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Colorado Marijuana Regulators Failed to Protect Consumers From Potential Contamination, Audit Finds

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Cannabis samples in the process of testing at Kaycha Labs in Denver Stephen Swofford/The Denver Gazette The agency charged with regulating Colorado’s first-in-the-nation legal recreational marijuana market potentially put consumers at risk of using contaminated products, a new state audit found. The report pointed to inconsistent oversight by the Marijuana Enforcement Division and loose state rules around testing marijuana products or contaminants. As a result, it found, nearly 75% of marijuana processed for eventual sale from 2023 through 2025 evaded testing for pesticides. The audit, released Monday , identified a host of issues, including regulators’ failure to meet regular inspection schedules or to conduct sufficient random checks at dispensaries for contaminated products. It also found that delayed agency warnings to the public allowed potentially contaminated products to remain on shelves for months, sometimes years. The audit’s conclusions echo several findin...
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Town Leaders Said They Were Prepared for Floods. First Responders Disagree.

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A Ruidoso Fire Department station less than a half mile from the Riverview RV Park. The fire chief had for weeks declined requests from off-duty swiftwater technicians who wanted to be stationed in flood-prone areas, including one close to the RV park, before the waters hit. The man was nearly to his waist in a flooded river and couldn’t get out. A firefighter and a police officer didn’t have enough rope or manpower to lift him onto the temporary flood barrier that separated them from the debris-strewn water. The man, Jere Stark, had just been carried a quarter mile by a torrential flood and was covered in mud and extremely cold. It was around 3:30 p.m. on July 8, 2025, and a flood in Ruidoso, New Mexico, had unleashed chaos at Paradise Canyon Drive, just a couple hundred yards from the headquarters of the village fire department. Not far from Stark, a woman huddled on the ground, shielded from the floodwaters by the temporary barrier. It was Stephanie Trotter, a tourist...
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The Secret Terms of Trump’s Venezuelan Oil Deal

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Alejandro Betancourt, a 46-year-old Venezuelan energy baron, is the key figure in a historic oil deal with the Trump administration. Venezuelan opposition leaders and U.S. congressional Democrats have criticized the agreement because Betancourt has been the target of investigations of alleged corruption. Antonio Heredia/El Mundo In late August, President Donald Trump announced what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history.” Since then, the full text of the accord — which grants the U.S. sweeping access to Venezuela’s oil reserves — has been one of the most sought-after secrets in Washington, D.C.  ProPublica has reviewed a copy of the 18-page strategic partnership agreement signed for the United States by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and pr...
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How Trump’s FBI Purge Saved Lindsey Graham and James Clyburn From a Bribery Investigation

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Beatrice Caciotti for ProPublica. Source images: Getty Images, Hawaii News Now, South Carolina Department of Transportation. On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting. Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed. “Shoot all he has to really do is stop by and say ‘yes,’” Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. “That should only take a minute and he’s on his way. We don’t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.” At the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the “yes” he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek’...
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