entry to this road.”

Cleveland County traffic stop leads to drugs, firearm

The marijuana grows that were robbed are in rural areas. Both sheriff’s believe it was a well planned out attack.

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