A Michigan lawmaker is urging swift action to combat climate change.

U.S. Senator Gary Peters hosted an Earth Day field summit in Lansing Monday.

Peters says the impacts of climate change are not a problem for future generations to tackle.

“They are significant, they are costly and they are already being felt here in Michigan,” Peters said.

Peters says the Midwest is particularly vulnerable to the challenges posed by climate change.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel says a new unit in her office will focus on businesses that illegally classify their workers as independent contractors to reduce their costs.

The Democratic attorney general says it’s a growing trend around the country. Nessel says the scheme is used to avoid paying workers the minimum wage as well as health and unemployment benefits they’re entitled to. She says it cheats other employers who play by the rules and shoulder those costs.

Across the state Michiganders are taking part in projects to mark Earth Day, and not all of them are taking place far away from the state’s urban centers.

In Saginaw, dozens of volunteers are spending the day cleaning up vacant lots. It’s part of a larger program to put in plants that attract pollinating insects and wildlife across the city.  

Zachary Branigan is the executive director of the Saginaw Basin Land Conservancy.

He says there’s a wildlife corridor that goes right through the city of Saginaw and Bay City, up and down the Saginaw Valley. 

The Detroit Medical Center’s Harper University Hospital passed an important inspection this month.

Harper Hospital could’ve lost Medicare payments after a Dec. 13, 2018 inspection listed several violations, including failure to accurately record time of death for three patients, "resulting in the potential for the inability to recover tissue and/or organs for use in transplant."

The Supreme Court will decide whether federal civil rights law prohibits discrimination against transgender people when it takes up a Michigan case involving a R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes.

The lawsuit involves Aimee Stephens, a funeral home director at R.G. and G.R. Harris, which operates three funeral homes in Michigan, who was fired after disclosing that she was transitioning from male to female and dressed as a woman.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued on behalf of Stephens.

Oscoda residents will meet with high ranking U.S. Air Force officials this week to discuss the cleanup of PFAS contamination at the former Wurtsmith Air Force base.

Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment and Energy, John Henderson, will hold a public forum in Oscoda next Wednesday, April 24 at 4 p.m. at the Oscoda Township Community Center.