propublica.org

Across the country, Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

Most of the 15 bills being considered are part of a coordinated effort by groups linked to right-wing activist Leonard Leo.

Most of the 15 bills being considered are part of a coordinated effort by groups linked to right-wing activist Leonard Leo.

Before becoming a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Aaron Szabo was a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry. Metadata shows he helped draft a trade group’s 2022 letter to the EPA objecting to controls on methane emissions.

Before becoming a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Aaron Szabo was a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry. Metadata shows he helped draft a trade group’s 2022 letter to the EPA objecting to controls on methane emissions.

The Trump administration official leading an effort to loosen rules on methane pollution was an unnamed author of key industry arguments against those same rules just four years ago when he was an oil and gas lobbyist.

The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.

Chose to use the title of the article for the title of the post despite it being somewhat “eh”.

Reporting Highlights

Reporting Highlights

The agency once said that pieces of space debris “pose a significant risk,” but the Trump administration has backed off a rule that would have required companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX to remove rocket parts from orbit within 25 years of launch.

On Wednesday, Torrez’s chief of staff, Lauren Rodriguez, said the office’s long-running investigation is complete and has found “troubling disciplinary practices.” She added that the agency’s “exhaustive” investigation calls for the state Public Education Department to enforce student discipline data reporting requirements and better track that information. Previously, the district’s former longtime Superintendent Mike Hyatt, had downplayed the amount of discipline Native students receive and pointed to poor data collection as an issue.

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement arm is requesting unfettered access to what is considered to be the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States and their most private information, including sensitive details about individual children, according to six current and former federal officials.

In February 2025, Russell Vought, a White House official who oversaw sweeping cuts across federal agencies, took control of the CFPB as acting director. He quickly ordered a stop to nearly all agency work. Under his leadership, the CFPB has attempted to fire most of its staff, frozen investigations and dropped enforcement actions, including against TransUnion. One of the CFPB’s new lawyers leading the pullback on enforcement represented Experian for years before joining the administration.

The New York State attorney general’s office has begun investigating how Columbia University let a predatory doctor continue to see patients despite decades of warnings.

Thousands of companies are jockeying for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.

ProPublica is releasing a trove of disclosure records that detail the finances of more than 1,500 Trump appointees, including former lobbyists, industry executives and at least a dozen officials who declined to identify former clients.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260305125438/https://www.propublica.org/article/albuquerque-homelessness-citations-surge-tim-keller

Thousands of companies are jockeying for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.

Lewandowski has an unusual role at DHS, where he is not a paid government employee but is nonetheless acting as a top official, helping Noem run the sprawling agency. For months, members of Congress have asked the agency to detail the scope of his work and authority.

Several others told ProPublica they are also seeing an uptick in the frequency and intensity of disasters, which makes it difficult to manage recovery (which can take years) while preparing for the next storm or fire. In St. Louis, for example, emergency management commissioner Sarah Russell was still in the midst of managing recovery efforts from 2022 flash flooding when the 2025 tornado hit.

When guards appeared earlier this month outside the room Christian Hinojosa shared with her son and other women and children at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, she guessed what they might be after. She quickly donned her puffy winter jacket, then slipped a manila envelope inside it. “Thank God the weather was cool,” she said — the jacket didn’t raise suspicions.

I funzionari di Trump hanno partecipato a un vertice di negazionisti delle elezioni che vogliono che il presidente prenda il controllo delle elezioni di medio termineTra i partecipanti all'incontro c'erano Kurt Olsen, avvocato della Casa Bianca incaricato di riesaminare le elezioni del 2020, e Heather Honey, funzionaria del Dipartimento per la sicurezza interna responsabile dell'integrità delle elezioni.propublica.org/article/electio@politica

Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.

Guards have taken away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper during recent room searches at Dilley, according to Hinojosa and three other former detainees, along with lawyers and advocates in contact with the families inside.

Four House Democrats demanded the top Federal Bureau of Prisons official explain how he plans to address the agency’s “persistent, unsafe conditions” and “pervasive shortage of critical staff,” driven in part by corrections officers fleeing the bureau for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

The Trump administration’s view, according to the Justice Department’s filings in Mendoza-Rivera’s case, is that undocumented parents convicted of even the most minor forms of parental negligence should be ineligible for a type of legal relief called “cancellation of removal.” (Mendoza-Rivera sought this relief during his initial deportation proceedings, which is part of what spurred the current appeals case.) It’s an off-ramp from deportation that until now has been available to such moms and dads if they’ve been in the U.S. for 10 or more years, they have “good moral character,” and their deportation would cause extreme hardship to their U.S. citizen children. This would apply to Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez’s kids, who are American citizens.

In mid-January, an unassuming man in khakis and a button-down shirt walked to a wooden lectern at a school board meeting in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Most chairs in the audience were empty. The man, Tim Smith, was the only person signed up to speak during public comments. He had five minutes.

EmblemHealth will compensate customers who paid out of pocket for mental health care because they couldn’t secure an appointment with a provider listed as being in-network. It also pledged to take additional steps to fix its provider directory.

The FDA has taken down a webpage warning about therapies and products making “false claims” of treating autism. It’s part of a series of actions the agency has taken under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to discredit long-established science.

Last month, Trump cheered a military assault by U.S. forces that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and brought them to the U.S. to face charges related to cocaine trafficking. Maduro, Trump said, led a “vicious cartel” that “flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans.”

For months, President Donald Trump has railed against Latin American narcoterrorists flooding the United States with “lethal poison.” He has used the scourge of drug trafficking as a rationale for dozens of military strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, which have left more than 140 people dead.

This week, ProPublica published a story I wrote based in part on interviews with parents and children being held at the nation’s only operating detention center for immigrant families in Dilley, Texas. I had asked some of the parents to see if their children would be willing to write to me about their experiences inside. More than three dozen did.

This week, ProPublica published a story I wrote based in part on interviews with parents and children being held at the nation’s only operating detention center for immigrant families in Dilley, Texas. I had asked some of the parents to see if their children would be willing to write to me about their experiences inside. More than three dozen did.

When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback.

Despite finding evidence of oil and gas contamination in the Boarmans’ water in more than a dozen tests conducted over two years, several agency leaders developed a new theory, according to internal emails from the fall of 2024: They suggested at times that the company that had drilled the Boarmans’ water well had done a bad job and drilled into a pocket of natural salt water, unrelated to oil and gas operations.

Under pressure from Republican state attorneys general, the agency that advises the U.S. Supreme Court and federal judges on scientific and technical matters has withdrawn the entirety of its content on climate change from a new judicial reference manual.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260211133122/https://www.propublica.org/article/habeas-petitions-immigrant-detentions-trump

As early as 2021, government officials were alerted to the presence of potentially dangerous chemicals known as PFAS in pants used by wildland firefighters, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence” — updated for the first time in 15 years — eliminates some 90 pages about climate science and comes just as numerous climate cases make their way through state and federal courts.

ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of what comes next.

For months, the Trump administration has justified its dramatic midnight raid on a Chicago apartment complex by saying that it had intelligence that the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building. But officials have provided no evidence to back up the claim.

In almost every instance, President Donald Trump’s administration blamed the injured and dead for the shooting within hours of the incident, raising questions about whether federal officials can fairly and objectively investigate their own. Legal experts and advocates for immigrants say this apparent lack of accountability demands that local authorities step up and exercise their power to investigate and prosecute federal agents who break state laws — from battery to murder.

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a sharp warning that rocket launches could “significantly reduce safety” for airplanes, urging pilots to prepare for the possibility that “catastrophic failures” could create dangerous debris fields.

The records viewed by ProPublica list Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, as the shooters during the deadly encounter last weekend that left Pretti dead and ignited massive protests and calls for criminal investigations.

Both apparently Hispanic and from South Texas. Makes you wonder if their names got leaked to throw them under the bus.