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Now That They’re Free

by Perla Trevizo , ProPublica and The Texas Tribune , Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg , ProPublica, Ronna Rísquez , Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Adrián González , Cazadores de Fake News , photography and additional reporting by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Leer en español. Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs. Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back. Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day...
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Idaho Schools Consistently Break Disability Laws. Parents Say They’re Not Doing Enough to Fix the Problem.

by Becca Savransky , Idaho Statesman Kali Larsen sat at her desk at Fruitland Elementary School in Idaho earlier this year, trying to read the test questions as her classmates silently worked around her. Her anxiety climbed as she stared at the paper. She asked to use the bathroom and left the room. Her mother, Jessica Larsen, had been substitute teaching that day when she received a call from the front office, notifying her that her 9-year-old daughter was having a panic attack. Kali, now 10, has dyslexia and struggles with reading and writing, Larsen said. “Wouldn’t you be anxious?” Larsen told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. For years, Larsen had been pleading with the Fruitland School District to get Kali qualified for special education for reading. Larsen, who herself was diagnosed later in life with dyslexia, had her daughter tested in first grade in 2021 by a private specialist who said Kali had the same disability. But a diagnosis doesn’t automatically qualify a student...
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A Las Vegas Festival Promised Ways to Cheat Death. Two Attendees Left Fighting for Their Lives.

by Anjeanette Damon 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. They went to a Las Vegas conference this month that promised pathways to an “unlimited lifespan.” But at least two attendees left in ambulances and were hospitalized in critical condition, requiring ventilators to breathe. The two women, who are recovering, fell ill after receiving peptide injections at a conference booth. The doctor who ran the booth was a Los Angeles physician specializing in “age reversal” therapies who did not have permission to practice medicine or dispense prescriptions in Nevada. Public health investigators are trying to determine if anyone else who attended the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival experienced a similar illness. The investigation comes as peptides grow in popularity, thanks in part to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promot...
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He Was Asked About His Tattoos and a TikTok Video in Court. Five Days Later, He Was in a Salvadoran Prison.

by Melissa Sanchez 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. In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention. Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter. More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities deta...
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Appeals Court Overturns Murder and Kidnapping Conviction in Etan Patz Disappearance

by Joaquin Sapien ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Last week, a federal appeals court overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez for the murder and kidnapping of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old New York boy who disappeared in 1979 in one of the most famous missing child cases in U.S. history. The three-judge panel ruled that a trial court judge had given jurors “manifestly inaccurate” guidance regarding a confession Hernandez made before he had been advised of his Miranda rights. Jurors asked whether, if they decided the first confession was involuntary, that meant they should disregard two videotaped confessions that came afterward. The trial judge said “the answer is no” and offered no further explanation. The appellate judges, in their opinion, said that by doing so, “the state trial court contradicted clearly established federal law.” They threw out Hernandez’s conviction and o...
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The FDA Is Cracking Down on an Indian Drugmaker Investigated by ProPublica Last Year

by Patricia Callahan ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on a generic drugmaker that was the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year, citing problems with safety tests that delayed the recall of a medicine linked to deaths in the U.S. In December, ProPublica reported that a Glenmark Pharmaceuticals factory in central India was responsible for an outsized share of recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve properly and could harm American patients. Among the string of recalls, federal regulators had determined that more than 50 million potassium chloride extended-release capsules sold in the U.S. could be deadly . Yet, federal drug inspectors at that point hadn’t set foot in the Madhya Pradesh factory for more than four years, ProPublica found. Seven weeks after that story was published, FDA inspectors showed up at the plant a...
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8 Things to Know About New Research on Earth’s Rapid Drying and the Loss of Its Groundwater

by ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The continents are rapidly drying out and the earth’s vast freshwater resources are under threat, according to a recently released study based on more than 20 years of NASA satellite data. Here are the report’s key findings and what they portend for humankind: Much of the Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying,” affecting the countries containing 75% of the world’s population, the new research shows. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, examined changes to Earth’s total supply of fresh water and found that nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries facing a net decline in water supply, posing a “critical, emerging threat to humanity.” Mining of underground freshwater aquifers is driving much of the loss. According to the study, the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corp...
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