Unews

President Donald Trump, along with Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announce the rollback of an environmental regulation last year. Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg/Getty Images For decades, a small program in the Environmental Protection Agency conducted the painstaking scientific work of assessing the toxicity of chemicals.  The calculations done by scientists at IRIS, as it was commonly known, underpin vast numbers of chemical regulations, permits and other environmental rules in the U.S. and abroad. Now the Trump administration is suggesting that their library of more than 500 chemical assessments can’t be trusted, opening the door to weakening hundreds of efforts to protect people from harmful chemicals at the state and federal level. The second-guessing could extend even to long-settled standards, environmental scientists said, such as how much arsenic is allowed in drinking water and how much lead is acceptable in paint and soil. ...

Animation by Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski When President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — but just barely. If faced with the same tests today, those guardrails and the people who held the line would largely be missing, a ProPublica examination found . At least 75 career officials who once held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety are gone. Two dozen appointees — including many who either actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote or are associates of such people — have been hired to replace them. And once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers. As the midterms approach, current and former government officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Trump appointees who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about balloting are now in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness. It’s hard to debunk false claims “co...

A Connecticut towing company sought approval to sell cars belonging to Saundra Magana, left, and her niece Eloise Bennett even though the women were supposed to have more time to reclaim the vehicles before they were sold. Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror Connecticut lawmakers on Wednesday approved more reforms aimed at reining in towing companies in the state, following reporting by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that exposed problems in state law . The Connecticut Senate passed a bill that would create an online portal so Connecticut drivers can track their towed cars and require towing companies to consider the age of towed vehicles before they’re sold. Last year, the legislature overhauled the state’s towing laws to end a practice in which towing companies could start the process to sell people’s cars in as little as 15 days if the firm deemed the car to be worth less than $1,500. The window was one of the shortest in the country, CT Mirror and ProPublica found, and meant man...

Children play in front of the Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C., last May. Wesley Lapointe for The Washington Post via Getty Images Every Tuesday, almost like clockwork, the U.S. Department of Education would update a public list of schools and colleges it was investigating for possible violations of students’ civil rights. Every Tuesday, that is, until Jan. 14, 2025, six days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term. Today, that online list remains as it was that week before inauguration: frozen in time. My colleagues Jodi Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards , both longtime education reporters, used that list regularly in their work. “You would get a call or a tip about a school district, and you would go and look up the school district to see if it was under investigation,” Cohen told me recently. The data also allowed the public to spot patterns in what types of investigations were being opened and where, Smith Richards said....

Glenn Harvey for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune When Texas dedicated $22 million to host the 2017 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, state officials expected a return on their investment. But a state analysis after the Patriots’ thrilling comeback win said it was “impossible” to tell if Texas taxpayers broke even on their investments.  If anything, Texas came up $14 million short, according to a breakdown of tax revenues in the same analysis. Texas taxpayers likely will be on the hook again when Houston and Dallas welcome the FIFA World Cup this June and July. The cities are among 11 in the U.S. that have agreed to shoulder hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the soccer tournament, subsidizing a World Cup expected to generate $11 billion in profits for FIFA .  Host cities and their local organizing committees will pay for security at the matches, cover the cost of retrofitting their stadiums to better accommodate soccer and o...

Jasmir Urbina was scammed and then deported. Across the U.S., immigration scams have spiked amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort. Photo courtesy of Jasmir Urbina As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her city. Urbina had fled Nicaragua in 2022 and legally resided with her husband, a fellow asylum-seeker, in New Orleans while reporting to immigration agents for check-ins as she awaited her day in court. Finally, the date was approaching, in late November 2025. Days later, the Trump administration would flood the region with federal officers in “Operation Swamp Sweep.” Urbina, 35, began searching for a Spanish speaker who could help her, and said she stumbled on a Facebook post advertising the services of Catholic C...