Posts

Senate Leaders Warn Defense Department About Procuring Generic Drugs Overseas

Senate leaders are urging the Department of Defense to prioritize the purchase of generic drugs manufactured in the United States, warning that the country’s overreliance on foreign factories poses an “existential risk” to the military. In a letter last week , Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., asked Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide information about drugs or key ingredients purchased from foreign sources and how long the department’s inventory would last if China restricted exports. They also sought details about whether the Food and Drug Administration had imposed any import bans on the department’s suppliers. The letter cited ProPublica reporting last year that found the FDA allowed dozens of foreign drugmakers, mostly in India and China, to continue sending generic medication to the U.S. even after the factories were banned because of serious safety and quality-control failures. Since 2013, ProPublica found, the FDA allowed more than 15...
Post a Comment
Read more

Democrats Demand Answers for Federal Prison Staffing Shortage After Corrections Officers Flee for ICE Jobs

Image
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. Outlined in a six-page letter sent Friday to BOP Director William Marshall III, the lawmakers’ questions come after a ProPublica investigation found that workers at federal lockups from Florida to California had been lured away by the $50,000 starting bonus and higher pay at ICE, which more than doubled its number of officers and agents last year during the Trump administration’s monthslong recruiting blitz. The prisons bureau, meanwhile, lost a net of more than 1,800 workers last year. “We are deeply concerned that these developments compromise the safety and security of both inmates and staff,” Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Lucy McBath of Georgia, Jasmine Crockett o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trump Administration Moves to Allow Intelligence Agencies Easier Access to Law Enforcement Files

Image
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. Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans. Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists. But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been mark...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases

Should a person be deported because once, a decade and a half ago, they left their toddlers home alone for a half hour to buy them pajamas at Walmart? That’s what the Trump administration is arguing in a little-noticed federal appeals court case being decided in California, with sweeping implications for both the immigration and child welfare systems. A ruling is expected in the coming months. In 2010, Sotero Mendoza-Rivera, an undocumented farmworker who’d immigrated from Mexico 10 years earlier, made a fateful decision. He drove with his girlfriend, Angelica Ortega-Vasquez, to their local Walmart in McMinnville, Oregon, according to a police report. The store was seven minutes from their apartment. In addition to the pajamas, they purchased motor oil and brake fluid for their car. When they got back to the apartment, their 2-year-old son, who’d been in bed asleep when they’d left, had woken up and somehow gotten out the door. A bystander found him by the street outside the complex,...
Post a Comment
Read more

U.S. Forest Service Stops Issuing Firefighter Pants That Contain PFAS, Following ProPublica’s Reporting

Image
Following a ProPublica article revealing that the U.S. Forest Service had for years issued clothing to wildland firefighters that it knew contained potentially dangerous “forever chemicals,” the agency has stopped distributing those garments. It also says that it will instruct its equipment manufacturers to avoid using PFAS in the future. This month, ProPublica reported that until at least 2023 one of the Forest Service’s suppliers, TenCate, used finishing products made with a PFAS compound on a Kevlar-blend pant fabric. According to emails from the supplier, the finishes were used to repel gasoline and water. Despite knowing about the use of PFAS, officials with the Forest Service had not previously informed wildland firefighters about it. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have long been used in protective gear to repel substances like fuels. But many municipal fire departments have moved away from the chemicals as researchers revealed more about health risks associated...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Victims Who Fought Back

Image
Lisa Rae Moss — serving a life sentence for her involvement in the 1990 murder of her husband, Mike Moss — sat in the witness box in a courtroom in Seminole, Oklahoma, on a frigid January morning in 2025, her hands knotted in her lap. Moss, who is 60, was asked to recount what she endured in her 20s, during her marriage to a volatile man a dozen years her senior. Her long silver hair and prison-issued glasses accentuated the years between her and the younger self she was describing. “Did Mike ever use a gun on you in the bedroom?” her lawyer, Colleen McCarty, asked. “He had a gun that usually lay on top of the chest of drawers at night,” Moss said quietly. She explained that her husband would place it there before they went to bed. “There were a number of occasions where he took the gun — and I wasn’t in the mood to have sex and I didn’t want to have sex — and he would move the gun up and down my inner thigh and then lay it on the pillow next to the bed.” She stopped to correct hers...
Post a Comment
Read more