Jack Lessenberry

To his credit, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan agreed this summer to a single televised debate with State Senator Coleman Young II, who ran far behind in the August primary. Duggan, in fact, got more than two-thirds of the vote in a seven-candidate field. Many cities don’t even hold a runoff when one candidate gets a majority in a primary. Other Detroit mayors in similar positions have refused to debate their opponents. But Duggan did.

More than a quarter of a million people in Michigan’s richest county have to boil their drinking water this week. If you haven’t heard, that’s because a four-foot wide water transmission line apparently broke in Farmington Hills Monday night.

A new study says African-American kids in Michigan fare worse than children of color anywhere else in the country when it comes to education and other benchmarks. Some advocates say that means it’s time to start acknowledging we need policies that give extra help to minority children. Michigan Radio's "Morning Edition" host Doug Tribou and senior news analyst Jack Lessenberry discuss what that approach might look like.

You don’t need a master’s degree in labor relations to know that America’s labor unions have been declining for years. In the early 1950s, more than a third of all private sector workers were unionized; in Detroit, that number may have been over half. But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that last year, union membership nationally fell to 10.7 percent, the lowest it’s been since before the New Deal and the Wagner Act gave workers the right to organize. In fact, union membership is far

Whatever you think of his policies, Senator Bernie Sanders did something politically smart. Sanders, who had been scheduled to open the first-ever Women’s Convention in Detroit next week, announced that he wouldn’t be able to attend after all. “I want to apologize to the organizers,” the senator from Vermont said, “but given the emergency situation in Puerto Rico,” he felt his leadership was needed there next weekend instead.

Someone once wrote that if you keep a diary and look back at what you wrote 20 years ago, you often find the stuff you thought was peripheral actually turned out to have been the most important. For example, you may have filled pages mooning over a now-forgotten Ralph or Susie, and just noted in passing a job that began your professional career. News is like that too. We don’t always see what’s most important. Most of us, so far as I can tell, are so focused on the daily clown show in Washington

Michigan legislators are debating auto insurance this week. One proposal would let people choose different levels of coverage – dropping the mandatory open-ended catastrophic medical coverage that's in place now. Another plan would prohibit the use of zip codes and credit histories to set rates. Everyone – with the possible exception of the insurance companies – seems to agree rates are too high. Morning Edition host Doug Tribou asks Michigan Radio's senior news analyst Jack Lessenberry if he

Jocelyn Benson announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for secretary of state yesterday. She has actually been running for the job for many months, though not as long as Bill Schuette has been running for governor; he is, after all, almost a quarter century older.

As you may know, Amazon is looking for another city in which to build a vast new headquarters that could mean billions in investment and up to 50,000 jobs. Not surprisingly, just about every city wants that. But the place where it might make the most difference for the local economy is, of course, Detroit. Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans czar who many regard as Detroit’s capitalist savior, is heading a task force that will submit a bid in the next two days to the giant mail order retailer. Mayor

I think I can say that I have some professional credibility as a journalist. I have a master’s degree from a major university, a national Emmy award, work in all forms of media, and am in charge of journalism at Wayne State University in Detroit. Yet legally, I have the same standing as a journalist as a high school dropout who writes a blog in his grandmother’s basement, and that is exactly the way it is supposed to be. Plumbers are licensed by the state. So are doctors, lawyers, and every