by Lomi Kriel, Perla Trevizo and Mica Rosenberg ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The text came from inside a Panamanian government outpost, set hours away from the country’s capital, on the edge of the Darien jungle. It had been written by a migrant who’d managed to smuggle a cellphone into the facility by hiding it in his shorts. He said authorities had detained him without providing him access to a lawyer or any means to communicate with relatives. He was hungry because all…
A behind-the-scenes legal effort to force Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution could end up helping President Donald Trump in his push to expand presidential power. While the convention effort is focused on the national debt, legal experts say it could open the door to other changes, such as limiting who can be a U.S. citizen, allowing the president to overrule Congress’ spending decisions or even making it legal for Trump to run for a third term. Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several…
By MIKE MAGEE For aging Boomers, it is impossible not to hear echoes of Apartheid re-emerging with force 3/4 of a century after the battle for social justice here and in far away lands was fully engaged. The Musk assault, disguised as “efficiency” is little more than stealing money from the poor to give to the rich, and widens an already extraordinary income gap. The assault is large enough to draw condemnation from a dying Pope Francis, forced to remind Trump, Musk and their enablers of the historic Jesus and the tenets of Liberation Theology. Our college years in the 1960’s were accompanied by…
by Taylor Kate Brown ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists. Two inches of raw sewage. Persistent chemical leaks. Pipes insulated with asbestos. A bat infestation. Black mold. “It kind of blows my mind some of the things I found in public schools,” says Emily Schwing, a KYUK reporter and ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Recently, we published her investigation of dangerous conditions in deteriorating public schools in Alaska’s rural villages. Schwing, who reported this story while also participating in…
by Anjeanette Damon ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. If you ask a National Park Service ranger how the Trump administration’s cost cutting will affect your next park visit, you might get talking points instead of a straight answer. A series of emails sent late last month to front-line staff at parks across the country provided rangers with instructions on how to describe the highly publicized staff cuts. Park leaders further instructed staff to avoid the word “fired” and not blame closures on staffing…
Employees of the General Services Administration, which manages government real estate and certain IT efforts, have been given a custom chatbot from Elon Musk’s DOGE to help automate tasks, according to a new report from Wired, with an internal memo telling workers it can be used to “draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.” The chatbot, GSAi, gives users a choice of three models — Claude Haiku 3.5 (the default), Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 and Meta Llama 3.2 — and is ultimately meant to be used to “analyze contract and procurement data,” Wired reports. The GSA is one…
by Jesse Coburn ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering taking a first step to using cryptocurrency, according to a meeting recording and other materials reviewed by ProPublica and three officials familiar with the matter. Two officials told ProPublica they believe the initiative may be a trial run for the use of crypto across the federal government. The discussions have sparked concern among some at the department, especially about the prospect of paying recipients of…
by Audrey Dutton ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Idaho lawmakers are moving forward with modest efforts to improve the state’s system for investigating deaths, following reports by ProPublica and others that identified major problems. At the same time, counties are moving to shield from public view records that ProPublica relied on in its coverage. “Before you today is a bill that is a long time coming, and I say that because over the course…
by Sharon Lerner For decades, Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists have tried to chip away at the small program in the Environmental Protection Agency that measures the threat of toxic chemicals. Most people don’t know IRIS, as the program is called, but it is the scientific engine of the agency that protects human health and the environment. Its scientists assess the toxicity of chemicals, estimating the amount of each that triggers cancer and other health effects. And these values serve as the independent, nonpartisan basis for the rules, regulations and permits that limit our exposure to toxic chemicals. Now IRIS…
