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In a Private Meeting, Colorado Marijuana Regulators Acknowledge the Extent of Illegal Hemp Sales

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Despite regulators’ concerns, Colorado lawmakers abandoned a bill that would have let voters decide whether to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants. Raymond Boyd/Getty Images A top regulator for Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division acknowledged in a private meeting with industry representatives that the amount of chemically converted hemp being illegally sold as marijuana is far greater than the agency has publicly disclosed. The remarks confirmed testing by The Denver Gazette and ProPublica , which found signs of hemp in marijuana vapes sold at dispensaries, as well as reporting that regulators have discovered that some hemp-derived vapes were contaminated with a toxic chemical. The virtual meeting, an audio recording of which was reviewed by the news organizations, was convened by members of Colorado Leads, a marijuana industry trade group, in March to discuss a problem they said had “metastasized” and now posed an “existential threat” to t...
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At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign.

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Charles Mauldin was near the front of the line to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, a day that became known as “Bloody Sunday” after police brutally beat demonstrators. Charity Rachelle for ProPublica Charles Mauldin remembers that his lungs felt like they were imploding when he breathed in tear gas more than 60 years ago. It was Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Mauldin, who was 17, joined hundreds of other demonstrators in a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans. Mauldin stood near the front of the line — just two rows behind John Lewis, who would go on to become a civil rights icon and U.S. representative — when the march attempted to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Law enforcement officers waited on the other side. They ordered the group to disperse. After about a minute and half, Mauldin said, police began to attack the demonstrators with billy clubs. They also lau...
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Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump

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Sebastian Gorka, senior director for counterterrorism, at the White House Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U.S. approach to combating terrorist threats. The finished product, released May 6 after months of delays, is a 16-page, typo-sprinkled document that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to several current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts. Islamist militant groups, the perennial top concern, now come second to Latin American drug cartels. The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn’t merit a mention. Meanwhile, militant leftists , a small subset of extremist violence in the United States, are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such...
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A Unique Oregon Law Allows It to Block Healthcare Deals. In Five Years, the State Hasn’t Done So Once.

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Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica Dana Gibbon was 18 weeks pregnant with her first baby when her OB-GYN told her at an appointment that she wouldn’t be her doctor anymore. OB-GYN services were ending at the clinic in Corvallis, a college town of 60,000 in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The doctor said all of the Corvallis Clinic’s OB-GYNs were resigning.  “We have appreciated the opportunity to participate in your care and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the clinic said in a subsequent letter to patients. The closure of the Corvallis OB-GYN practice came two years after a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company, bought the clinic. The subsidiary, Optum Oregon, cited a national shortage of physicians that made it hard to replace doctors who left and increased the workload for those who remained. Gibbon frantically looked for another doctor. Friends recommended two other obstetrics practices, but ...
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Immigrants Detained in Chicago Military-Style Raid Seek Millions in Damages

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During a military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex, a large dog bit into tenant Tolulope Akinsulie’s right ankle, knocking him to the floor. Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica On the night of the military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex, a loud boom woke the Nigerian man who lived in Unit 215. Tolulope Akinsulie stood up from his bed and saw heavily armed federal agents rushing into his apartment. He then felt the jaws of a large dog biting into his right ankle, knocking him to the floor. Akinsulie screamed as the dog tore the flesh from his ankle, thighs, hip and wrist.  Down the hall, agents took a Venezuelan mother and her 16-year-old son from their apartment at gunpoint to another unit. There, they saw agents hit a man with what looked like the butt of a  rifle and kick another who was lying on the floor. As he watched, her son began to hyperventilate. “Here is another one,” agents said about a Mexican man who lived in Unit 502, before zip...
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A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her.

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Travelers wait at the Detroit airport, where a 57-year-old who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S. was detained for 30 hours. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Estelle, who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S., is a veteran at navigating the reentry process when she returns from visiting relatives in her native France. But on her most recent trip through customs in mid-March, officers detained the 57-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, forced her to spend the night in a holding cell on a concrete slab and threatened her with deportation. Why? Because she acknowledged under questioning by customs officers that she’d once voted in a local election, despite not being a U.S. citizen. A small number of cities in the U.S. allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not one of them. Kansas and federal law both require U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Immigration and election experts say her c...
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