Lucas was just 12 days old when he was struck in the head outside nursery in Argentina

A Texas grandmother's safe-deposit box became the centre of a family dispute after her death in 2019. Her grandson reported finding $16,000, while another family member claimed it contained $400,000, an eight-carat diamond ring and gold coins. The grandmother's niece later won nearly $797,000 in damages, but an appeals court overturned the award on Tuesday, citing her failure to follow the required legal process.

Chattanooga’s publicly owned internet network has helped transform the once struggling city into an unlikely marvel of civic reinvention. | Lucy Jones for Vox; Getty Images Most Americans hate their cable companies. But not the 200,000-odd residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city nestled in the Appalachian foothills.  For many people, the city might seem off the beaten path — enough so that when Spain’s national team chose the city as their base during the FIFA World Cup over the summer, the internet exploded with jeers of incredulity. And yet, as many an urban planner, and certainly many a local, will tell you, Chattanooga is a special place, known not just because the Glenn Miller Orchestra immortalized it as a scenic hub for the choo-choo train. No, what really has put Chattanooga on the map recently is its ridiculously fast, municipally owned internet.  Key takeaways Chattanooga, Tennessee, is home to some of the fastest, most beloved broadband in the nation. It’s all thanks to the city’s publicly owned internet network, which has been linked to billions of dollars in economic benefits since coming online in 2010. Hundreds of other cities have followed suit in the years since, but many others have been stymied by opposition from major cable companies. And that’s a shame, because if every city was like Chattanooga, our internet could be so much better than it is now. Unlike almost everywhere else in the country, the fiber-optic cables that keep much of Chattanooga online were laid neither by Comcast nor Spectrum, but by the city itself. In a $220 million gamble, its public power utility, EPB, has helped transform the once struggling post-industrial city into an unlikely marvel of civic reinvention, and an inspiration for many other dozens of copycat towns around the country.   When it debuted in 2010, at one gigabit per second, the city’s ultra-speedy broadband was among the fastest in the world, as fast as global meccas like Hong Kong, and over 200 times faster than the average top-tier offering across the US. “This makes Chattanooga, a mid-sized city in the South,” declared then-Mayor Ron Littlefield to the New York Times, “one of the leading cities in the world in its digital capabilities.”  In the decade and a half since Chattanooga rebranded as “Gig City,” its trademark broadband has proved to be far more than a mere fancy gimmick. It has added billions of dollars to the city’s economy, lured in hundreds of new startups, and, according to EPB, become the single largest source of funding for local public schools, and delighted hundreds of thousands of local customers.  If you’re not a tech company or a prolific streamer, of course, you may not need such intensive internet service. But the city’s broadband service is widely beloved locally for bringing 70 percent of households online at, by far, the lowest price per megabit of bandwidth in the area and quite possibly, among the lowest in the country. Consumer Reports perennially ranks EPB among America’s best providers, a sentiment apparently shared by the legions of Chattanoogans who take to social media to sing EPB’s praises every time it swoops in to fix an outage minutes after a storm hits, or bemoan their loss when they move away and witness the sludgy pace at — and high rates — which the rest of us browse and scroll.  “Chattanooga turned out better than anyone could have hoped,” said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, part of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that researches locally owned infrastructure, “and the one thing that hasn’t changed are their prices. It’s rare, remarkable even.” That original single-gig service runs $68 per month, and faster speeds aren’t too much more.   But even as the benefits of Chattanooga’s internet supremacy have compounded, public broadband networks like it are still a rarity across the US, which you probably already know if you, like most Americans, have ever sensed your internet growing ever more lethargic, even as your fees climb month after month.  There is a better way, and Chattanooga has long since shown the nation how. For better or worse, the internet drives much of our daily lives and the economy, and what makes the internet possible? Broadband, which is powered by those stiff plastic-sheathed cables filled with strands of thin glass or braids of copper wire, beaming pulses of light or electricity into your modem. And yet, the US has outsourced the provision of this precious public good almost entirely to de facto monopolies that keep our internet slower, more expensive, and above all, more infuriating than it needs to be.  “There was a generation that built water systems and electric systems. There was a generation that built the roads,” Mitchell said. Today, however, “People are just afraid of the idea of the government being ambitious and doing what Chattanooga did.” How Chattanooga built the world’s best broadband Long before Chattanooga grew famous for its broadband, it was known, for a period of time, as “the dirtiest city of America,” a moniker bestowed by Walter Cronkite in 1969.  According to local lore, the moon pie, which originated at a bakery in Chattanooga, came to be when a coal miner asked for a snack “as big as the moon” to sustain him for long shifts down the shaft. The coal he mined fueled the industrial boom that defined Chattanooga until the mid-20th century, when the city’s factories, furnaces, and railroads belched a smog so noxious, it melted women’s nylon stockings off their legs as they walked.  By the 1980s, the city knew it needed to change, seeding a hunger for reinvention that experts told me would come to define its municipally-owned internet. By the 2000s, Chattanooga had more than cleaned up its air and its reputation, building a huge aquarium in the heart of downtown and carefully revitalizing its riverfront and natural areas. But in the early aughts, with the remaining heavy industry in deep retreat, and a fragile recovery threatened by the Great Recession, the city craved a new economic engine.  The city’s EPB, which originated as a municipally owned electric utility in 1935, had already set out to build a smart electrical grid in 2008, retrofitting it with a two-way digital communications system that could detect and fix problems as they arise. This process would involve laying hundreds of miles of new fiber-optic cable lines along existing power lines, monitoring them and relaying information back and forth with operators. But as the EPB laid plans for its new grid-helping fiber, it realized that for roughly the same amount of effort and cost, it could repurpose those cables to also serve as a cutting-edge internet service.  Laying those hundreds of miles of new cables, along every single power line in the city, is an expensive and time-consuming process. But since EPB already had power lines plugging into almost every home and business throughout the city, it didn’t even need permission to get it done. And once the cables are there, there’s no real limit on how much data they can carry, meaning that they’ll work just as well whether they’re relaying the power grid’s data exclusively or if they’re carrying petabytes upon petabytes of data from hundreds of thousands of internet customers. This same quality has made it easy for EPB to pump up the volume of data it offers over the years, eventually allowing it to become the first city in the nation to offer a 25-gigabit-per-second service, which it did for its customers in 2023. More recently, EPB became the first provider nationwide to hook its fiber-optic cables up to a quantum computer — which uses advanced physics to solve mind-bogglingly complex problems — and offer its use to researchers and customers across the city.  “If we’re going to own that fiber communications network to help automate our grid, why not offer that as a service to our customers? We thought, ‘Why not go big? Why not be ambitious?’” Janet Rehberg, CEO of EPB, told me. “People thought we were crazy. And we said, ‘If we can do it, why not?’ So, we did.” Equipped with a $111 million federal stimulus grant from the recession-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, plus about $222 million in municipal bonds, EPB was able to complete the project — initially expected to take a decade — in just two years.  In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the nation to offer one-gigabit-per-second fiber optic internet.  “This was a huge shift for our city’s fortunes,” Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga from 2013 to 2021, told me. “All of a sudden, we were a place where you could try to discover the next big thing.”  Hundreds of startups flocked to the city for its super-fast broadband, with tech incubators setting up shop in shuttered storefronts and abandoned industrial factories dotted along the city’s downtown. In its first 10 years, EPB’s fiber network brought more than $5.3 billion in economic benefits and 10,420 jobs to the city, about 31 percent of all jobs created during that period, according to a study by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This has transformed “the way we thought about ourselves and what we thought was possible technologically,” Berke said.  The broadband investment has long since paid for itself and then some in the fees people pay to access its service. EPB expects to earn about $190 million over the next year alone from its telecommunications and enormously popular internet service, all of which will flow back into the business itself or into the city. As a result, EPB chose not to increase electricity rates at all this year, in stark contrast to much of the rest of the country. And the utility now pays tens of millions of dollars annually straight back into city services, like public schools.  Under Berke’s mayoral administration, the city also integrated EPB into initiatives meant to get more Chattanoogans online. When the pandemic hit, and local sch

The new restrictions come amid concerns that some buyers may have been taking advantage of an exemption meant for commercial vehicles, despite having no intention of providing private-hire services.

Government analysis suggested the strategy could save a typical household around £130 over the next 10 years