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<title>Journalists &#45; Latest Posts</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/rss/latest-posts</link>
<description>Journalists &#45; Latest Posts</description>
<dc:language>en</dc:language>
<dc:rights>ICIJ News</dc:rights>

<item>
<title>Merck takes Austria’s Keytruda price transparency battle to top court as journalists fight for information</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/merck-takes-austrias-keytruda-price-transparency-battle-to-top-court-as-journalists-fight-for-information</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/merck-takes-austrias-keytruda-price-transparency-battle-to-top-court-as-journalists-fight-for-information</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The case stems from ICIJ’s Cancer Calculus investigation into the world&#039;s best-selling drug’s sky-high price and its global consequences. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:32:57 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Merck, takes, Austria’s, Keytruda, price, transparency, battle, top, court, journalists, fight, for, information</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>&amp;apos;Teeth can heal&amp;apos;: Oral health giant&amp;apos;s ad claims called into question</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/teeth-can-heal-oral-health-giants-ad-claims-called-into-question</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/teeth-can-heal-oral-health-giants-ad-claims-called-into-question</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Oral care giant Hismile has used &quot;misleading&quot; videos in social media advertisements showing a sales professional, and its own staff, spruiking products while dressed as health workers.In one instance, AI appears to have been used to show a woman performing dental work. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:33:50 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Teeth, can, heal:, Oral, health, giants, claims, called, into, question</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Crypto giant Circle rebuffed efforts to help scam victims, police say</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/crypto-giant-circle-rebuffed-efforts-to-help-scam-victims-police-say</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/crypto-giant-circle-rebuffed-efforts-to-help-scam-victims-police-say</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Law enforcement in Wisconsin and New York accuse the firm of refusing to help recoup funds, even under court orders. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:32:30 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Crypto, giant, Circle, rebuffed, efforts, help, scam, victims, police, say</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Taiwanese authorities charge executives who helped China’s cyber spies target ICIJ network</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/taiwanese-authorities-charge-executives-who-helped-chinas-cyber-spies-target-icij-network</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/taiwanese-authorities-charge-executives-who-helped-chinas-cyber-spies-target-icij-network</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau probe corroborates ICIJ and Citizen Lab’s findings that attacks against journalists were part of a coordinated espionage campaign sponsored by Beijing.  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:32:01 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Taiwanese, authorities, charge, executives, who, helped, China’s, cyber, spies, target, ICIJ, network</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Pesticides, Mercury, Lead: How Clean is Your Bathing Site Really?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pesticides-mercury-lead-how-clean-is-your-bathing-site-really</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pesticides-mercury-lead-how-clean-is-your-bathing-site-really</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Officially, most bathing sites are designated as clean. However, research by CORRECTIV.Europe indicates that bathing waters at thousands of sites across Europe are contaminated with chemical pollutants – in some cases posing health risks. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:33:22 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pesticides, Mercury, Lead:, How, Clean, Your, Bathing, Site, Really</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Senator questions Merck over patent strategy for blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/senator-questions-merck-over-patent-strategy-for-blockbuster-cancer-drug-keytruda</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/senator-questions-merck-over-patent-strategy-for-blockbuster-cancer-drug-keytruda</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In a letter, Sen. Maggie Hassan cited ICIJ&#039;s Cancer Calculus investigation and expressed concerns that the pharma giant is boosting profits at the expense of patients. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:31:30 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Senator, questions, Merck, over, patent, strategy, for, blockbuster, cancer, drug, Keytruda</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Businessman accused of masterminding Caruana Galizia assassination stands trial in Malta</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/businessman-accused-of-masterminding-caruana-galizia-assassination-stands-trial-in-malta</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/businessman-accused-of-masterminding-caruana-galizia-assassination-stands-trial-in-malta</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Yorgen Fenech appeared in court nearly a decade after the car-bomb killing of one of the country’s most prominent investigative journalists. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:19:29 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Businessman, accused, masterminding, Caruana, Galizia, assassination, stands, trial, Malta</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>PRG Holdings lantik PKF jalankan semakan bebas, laporan awal dijangka siap dalam 10 Minggu</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/prg-holdings-lantik-pkf-jalankan-semakan-bebas-laporan-awal-dijangka-siap-dalam-10-minggu</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/prg-holdings-lantik-pkf-jalankan-semakan-bebas-laporan-awal-dijangka-siap-dalam-10-minggu</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR- Lembaga Pengarah PRG Holdings Berhad mengumumkan pelantikan PKF Covenant Equity Consulting Sdn. Bhd. (PKF-CEC) bagi menjalankan ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:42:50 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>PRG, Holdings, lantik, PKF, jalankan, semakan, bebas, laporan, awal, dijangka, siap, dalam, Minggu</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Videos show destruction after twin earthquakes hit Venezuela</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/videos-show-destruction-after-twin-earthquakes-hit-venezuela</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/videos-show-destruction-after-twin-earthquakes-hit-venezuela</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Verified videos posted on social media show the extent of damage and horror of residents after twin earthquakes pummelled Venezuela.A magnitude-7.2 quake struck an area west of the capital Caracas on Wednesday afternoon, followed by a magnitude-7.5 tremor less than a minute later. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:20:52 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Videos, show, destruction, after, twin, earthquakes, hit, Venezuela</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Widad terus bergolak: Ikmal Opat letak jawatan, Hextar Group tamatkan perjanjian pembelian saham</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/widad-terus-bergolak-ikmal-opat-letak-jawatan-hextar-group-tamatkan-perjanjian-pembelian-saham</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/widad-terus-bergolak-ikmal-opat-letak-jawatan-hextar-group-tamatkan-perjanjian-pembelian-saham</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR – Selepas beberapa tahun berdepan tekanan pasaran, prestasi kewangan yang lemah dan kontroversi projek kerajaan, Widad ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:20:24 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Widad, terus, bergolak:, Ikmal, Opat, letak, jawatan, Hextar, Group, tamatkan, perjanjian, pembelian, saham</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Law enforcement, banks warn of money laundering gaps in major US crypto bill</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/law-enforcement-banks-warn-of-money-laundering-gaps-in-major-us-crypto-bill</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/law-enforcement-banks-warn-of-money-laundering-gaps-in-major-us-crypto-bill</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The crypto industry and law enforcement groups are in the midst of a lobbying showdown over the proposed Clarity Act. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:20:01 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Law, enforcement, banks, warn, money, laundering, gaps, major, crypto, bill</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Cyprus anti&#45;corruption watchdog refers former president to prosecutors for alleged ‘abuse of power’</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/cyprus-anti-corruption-watchdog-refers-former-president-to-prosecutors-for-alleged-abuse-of-power</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/cyprus-anti-corruption-watchdog-refers-former-president-to-prosecutors-for-alleged-abuse-of-power</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Nicos Anastasiades may have misused his office to advance his and his allies’ interests, according to a sprawling probe that also names his former law firm and other officials.  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:19:36 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Cyprus, anti-corruption, watchdog, refers, former, president, prosecutors, for, alleged, ‘abuse, power’</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Webinar 6/24: Negotiating FOIA fees</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/webinar-624-negotiating-foia-fees</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/webinar-624-negotiating-foia-fees</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Please join us Wednesday, June 24, at noon Eastern for a free webinar with tips and resources on how to negotiate FOIA fees. Click here to register for this webinar. Reporters often face prohibitively high fees to obtain local, state and federal records — running into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. In this webinar, […]
The post Webinar 6/24: Negotiating FOIA fees appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:35:24 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Webinar, 624:, Negotiating, FOIA, fees</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Backstory: Byard Duncan</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-byard-duncan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-byard-duncan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Paco Alvarez: So my first question is, how did you get your start in investigative journalism?  Byard Duncan: Back in 2015, I joined Reveal as their community manager. So my first role there was managing their social, doing a little bit of engagement reporting work and handling newsletters, things like that. And even though I […]
The post The Backstory: Byard Duncan appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:34:58 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Backstory:, Byard, Duncan</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The 2 minutes and 46 seconds of Pauline Hanson&amp;apos;s speech that she thinks matters</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-2-minutes-and-46-seconds-of-pauline-hansons-speech-that-she-thinks-matters</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-2-minutes-and-46-seconds-of-pauline-hansons-speech-that-she-thinks-matters</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ One of the reasons social media-savvy politicians still front up to forums like the National Press Club is to generate short, shareable clips to distribute on social media.The clips and their message can then be found by audiences who are not watching daytime TV or monitoring news channels. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:31:48 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, minutes, and, seconds, Pauline, Hansons, speech, that, she, thinks, matters</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Ideal Woman: How autocrats built the archetype.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-ideal-woman-how-autocrats-built-the-archetype</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-ideal-woman-how-autocrats-built-the-archetype</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Women in autocracies often seem like the regime’s showcase figures. Whether it is patriotic breast implants or pastel dresses as a sign of evangelical modesty, their appearance conveys political messages that can hardly be stated openly. A text about female power in the service of unfreedom. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:01:42 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Ideal, Woman:, How, autocrats, built, the, archetype.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Lowering doses of cancer drugs could slash global health spending by $30B, new research shows</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/lowering-doses-of-cancer-drugs-could-slash-global-health-spending-by-30b-new-research-shows</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/lowering-doses-of-cancer-drugs-could-slash-global-health-spending-by-30b-new-research-shows</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Researchers found that Keytruda — the focus of ICIJ&#039;s recent Cancer Calculus investigation — accounted for nearly half of the potential annual savings. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:01:06 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Lowering, doses, cancer, drugs, could, slash, global, health, spending, 30B, new, research, shows</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>&amp;apos;Keyboard warriors&amp;apos;: Northern Ireland leader hits out at Musk and Robinson</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/keyboard-warriors-northern-ireland-leader-hits-out-at-musk-and-robinson</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/keyboard-warriors-northern-ireland-leader-hits-out-at-musk-and-robinson</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Anti-immigration figures are using social media to exploit anger at the horrific stabbing of a man in Northern Ireland.The attack on Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast, allegedly at the hands of a Sudanese migrant, has led to rioting in the city, with cars and homes destroyed by mobs of people wearing black clothing. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:27:49 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Keyboard, warriors:, Northern, Ireland, leader, hits, out, Musk, and, Robinson</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Discover How Drought is Affecting your Region</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/discover-how-drought-is-affecting-your-region</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/discover-how-drought-is-affecting-your-region</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ An analysis by CORRECTIV.Europe reveals for the first time how widespread drought has become across Europe. Two-thirds of all regions have recorded severe drought years since 2012. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:27:29 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Discover, How, Drought, Affecting, your, Region</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>PRG Holdings Bhd vs PDM: Pertikaian RM64.24 juta antara syarikat yang dikuasai Datuk Ng Yan Cheng</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/prg-holdings-bhd-vs-pdm-pertikaian-rm6424-juta-antara-syarikat-yang-dikuasai-datuk-ng-yan-cheng</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/prg-holdings-bhd-vs-pdm-pertikaian-rm6424-juta-antara-syarikat-yang-dikuasai-datuk-ng-yan-cheng</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR –  Konflik korporat yang membabitkan PRG Holdings Berhad dan Premier De Muara Sdn Bhd (PDM) memasuki ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:27:04 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>PRG, Holdings, Bhd, PDM:, Pertikaian, RM64.24, juta, antara, syarikat, yang, dikuasai, Datuk, Yan, Cheng</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Urus Niaga RM37 Juta PRG: SPRM dan SC digesa siasat dakwaan salah guna kuasa pemegang saham terbesar, Datuk Ng Yan Cheng</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/urus-niaga-rm37-juta-prg-sprm-dan-sc-digesa-siasat-dakwaan-salah-guna-kuasa-pemegang-saham-terbesar-datuk-ng-yan-cheng</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/urus-niaga-rm37-juta-prg-sprm-dan-sc-digesa-siasat-dakwaan-salah-guna-kuasa-pemegang-saham-terbesar-datuk-ng-yan-cheng</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Pemegang saham kedua terbesar PRG Holdings Bhd, Datuk Sheah Kok Fah, yang memiliki 8.14 peratus kepentingan dalam syarikat ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:26:28 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Urus, Niaga, RM37, Juta, PRG:, SPRM, dan, digesa, siasat, dakwaan, salah, guna, kuasa, pemegang, saham, terbesar, Datuk, Yan, Cheng</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump intelligence adviser previously helped father pursue millions from Kremlin&#45;linked bank, leaked documents show</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-intelligence-adviser-previously-helped-father-pursue-millions-from-kremlin-linked-bank-leaked-documents-show</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-intelligence-adviser-previously-helped-father-pursue-millions-from-kremlin-linked-bank-leaked-documents-show</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who recently stepped down from two senior administration posts, was serving as a CIA officer during the dispute. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:45:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump, intelligence, adviser, previously, helped, father, pursue, millions, from, Kremlin-linked, bank, leaked, documents, show</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Chinese spies are posing as recruiters to target officials and journalists</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/chinese-spies-are-posing-as-recruiters-to-target-officials-and-journalists</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/chinese-spies-are-posing-as-recruiters-to-target-officials-and-journalists</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The U.S. and its Five Eyes partners warned that Chinese military intelligence services were behind “cover companies” using job platforms to pry sensitive information from foreigners. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:25:05 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Chinese, spies, are, posing, recruiters, target, officials, and, journalists</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Israel&amp;apos;s military crossed a tank over a major Lebanese river. We found where</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/israels-military-crossed-a-tank-over-a-major-lebanese-river-we-found-where</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/israels-military-crossed-a-tank-over-a-major-lebanese-river-we-found-where</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ On May 31, the Israeli military posted a video showing what it claimed was its first tank to cross the Litani River in southern Lebanon.It&#039;s significant because it shows a lone IDF tank crossing a line that, just weeks earlier, had marked the limit of Israel&#039;s invasion into Lebanon in this latest conflict. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:19:20 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Israels, military, crossed, tank, over, major, Lebanese, river., found, where</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Mexico seizes suspicious Keytruda in raid to dismantle counterfeit medication ring</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/mexico-seizes-suspicious-keytruda-in-raid-to-dismantle-counterfeit-medication-ring</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/mexico-seizes-suspicious-keytruda-in-raid-to-dismantle-counterfeit-medication-ring</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ After ICIJ’s Cancer Calculus investigation exposed a market for falsified Keytruda, two sources confirmed Friday that Mexican authorities found vials labeled as the anti-cancer drug in the raid. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:18:54 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Mexico, seizes, suspicious, Keytruda, raid, dismantle, counterfeit, medication, ring</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Boxing trainer suspended after neo&#45;Nazi Sewell trained at his gym</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/boxing-trainer-suspended-after-neo-nazi-sewell-trained-at-his-gym</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/boxing-trainer-suspended-after-neo-nazi-sewell-trained-at-his-gym</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The owner and head instructor of a Melbourne boxing gym has been temporarily suspended by Boxing Victoria pending further investigation after the governing body learned that neo-Nazi leader Thomas Sewell was training at the facility.Sewell&#039;s organisation, National Socialist Network, was formally listed as a hate group by the federal government last month. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:38:36 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Boxing, trainer, suspended, after, neo-Nazi, Sewell, trained, his, gym</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Fidelity opened account for Epstein, even as outrage grew</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/fidelity-opened-account-for-epstein-even-as-outrage-grew</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/fidelity-opened-account-for-epstein-even-as-outrage-grew</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Asset manager Fidelity moved millions for company owned by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein just weeks before his 2019 arrest, documents reveal. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:37:23 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Fidelity, opened, account, for, Epstein, even, outrage, grew</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Patents, prices and court files: How ICIJ used data to investigate an industry that thrives on secrecy</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/patents-prices-and-court-files-how-icij-used-data-to-investigate-an-industry-that-thrives-on-secrecy</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/patents-prices-and-court-files-how-icij-used-data-to-investigate-an-industry-that-thrives-on-secrecy</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For the Cancer Calculus, ICIJ’s data team created datasets using records from patent offices and courts, and analyzed the opaque pricing of a lifesaving drug with a sky-high price tag. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 13:36:42 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Patents, prices, and, court, files:, How, ICIJ, used, data, investigate, industry, that, thrives, secrecy</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>911, Please Hold</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/911-please-hold</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/911-please-hold</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The 911 system functions as a sort of promise: Call for help, and someone will be there to respond quickly. But in many American cities, it’s a broken promise. Thanks in part to a widespread understaffing crisis across 911 dispatch centers, hundreds of thousands of callers are left waiting on hold during their most harrowing […]
The post 911, Please Hold appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 13:38:57 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>911, Please, Hold</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Amid a scam crackdown, crypto giants keep fueling bitcoin ATMs</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/amid-a-scam-crackdown-crypto-giants-keep-fueling-bitcoin-atms</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/amid-a-scam-crackdown-crypto-giants-keep-fueling-bitcoin-atms</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ As governments seek to ban the machines, bitcoin ATMs remain entwined with cryptocurrency industry&#039;s most mainstream players. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/12/Coinflip-ATM-Getty-Images.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 13:36:12 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Amid, scam, crackdown, crypto, giants, keep, fueling, bitcoin, ATMs</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>NexG umum kerugian RM85.7 juta era pelaburan lama, Ishak Ismail kini terajui pemulihan dengan operasi syarikat yang kukuh</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/nexg-umum-kerugian-rm857-juta-era-pelaburan-lama-ishak-ismail-kini-terajui-pemulihan-dengan-operasi-syarikat-yang-kukuh</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/nexg-umum-kerugian-rm857-juta-era-pelaburan-lama-ishak-ismail-kini-terajui-pemulihan-dengan-operasi-syarikat-yang-kukuh</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — NexG Berhad kini berdepan cabaran besar untuk memulihkan keyakinan pasaran selepas syarikat itu merekodkan kerugian ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 23 May 2026 13:38:08 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>NexG, umum, kerugian, RM85.7, juta, era, pelaburan, lama, Ishak, Ismail, kini, terajui, pemulihan, dengan, operasi, syarikat, yang, kukuh</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Nowhere to Exist: Queer and Trans Afghans on The Move</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/nowhere-to-exist-queer-and-trans-afghans-on-the-move</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/nowhere-to-exist-queer-and-trans-afghans-on-the-move</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ An Escape is meant to bring people from danger to safety. For queer and trans Afghans, however, it does not. Instead, it leads them from Taliban rule to familial control, to regional deportation regimes, to bureaucratic indifference—a chain without any moment of arrival. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 06:41:18 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Nowhere, Exist:, Queer, and, Trans, Afghans, The, Move</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Backstory: Max Rivlin&#45;Nadler</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-max-rivlin-nadler</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-max-rivlin-nadler</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Paco Alvarez: How did the idea for Courts of Contempt come about?  Max Rivlin-Nadler: So since we launched Hell Gate around just over four years ago, this had been something that had been on our mind, which was how nobody has had done a deep dive into how the judicial system as a whole functions […]
The post The Backstory: Max Rivlin-Nadler appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 06:42:10 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Backstory:, Max, Rivlin-Nadler</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>WATCH: Inside the Cancer Calculus investigation — a live Q&amp;amp;A</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/watch-inside-the-cancer-calculus-investigation-a-live-qa</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/watch-inside-the-cancer-calculus-investigation-a-live-qa</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Go behind the scenes of the Cancer Calculus investigation, and hear insights about Merck&#039;s cancer drug Keytruda from ICIJ&#039;s chief reporter and a health economist. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 06:40:54 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>WATCH:, Inside, the, Cancer, Calculus, investigation, —, live, Q&amp;A</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Next Thurs., 5/28: Tips for environmental investigations</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/next-thurs-528-tips-for-environmental-investigations</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/next-thurs-528-tips-for-environmental-investigations</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Please join us next Thursday, May 28, at noon Eastern, for a free webinar with tips and resources on environmental investigations – including stories on climate change, pollution, and regulation. Click here to register for this webinar. Naveena Sadasivam, senior staff writer at Grist, will share how she and Lylla Younes investigated medical-device warehouses in […]
The post Next Thurs., 5/28: Tips for environmental investigations appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 14:13:27 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Next, Thurs., 528:, Tips, for, environmental, investigations</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>San Diego shooters named Australia’s worst mass murderer in online posts</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/san-diego-shooters-named-australias-worst-mass-murderer-in-online-posts</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/san-diego-shooters-named-australias-worst-mass-murderer-in-online-posts</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Two teenagers who murdered three people in an attack on an Islamic centre in San Diego earlier this week the Australian perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch massacre in which 51 people were killed, as direct inspiration.Investigators claim Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17 met online prior to carrying out the attack. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 14:13:06 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>San, Diego, shooters, named, Australia’s, worst, mass, murderer, online, posts</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>GLC Malaysia Semakin Berorientasikan Keuntungan, Agenda Nasional Semakin Terpinggir</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/glc-malaysia-semakin-berorientasikan-keuntungan-agenda-nasional-semakin-terpinggir</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/glc-malaysia-semakin-berorientasikan-keuntungan-agenda-nasional-semakin-terpinggir</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Syarikat Berkaitan Kerajaan (GLC) dan syarikat yang mempunyai pegangan institusi pelaburan kerajaan suatu ketika dahulu diwujudkan sebagai instrumen ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 14:12:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>GLC, Malaysia, Semakin, Berorientasikan, Keuntungan, Agenda, Nasional, Semakin, Terpinggir</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>San Diego shooters named Australia&amp;apos;s worst mass murderer in online posts</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/san-diego-shooters-named-australias-worst-mass-murderer-in-online-posts-1195</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/san-diego-shooters-named-australias-worst-mass-murderer-in-online-posts-1195</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Two teenagers who murdered three people in an attack on an Islamic centre in San Diego earlier this week the Australian perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch massacre in which 51 people were killed, as direct inspiration.Investigators claim Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17 met online prior to carrying out the attack. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 06:41:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>San, Diego, shooters, named, Australias, worst, mass, murderer, online, posts</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Projek Kroni LRA Sungai Limau &amp;amp; Selambau RM219.2 Juta Bermasalah, Widad Pula Bakal Dikuasai Hextar Group Milik Dato’ Eddie Ong</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/projek-kroni-lra-sungai-limau-selambau-rm2192-juta-bermasalah-widad-pula-bakal-dikuasai-hextar-group-milik-dato-eddie-ong</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/projek-kroni-lra-sungai-limau-selambau-rm2192-juta-bermasalah-widad-pula-bakal-dikuasai-hextar-group-milik-dato-eddie-ong</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Krisis melibatkan Widad Group Berhad kini semakin membimbangkan apabila syarikat itu bukan sahaja berdepan tekanan kewangan dan kejatuhan ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 14:12:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Projek, Kroni, LRA, Sungai, Limau, Selambau, RM219.2, Juta, Bermasalah, Widad, Pula, Bakal, Dikuasai, Hextar, Group, Milik, Dato’, Eddie, Ong</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Intelligence official Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a Gabbard ally, leaves two jobs</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/intelligence-official-amaryllis-fox-kennedy-a-gabbard-ally-leaves-two-jobs</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/intelligence-official-amaryllis-fox-kennedy-a-gabbard-ally-leaves-two-jobs</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The daughter-in-law of RFK Jr. held top posts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of Management and Budget. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 14:11:52 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Intelligence, official, Amaryllis, Fox, Kennedy, Gabbard, ally, leaves, two, jobs</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Crypto ATM operator Bitcoin Depot files for bankruptcy</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/crypto-atm-operator-bitcoin-depot-files-for-bankruptcy</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/crypto-atm-operator-bitcoin-depot-files-for-bankruptcy</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With regulators cracking down on the cash-to-cryptocurrency kiosks in a bid to stop scammers, Bitcoin Depot has said that its business model is no longer viable. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 14:11:12 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Crypto, ATM, operator, Bitcoin, Depot, files, for, bankruptcy</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Alleged cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme ‘goddess’ extradited from Thailand to face conspiracy charges in US</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/alleged-cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme-goddess-extradited-from-thailand-to-face-conspiracy-charges-in-us</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/alleged-cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme-goddess-extradited-from-thailand-to-face-conspiracy-charges-in-us</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Authorities say Olena Oblamska was one of the founders of Forsage, a cryptocurrency platform allegedly used as part of a global pyramid scheme. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 15:45:36 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Alleged, cryptocurrency, Ponzi, scheme, ‘goddess’, extradited, from, Thailand, face, conspiracy, charges</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Neo&#45;Nazis fundraising to challenge laws that listed them as hate group</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/neo-nazis-fundraising-to-challenge-laws-that-listed-them-as-hate-group</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/neo-nazis-fundraising-to-challenge-laws-that-listed-them-as-hate-group</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Members of Australia&#039;s most prominent Neo-Nazi group have been quietly preparing for the organisation&#039;s possible listing as a prohibited hate group, raising more than $150,000 to challenge the laws in the High Court.Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke yesterday announced the inclusion of the &quot;White Australia&quot; group on the list, noting the other names it has used, like the National Socialist Network (NSN). ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 15:46:01 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Neo-Nazis, fundraising, challenge, laws, that, listed, them, hate, group</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump administration curbs state oversight of crypto industry</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-administration-curbs-state-oversight-of-crypto-industry</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-administration-curbs-state-oversight-of-crypto-industry</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The shift offers companies immunity from certain regulations — and, critics say, weakens protections for scam victims. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 15:45:04 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump, administration, curbs, state, oversight, crypto, industry</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Mjets potong gaji, lewat bayar gaji ketika krisis kewangan MMAG Holdings</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/mjets-potong-gaji-lewat-bayar-gaji-ketika-krisis-kewangan-mmag-holdings</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/mjets-potong-gaji-lewat-bayar-gaji-ketika-krisis-kewangan-mmag-holdings</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — Syarikat penerbangan kargo MJets Air yang merupakan anak syarikat kepada MMAG Holdings Berhad didakwa sedang ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 01:06:04 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Mjets, potong, gaji, lewat, bayar, gaji, ketika, krisis, kewangan, MMAG, Holdings</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Type Investigations Names Maryam Saleh as Senior Editor for the Springboard Project</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/type-investigations-names-maryam-saleh-as-senior-editor-for-the-springboard-project</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/type-investigations-names-maryam-saleh-as-senior-editor-for-the-springboard-project</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Type Investigations is thrilled to announce that Maryam Saleh has joined the team as senior editor for the Springboard Project, an initiative that supports newsrooms serving historically marginalized communities in building investigative capacity.  Saleh will mentor Springboard partners in producing impactful investigations, guiding them from story inception to final edits and publication. She will also […]
The post Type Investigations Names Maryam Saleh as Senior Editor for the Springboard Project appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 14:24:41 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Type, Investigations, Names, Maryam, Saleh, Senior, Editor, for, the, Springboard, Project</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Kontroversi Projek Pan Borneo Sabah RM1.07 Bilion: Bursa denda Ireka &amp;amp; Pengarah RM425,000</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/kontroversi-projek-pan-borneo-sabah-rm107-bilion-bursa-denda-ireka-pengarah-rm425000</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/kontroversi-projek-pan-borneo-sabah-rm107-bilion-bursa-denda-ireka-pengarah-rm425000</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — Kontroversi projek Lebuhraya Pan Borneo Sabah bernilai RM1.07 bilion kembali menghantui Ireka Corporation Berhad apabila ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 14:24:04 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Kontroversi, Projek, Pan, Borneo, Sabah, RM1.07, Bilion:, Bursa, denda, Ireka, Pengarah, RM425, 000</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Following the paper trail to Guatemala to uncover what records can’t reveal about access to Keytruda</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/following-the-paper-trail-to-guatemala-to-uncover-what-records-cant-reveal-about-access-to-keytruda</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/following-the-paper-trail-to-guatemala-to-uncover-what-records-cant-reveal-about-access-to-keytruda</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ I had read countless legal documents about the world&#039;s bestselling drug. But it took a trip to Latin America to see how scarcity shapes life and death decisions. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 15:50:06 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Following, the, paper, trail, Guatemala, uncover, what, records, can’t, reveal, about, access, Keytruda</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Kedai Emas Sri Semantan satu lagi skim pelaburan emas ‘scammer’ langgar undang&#45;undang Suruhanjaya Sekuriti &amp;amp; BNM</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/kedai-emas-sri-semantan-satu-lagi-skim-pelaburan-emas-scammer-langgar-undang-undang-suruhanjaya-sekuriti-bnm</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/kedai-emas-sri-semantan-satu-lagi-skim-pelaburan-emas-scammer-langgar-undang-undang-suruhanjaya-sekuriti-bnm</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Kedai Emas Sri Semantan Sdn Bhd (KESS) menjadi tular di media sosial hari ini selepas pelbagai pihak mula ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 07:09:22 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Kedai, Emas, Sri, Semantan, satu, lagi, skim, pelaburan, emas, ‘scammer’, langgar, undang-undang, Suruhanjaya, Sekuriti, BNM</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Ekuiti Bumiputera dalam bahaya: “Arkitek” penjualan saham IJM kepada Sunway Bhd dilantik Presiden Permodalan Nasional Berhad</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ekuiti-bumiputera-dalam-bahaya-arkitek-penjualan-saham-ijm-kepada-sunway-bhd-dilantik-presiden-permodalan-nasional-berhad</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ekuiti-bumiputera-dalam-bahaya-arkitek-penjualan-saham-ijm-kepada-sunway-bhd-dilantik-presiden-permodalan-nasional-berhad</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Satu lagi episod yang membimbangkan sedang berlaku dalam institusi pelaburan paling penting milik Bumiputera. Ketika rakyat masih belum ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2026/05/rickman-datuk.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 07:08:36 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ekuiti, Bumiputera, dalam, bahaya:, “Arkitek”, penjualan, saham, IJM, kepada, Sunway, Bhd, dilantik, Presiden, Permodalan, Nasional, Berhad</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Krisis Kewangan MJets–MMAG semakin parah: gaji tertunggak, pelabur tarik diri</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/krisis-kewangan-mjetsmmag-semakin-parah-gaji-tertunggak-pelabur-tarik-diri</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/krisis-kewangan-mjetsmmag-semakin-parah-gaji-tertunggak-pelabur-tarik-diri</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — Kemelut kewangan yang didakwa melanda syarikat penerbangan persendirian MJets Air Sdn Bhd kini dilihat semakin ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2026/05/mejts-gaji.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 07:07:11 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Krisis, Kewangan, MJets–MMAG, semakin, parah:, gaji, tertunggak, pelabur, tarik, diri</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Made in Moscow: The Foreign Agent Law as a Blueprint for Autocrats</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/made-in-moscow-the-foreign-agent-law-as-a-blueprint-for-autocrats</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/made-in-moscow-the-foreign-agent-law-as-a-blueprint-for-autocrats</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ It is not a secret weapon or a military tactic. It is a law — bureaucratic, dull, and devastatingly effective. Russia’s 2012 foreign agent legislation gave autocrats everywhere a template for dismantling civil society while keeping their hands seemingly clean. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://correctiv.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/chapter03-1445x790.png" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 16:47:01 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Made, Moscow:, The, Foreign, Agent, Law, Blueprint, for, Autocrats</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Tunisian authorities threaten to dissolve the parent company of ICIJ partner Inkyfada</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/tunisian-authorities-threaten-to-dissolve-the-parent-company-of-icij-partner-inkyfada</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/tunisian-authorities-threaten-to-dissolve-the-parent-company-of-icij-partner-inkyfada</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The move follows years of legal harassment by government agencies and a wider, escalating crackdown on the Tunisian press. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272284802-2.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 16:46:17 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Tunisian, authorities, threaten, dissolve, the, parent, company, ICIJ, partner, Inkyfada</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>NexG Crisis Ends: Datuk Ishak Ismail Ousts ‘Corporate Mafia’, Restores Market Confidence</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/nexg-crisis-ends-datuk-ishak-ismail-ousts-corporate-mafia-restores-market-confidence</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/nexg-crisis-ends-datuk-ishak-ismail-ousts-corporate-mafia-restores-market-confidence</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The prolonged internal turmoil that had long plagued NexG Berhad has finally come to an end as Malay ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2026/05/nexg-crisis.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 02:02:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>NexG, Crisis, Ends:, Datuk, Ishak, Ismail, Ousts, ‘Corporate, Mafia’, Restores, Market, Confidence</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Krisis NexG tamat: Datuk Ishak Ismail pulihkan syarikat, singkir ‘Mafia Korporat’, kembalikan keyakinan</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/krisis-nexg-tamat-datuk-ishak-ismail-pulihkan-syarikat-singkir-mafia-korporat-kembalikan-keyakinan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/krisis-nexg-tamat-datuk-ishak-ismail-pulihkan-syarikat-singkir-mafia-korporat-kembalikan-keyakinan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Kemelut dalaman yang sekian lama membelenggu NexG Berhad akhirnya menemui noktah apabila tokoh korporat Melayu, Datuk Ishak Ismail, ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2026/05/krisis-nexg.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 02:02:13 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Krisis, NexG, tamat:, Datuk, Ishak, Ismail, pulihkan, syarikat, singkir, ‘Mafia, Korporat’, kembalikan, keyakinan</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>US bars executives of Costa Rica’s leading newspaper La Nación from entry</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/us-bars-executives-of-costa-ricas-leading-newspaper-la-nacion-from-entry</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/us-bars-executives-of-costa-ricas-leading-newspaper-la-nacion-from-entry</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Board members at the Central American media outlet say they were not given a reason for having their tourist visas to the U.S. revoked on May 2. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2197114698.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 02:01:28 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>bars, executives, Costa, Rica’s, leading, newspaper, Nación, from, entry</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>“They protect the law while breaking it”: Inside Europol’s Shadow IT System</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/they-protect-the-law-while-breaking-it-inside-europols-shadow-it-system</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/they-protect-the-law-while-breaking-it-inside-europols-shadow-it-system</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Europol is aiming to become a powerful police force with far-reaching surveillance powers. But in an attempt to deliver in the fight against serious cross-border crime, the agency has apparently gone rogue itself, this investigation reveals: Secret data analysis platforms have put innocent citizens at risk, an issue that remains unresolved today. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://correctiv.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Europol-240504-1445x790.webp" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 15:41:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“They, protect, the, law, while, breaking, it”:, Inside, Europol’s, Shadow, System</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Pennsylvania county freezes gambling&#45;revenue program and launches reforms after grantee investigation raises flags</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pennsylvania-county-freezes-gambling-revenue-program-and-launches-reforms-after-grantee-investigation-raises-flags</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pennsylvania-county-freezes-gambling-revenue-program-and-launches-reforms-after-grantee-investigation-raises-flags</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A popular grant program in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, is funded by gambling revenue from a local casino. With support from the Fund, reporters at Penn Live spent 19 months analyzing thousands of records, interviewing dozens of officials and grantees and building databases to understand who was requesting the money and where it was going. They […]
The post Pennsylvania county freezes gambling-revenue program and launches reforms after grantee investigation raises flags appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 02:45:26 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pennsylvania, county, freezes, gambling-revenue, program, and, launches, reforms, after, grantee, investigation, raises, flags</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Investigating Workers’ Compensation in New York, grantee finds a “long retreat”</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/investigating-workers-compensation-in-new-york-grantee-finds-a-long-retreat</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/investigating-workers-compensation-in-new-york-grantee-finds-a-long-retreat</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ New York became the first state in the nation to set up a workers’ compensation system in the wake of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The program covers medical bills and cash for recovery time for countless injured workers. But in recent years, the program’s benefits have quietly shrunk by over a third, according […]
The post Investigating Workers’ Compensation in New York, grantee finds a “long retreat” appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 02:45:26 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Investigating, Workers’, Compensation, New, York, grantee, finds, “long, retreat”</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee investigation tracks extent of parents surrendering their kids to foster care to get mental&#45;health treatment</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-investigation-tracks-extent-of-parents-surrendering-their-kids-to-foster-care-to-get-mental-health-treatment</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-investigation-tracks-extent-of-parents-surrendering-their-kids-to-foster-care-to-get-mental-health-treatment</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Thousands of children in the throes of mental health crises are turned over to foster care each year by parents who can’t access – or afford – the treatment they need, according to a first-ever database of such “relinquishments” created by The Imprint, with support from the Fund. More than 20 years ago, a report […]
The post Grantee investigation tracks extent of parents surrendering their kids to foster care to get mental-health treatment appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://fij.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/lindsey-1536x1368-1.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 02:45:26 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, investigation, tracks, extent, parents, surrendering, their, kids, foster, care, get, mental-health, treatment</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>For Florida Trib/ProPublica partnership, grantee shows that jails keep contracting with private health company despite inmate deaths</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/for-florida-tribpropublica-partnership-grantee-shows-that-jails-keep-contracting-with-private-health-company-despite-inmate-deaths</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/for-florida-tribpropublica-partnership-grantee-shows-that-jails-keep-contracting-with-private-health-company-despite-inmate-deaths</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Miami-based Armor Correctional Health Services has a long history of complaints of providing subpar care to inmates – and has even been convicted of felony abuse over the death of an inmate. Even though Florida law bars companies with such convictions from doing business with the state, the state has continued to contract with Armor […]
The post For Florida Trib/ProPublica partnership, grantee shows that jails keep contracting with private health company despite inmate deaths appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://fij.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260131-KAHN-FloridaPrisonDeaths-0021-SOCIAL.webp" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 02:45:26 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>For, Florida, TribProPublica, partnership, grantee, shows, that, jails, keep, contracting, with, private, health, company, despite, inmate, deaths</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee obtains new evidence that FBI uncovered serious misconduct by top Chicago jail official</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-obtains-new-evidence-that-fbi-uncovered-serious-misconduct-by-top-chicago-jail-official</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-obtains-new-evidence-that-fbi-uncovered-serious-misconduct-by-top-chicago-jail-official</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ When the FBI investigated the Cook County Sherriff’s Office for a ghost-payrolling scheme in 2022, agents uncovered evidence that a high-ranking official had been involved in misconduct years earlier – and was not disciplined, but promoted. The FBI found that the official had been robbed at gunpoint outside of an illegal gambling den and fired […]
The post Grantee obtains new evidence that FBI uncovered serious misconduct by top Chicago jail official appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://fij.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ssw.webp" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 02:45:03 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, obtains, new, evidence, that, FBI, uncovered, serious, misconduct, top, Chicago, jail, official</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Courts of Contempt</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/courts-of-contempt</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/courts-of-contempt</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This project was produced in partnership with Hell Gate, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. Judges wield enormous power. Here in the five boroughs, they are often the ultimate arbiters in deciding how many New Yorkers get sent to Rikers Island, where and how new housing will be built, and when children are removed […]
The post Courts of Contempt appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 02:03:10 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Courts, Contempt</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>After grantee reveals data center’s influence campaign in Pennsylvania, local officials oust town leadership</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/after-grantee-reveals-data-centers-influence-campaign-in-pennsylvania-local-officials-oust-town-leadership</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/after-grantee-reveals-data-centers-influence-campaign-in-pennsylvania-local-officials-oust-town-leadership</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, Edward Donnelly spent four months investigating efforts to build some of the world’s largest data centers in the borough of Archbald, Pennsylvania – and found that local officials let developers help rewrite zoning regulations in order to build the massive centers, outside the view of local residents. Spurred by the […]
The post After grantee reveals data center’s influence campaign in Pennsylvania, local officials oust town leadership appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 16:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>After, grantee, reveals, data, center’s, influence, campaign, Pennsylvania, local, officials, oust, town, leadership</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantees investigate emotional abuse in college sports for in&#45;depth NPR report</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantees-investigate-emotional-abuse-in-college-sports-for-in-depth-npr-report</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantees-investigate-emotional-abuse-in-college-sports-for-in-depth-npr-report</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For a story that aired nationally on NPR, Julia Haney and Elizabeth Santos investigated emotional abuse in college sports. With support from the Fund, they reported that researchers have found that athletes experience emotional abuse – a toxic pattern of verbal attacks, manipulation and/or controlling actions – more than any other form of harm. Yet, […]
The post Grantees investigate emotional abuse in college sports for in-depth NPR report appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 16:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantees, investigate, emotional, abuse, college, sports, for, in-depth, NPR, report</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>In follow&#45;up coverage, grantee uncovers deeper problems at DC’s troubled psychiatric hospital</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/in-follow-up-coverage-grantee-uncovers-deeper-problems-at-dcs-troubled-psychiatric-hospital</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/in-follow-up-coverage-grantee-uncovers-deeper-problems-at-dcs-troubled-psychiatric-hospital</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With a follow-up grant from the Fund after his initial investigation last year, Luke Mullins reported for Washingtonian Magazine that conditions inside the Psychiatric Institute of Washington are even worse than previously known. Mullins spoke to a former employee at the facility who was sexually assaulted on the job by a patient, for which the […]
The post In follow-up coverage, grantee uncovers deeper problems at DC’s troubled psychiatric hospital appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 16:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>follow-up, coverage, grantee, uncovers, deeper, problems, DC’s, troubled, psychiatric, hospital</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee sues New York state agency to get records on prison staff accused of sexual assault</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-sues-new-york-state-agency-to-get-records-on-prison-staff-accused-of-sexual-assault</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-sues-new-york-state-agency-to-get-records-on-prison-staff-accused-of-sexual-assault</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For more than a year, reporters at New York Focus and Hell Gate, with support from the Fund, have been reporting on a flood of sexual-abuse lawsuits filed by people held in New York state prisons. The two outlets have filed public-records requests for the personnel records of state prison staff named in the lawsuits […]
The post Grantee sues New York state agency to get records on prison staff accused of sexual assault appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 16:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, sues, New, York, state, agency, get, records, prison, staff, accused, sexual, assault</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantees investigate impact of contaminated water from California prison on residents of nearby town</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantees-investigate-impact-of-contaminated-water-from-california-prison-on-residents-of-nearby-town</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantees-investigate-impact-of-contaminated-water-from-california-prison-on-residents-of-nearby-town</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Freelance journalist Emily Nonko teamed up with D. Razor Babb, a journalist who is incarcerated in state prison in California, to report on health concerns stemming from water quality inside the prison and in the surrounding community. With support from the Fund, the pair identified illnesses among incarcerated people, prison staff and people living in […]
The post Grantees investigate impact of contaminated water from California prison on residents of nearby town appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://fij.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Mule-Creek-poisoned-water.webp" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 16:19:25 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantees, investigate, impact, contaminated, water, from, California, prison, residents, nearby, town</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Gunasekar  sahkan ‘Mafia Korporat’ Victor Chin ada kuasa dalam kerjasama Syarikat M Jets&#45;MMAG</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/gunasekar-sahkan-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-ada-kuasa-dalam-kerjasama-syarikat-m-jets-mmag</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/gunasekar-sahkan-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-ada-kuasa-dalam-kerjasama-syarikat-m-jets-mmag</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR – Mahkamah Tinggi diberitahu bahawa usahawan Victor Chin Boon Leong mempunyai kuasa sebenar dan bukan hanya ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2026/05/gunasekar-victor.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 02 May 2026 02:27:38 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Gunasekar,  sahkan, ‘Mafia, Korporat’, Victor, Chin, ada, kuasa, dalam, kerjasama, Syarikat, Jets-MMAG</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Ukrainian in a Russian Uniform</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-ukrainian-in-a-russian-uniform</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-ukrainian-in-a-russian-uniform</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ What prisoners of war from the occupied territories reveal about identity, coercion, and the story Russia tells about why it went to war - and why it matters for how Europe understands Russia&#039;s justification for the war. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:25:07 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ukrainian, Russian, Uniform</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Arizona gun shop owner faces terrorism&#45;related charges for allegedly selling high&#45;caliber weapons bound for Mexican cartels</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/arizona-gun-shop-owner-faces-terrorism-related-charges-for-allegedly-selling-high-caliber-weapons-bound-for-mexican-cartels</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/arizona-gun-shop-owner-faces-terrorism-related-charges-for-allegedly-selling-high-caliber-weapons-bound-for-mexican-cartels</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ It is the first such case filed since the Trump administration designated several of the criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations in 2025. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-533114854-scaled-e1777564599140.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:26:59 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Arizona, gun, shop, owner, faces, terrorism-related, charges, for, allegedly, selling, high-caliber, weapons, bound, for, Mexican, cartels</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The AI School Bus Camera Company Blanketing America in Tickets</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-ai-school-bus-camera-company-blanketing-america-in-tickets</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-ai-school-bus-camera-company-blanketing-america-in-tickets</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Every weekday morning outside the 16-story apartment complex at 1400 East-West Highway in Silver Spring, Maryland, students step onto big yellow buses that take them to school. It’s not a particularly pleasant spot: The building faces a fenced-off construction site across six lanes humming with Washington metro-area commuter traffic. But this is an important place […]
The post The AI School Bus Camera Company Blanketing America in Tickets appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.typeinvestigations.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/0406_feat_buspatrol_01.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:56:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, School, Bus, Camera, Company, Blanketing, America, Tickets</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>21 akaun bank dibekukan dedah keseriusan dakwaan pengubahan wang haram libatkan Padini Holdings Bhd</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/21-akaun-bank-dibekukan-dedah-keseriusan-dakwaan-pengubahan-wang-haram-libatkan-padini-holdings-bhd</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/21-akaun-bank-dibekukan-dedah-keseriusan-dakwaan-pengubahan-wang-haram-libatkan-padini-holdings-bhd</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Kumpulan Padini Holdings Berhad mengesahkan sebanyak 21 akaun bank milik syarikat dan beberapa anak syarikatnya telah dibekukan di ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:55:08 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>akaun, bank, dibekukan, dedah, keseriusan, dakwaan, pengubahan, wang, haram, libatkan, Padini, Holdings, Bhd</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>‘Escalating efforts’: A year after China Targets, Beijing’s global campaign against dissenters continues</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/escalating-efforts-a-year-after-china-targets-beijings-global-campaign-against-dissenters-continues</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/escalating-efforts-a-year-after-china-targets-beijings-global-campaign-against-dissenters-continues</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In 2025, China was the most prolific perpetrator of transnational repression, a new Freedom House report found. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:53:57 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>‘Escalating, efforts’:, year, after, China, Targets, Beijing’s, global, campaign, against, dissenters, continues</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>What we know about Cole Tomas Allen, Donald Trump&amp;apos;s would&#45;be assassin</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-we-know-about-cole-tomas-allen-donald-trumps-would-be-assassin</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-we-know-about-cole-tomas-allen-donald-trumps-would-be-assassin</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The first clear image of the alleged shooter — face down and in handcuffs on the carpet of the Washington Hilton — was posted without caption by United States President Donald Trump.The man has been identified by US media as Cole Tomas Allen, 31. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:55:50 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, know, about, Cole, Tomas, Allen, Donald, Trumps, would-be, assassin</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Empayar Padini bergoncang: Siapa pihak ketiga yang mengheretnya ke siasatan SPRM hingga akaun dibeku kerana pengubahan wang haram?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/empayar-padini-bergoncang-siapa-pihak-ketiga-yang-mengheretnya-ke-siasatan-sprm-hingga-akaun-dibeku-kerana-pengubahan-wang-haram</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/empayar-padini-bergoncang-siapa-pihak-ketiga-yang-mengheretnya-ke-siasatan-sprm-hingga-akaun-dibeku-kerana-pengubahan-wang-haram</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Empayar runcit fesyen tempatan, Padini Holdings Berhad, kini berdepan tekanan luar jangka apabila beberapa akaun bank milik syarikat ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:54:22 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Empayar, Padini, bergoncang:, Siapa, pihak, ketiga, yang, mengheretnya, siasatan, SPRM, hingga, akaun, dibeku, kerana, pengubahan, wang, haram</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Phony whistleblowers, fake journalists and cyber spies: ICIJ network targeted after China Targets probe </title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/phony-whistleblowers-fake-journalists-and-cyber-spies-icij-network-targeted-after-china-targets-probe</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/phony-whistleblowers-fake-journalists-and-cyber-spies-icij-network-targeted-after-china-targets-probe</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Shortly after publication, a slew of fake ICIJ reporters approached journalists, Taiwanese officials, and human rights advocates seeking sensitive data. With Citizen Lab, we investigated. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:52:20 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Phony, whistleblowers, fake, journalists, and, cyber, spies:, ICIJ, network, targeted, after, China, Targets, probe </media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Selepas akaun dibekukan AMLA, MMAG batalkan pembelian pesawat RM109.85 juta dengan GASL Ireland Leasing A&#45;1</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/selepas-akaun-dibekukan-amla-mmag-batalkan-pembelian-pesawat-rm10985-juta-dengan-gasl-ireland-leasing-a-1</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/selepas-akaun-dibekukan-amla-mmag-batalkan-pembelian-pesawat-rm10985-juta-dengan-gasl-ireland-leasing-a-1</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — MMAG Holdings Berhad mengambil langkah menarik diri daripada perolehan pesawat bernilai RM109.85 juta apabila memeterai ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:23:35 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Selepas, akaun, dibekukan, AMLA, MMAG, batalkan, pembelian, pesawat, RM109.85, juta, dengan, GASL, Ireland, Leasing, A-1</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Former co&#45;owner of Panama Papers law firm convicted of aiding and abetting tax evasion</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/former-co-owner-of-panama-papers-law-firm-convicted-of-aiding-and-abetting-tax-evasion</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/former-co-owner-of-panama-papers-law-firm-convicted-of-aiding-and-abetting-tax-evasion</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Over a decade after the ICIJ investigation, a German court found the Swiss lawyer guilty of enabling a tax loss of about $15 million. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2023/08/Mossack-Fonseca-1920px-1138x640.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:23:00 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Former, co-owner, Panama, Papers, law, firm, convicted, aiding, and, abetting, tax, evasion</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>‘Unacceptable’: Lawmakers react to revelations from ICIJ’s Cancer Calculus investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/unacceptable-lawmakers-react-to-revelations-from-icijs-cancer-calculus-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/unacceptable-lawmakers-react-to-revelations-from-icijs-cancer-calculus-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In hearings around the world, politicians and experts called for inquiries into inequities surrounding Merck&#039;s anti-cancer drug Keytruda. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-182931593-960x640.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:22:34 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>‘Unacceptable’:, Lawmakers, react, revelations, from, ICIJ’s, Cancer, Calculus, investigation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>With Record 70 New Grants, Fund for Investigative Journalism Increases Support for Critical Reporting</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/with-record-70-new-grants-fund-for-investigative-journalism-increases-support-for-critical-reporting</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/with-record-70-new-grants-fund-for-investigative-journalism-increases-support-for-critical-reporting</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ WASHINGTON, DC; April 22, 2026 – The Fund for Investigative Journalism announced today that it is awarding 70 new grants to journalists for groundbreaking investigations. The grants cover the expenses of specific investigative stories, and recipients can also receive free editorial and legal assistance. This group of grants, from the Fund’s first funding cycle of […]
The post With Record 70 New Grants, Fund for Investigative Journalism Increases Support for Critical Reporting appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:19:41 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>With, Record, New, Grants, Fund, for, Investigative, Journalism, Increases, Support, for, Critical, Reporting</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Half of Europe’s towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/half-of-europes-towns-and-villages-have-fewer-residents-than-60-years-ago</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/half-of-europes-towns-and-villages-have-fewer-residents-than-60-years-ago</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A data analysis by CORRECTIV.Europe reveals for the first time that even as Europe’s overall population grows, half of its municipalities are losing inhabitants – putting increasing pressure on the quality of life in rural areas. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:19:13 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Half, Europe’s, towns, and, villages, have, fewer, residents, than, years, ago</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Syarikat anak Pak Lah ENRA Group meterai kerjasama strategik dengan Boustead projek MRO TLDM</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/syarikat-anak-pak-lah-enra-group-meterai-kerjasama-strategik-dengan-boustead-projek-mro-tldm</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/syarikat-anak-pak-lah-enra-group-meterai-kerjasama-strategik-dengan-boustead-projek-mro-tldm</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR – ENRA Group Berhad, syarikat yang dikaitkan dengan anak kepada bekas Perdana Menteri, Allahyarham Abdullah Ahmad ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:18:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Syarikat, anak, Pak, Lah, ENRA, Group, meterai, kerjasama, strategik, dengan, Boustead, projek, MRO, TLDM</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A ‘burgeoning black market’, inflated dosing and the over&#45;judicialization of health care: reporters around the world tell stories about Keytruda</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-burgeoning-black-market-inflated-dosing-and-the-over-judicialization-of-health-care-reporters-around-the-world-tell-stories-about-keytruda</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-burgeoning-black-market-inflated-dosing-and-the-over-judicialization-of-health-care-reporters-around-the-world-tell-stories-about-keytruda</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In a yearlong investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, reporters from more than 37 countries found the cancer drug’s high price impacts patients and health systems differently. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:18:18 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>‘burgeoning, black, market’, inflated, dosing, and, the, over-judicialization, health, care:, reporters, around, the, world, tell, stories, about, Keytruda</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Cartel boss Daniel Kinahan arrested in Dubai </title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/cartel-boss-daniel-kinahan-arrested-in-dubai</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/cartel-boss-daniel-kinahan-arrested-in-dubai</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Kinahan cartel wars with rivals have been linked to at least 20 murders across four European countries, according to Europol. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:17:54 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Cartel, boss, Daniel, Kinahan, arrested, Dubai </media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Report: Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug topped $200,000 a year under Trump</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/report-mercks-blockbuster-cancer-drug-topped-200000-a-year-under-trump</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/report-mercks-blockbuster-cancer-drug-topped-200000-a-year-under-trump</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Despite the president’s plan to lower prescription medicine costs, the price of many of the most expensive drugs — including several immunotherapy treatments — have continued to rise. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:17:23 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Report:, Merck’s, blockbuster, cancer, drug, topped, 200, 000, year, under, Trump</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grant applications due April 27; webinar video shares proposal&#45;writing tips</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grant-applications-due-april-27-webinar-video-shares-proposal-writing-tips</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grant-applications-due-april-27-webinar-video-shares-proposal-writing-tips</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Fund for Investigative Journalism is accepting applications for regular grants (up to $10,000 for full investigative stories) and seed grants for early reporting (up to $2,500). Proposals for both types of grants are due on April 27, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Details are below. The Fund recently held an hourlong webinar on how […]
The post Grant applications due April 27; webinar video shares proposal-writing tips appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:57:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grant, applications, due, April, 27, webinar, video, shares, proposal-writing, tips</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>100 bombs in 10 minutes: Mapping Lebanon&amp;apos;s &amp;apos;Black Wednesday&amp;apos;</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/100-bombs-in-10-minutes-mapping-lebanons-black-wednesday</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/100-bombs-in-10-minutes-mapping-lebanons-black-wednesday</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ WARNING: This story contains distressing details and imagery.The Israel Defense Forces called it Operation Eternal Darkness. In Lebanon, it&#039;s now called Black Wednesday. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:57:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>100, bombs, minutes:, Mapping, Lebanons, Black, Wednesday</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How Merck turned its wonder drug into a blockbuster — and priced out cancer patients worldwide</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-merck-turned-its-wonder-drug-into-a-blockbuster-and-priced-out-cancer-patients-worldwide</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-merck-turned-its-wonder-drug-into-a-blockbuster-and-priced-out-cancer-patients-worldwide</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The pharmaceutical giant has built a fortress of patents, traded in secrecy and relentlessly lobbied to guard its revenue kingpin Keytruda. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/04/Cancer-Calculus-overview-Chelsea-Conrad.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:40:32 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, Merck, turned, its, wonder, drug, into, blockbuster, —, and, priced, out, cancer, patients, worldwide</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Counterfeiters cash in on the world’s bestselling cancer drug</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/counterfeiters-cash-in-on-the-worlds-bestselling-cancer-drug</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/counterfeiters-cash-in-on-the-worlds-bestselling-cancer-drug</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Desperate patients — and even hospitals — have become unwitting customers of fake Keytruda, with potentially fatal consequences. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:40:12 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Counterfeiters, cash, the, world’s, bestselling, cancer, drug</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>‘They deny the medication that is keeping you alive’: Patients wage grueling legal battles for lifesaving cancer drug</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/they-deny-the-medication-that-is-keeping-you-alive-patients-wage-grueling-legal-battles-for-lifesaving-cancer-drug</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/they-deny-the-medication-that-is-keeping-you-alive-patients-wage-grueling-legal-battles-for-lifesaving-cancer-drug</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ As bureaucratic fights to access Keytruda drag on for years, some patients die waiting. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/04/Cancer-Calculus-insurers-Chelsea-Conrad.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:39:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>‘They, deny, the, medication, that, keeping, you, alive’:, Patients, wage, grueling, legal, battles, for, lifesaving, cancer, drug</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How Merck uses patents to help maintain Keytruda’s exorbitant price</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-merck-uses-patents-to-help-maintain-keytrudas-exorbitant-price</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-merck-uses-patents-to-help-maintain-keytrudas-exorbitant-price</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Explore the U.S. patents Merck deploys to stymie competition and keep revenues for its blockbuster cancer drug flowing as long as possible. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/04/patents-art.png" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:39:26 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, Merck, uses, patents, help, maintain, Keytruda’s, exorbitant, price</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Judges Overseeing Louisiana’s Landmark Oil Cases Have Financial Stakes in Defendants</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/judges-overseeing-louisianas-landmark-oil-cases-have-financial-stakes-in-defendants</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/judges-overseeing-louisianas-landmark-oil-cases-have-financial-stakes-in-defendants</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This story was published in partnership with Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action, and in collaboration with Verite News and WWNO/WRKF. With support from the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism. A dozen federal judges have presided over some of the most consequential environmental lawsuits in Louisiana’s history despite having […]
The post Judges Overseeing Louisiana’s Landmark Oil Cases Have Financial Stakes in Defendants appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 04:29:20 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Judges, Overseeing, Louisiana’s, Landmark, Oil, Cases, Have, Financial, Stakes, Defendants</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Kes Mafia Korporat: Selepas lari ke luar negara, Victor Chin mohon bicara secara video, dakwa faktor keselamatan</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/kes-mafia-korporat-selepas-lari-ke-luar-negara-victor-chin-mohon-bicara-secara-video-dakwa-faktor-keselamatan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/kes-mafia-korporat-selepas-lari-ke-luar-negara-victor-chin-mohon-bicara-secara-video-dakwa-faktor-keselamatan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Berani bersuara dari luar negara melalui peguam Victor Chin Boon Long, yang dikaitkan dengan kontroversi “mafia korporat”, dilaporkan ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:41:20 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Kes, Mafia, Korporat:, Selepas, lari, luar, negara, Victor, Chin, mohon, bicara, secara, video, dakwa, faktor, keselamatan</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Oligarch&#45;Autocrat Alliances</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-oligarch-autocrat-alliances</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-oligarch-autocrat-alliances</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Democracy is not dying by sudden coup – it is being dismantled through the law itself, using a shared playbook refined across continents. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://correctiv.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Playbook_ENG02-1445x790.png" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:41:49 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Oligarch-Autocrat, Alliances</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Mexican surveillance giant you’ve never heard of is now watching the US border</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-mexican-surveillance-giant-youve-never-heard-of-is-now-watching-the-us-border</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-mexican-surveillance-giant-youve-never-heard-of-is-now-watching-the-us-border</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This article was produced in partnership with Rest of World. Inside a law enforcement command center in Ciudad Juárez, a police officer scrolled across a map on her touch-screen computer. As she used her fingers to navigate through the Mexican state of Chihuahua, where Juárez is located, different colored bubbles lit up. “That one is […]
The post A Mexican surveillance giant you’ve never heard of is now watching the US border appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:42:29 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Mexican, surveillance, giant, you’ve, never, heard, now, watching, the, border</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Sunway Gagal Rampas IJM: Tamparan buat kesombongan Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sunway-gagal-rampas-ijm-tamparan-buat-kesombongan-tan-sri-jeffrey-cheah</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sunway-gagal-rampas-ijm-tamparan-buat-kesombongan-tan-sri-jeffrey-cheah</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR – Percubaan Sunway Bhd untuk “mengunci” IJM Corporation Bhd melalui tawaran pengambilalihan sukarela (MGO) akhirnya berkubur. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:40:52 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Sunway, Gagal, Rampas, IJM:, Tamparan, buat, kesombongan, Tan, Sri, Jeffrey, Cheah</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>IJM ‘Sound’ Sunway: Nafi rundingan awal yang digerakkan ‘Orang Tengah’, tegas tolak tawaran tidak adil</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ijm-sound-sunway-nafi-rundingan-awal-yang-digerakkan-orang-tengah-tegas-tolak-tawaran-tidak-adil</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ijm-sound-sunway-nafi-rundingan-awal-yang-digerakkan-orang-tengah-tegas-tolak-tawaran-tidak-adil</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Sunway begitu terdesak untuk memiliki IJM. IJM pula terus fokus menghadapi kes rasuah pengerusinya Tan Sri Krishnan Tan. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:43:54 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>IJM, ‘Sound’, Sunway:, Nafi, rundingan, awal, yang, digerakkan, ‘Orang, Tengah’, tegas, tolak, tawaran, tidak, adil</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>WATCH: The Panama Papers — ten years of impact</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/watch-the-panama-papers-ten-years-of-impact</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/watch-the-panama-papers-ten-years-of-impact</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A decade after the Panama Papers made headlines around the world, the investigation remains a milestone moment in the global push for financial equality and transparency. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2022/07/ICIJ-2.0-Announcement.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:50:02 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>WATCH:, The, Panama, Papers, — ten, years, impact</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>WATCH: The Panama Papers at 10 live panel event</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/watch-the-panama-papers-at-10-live-panel-event</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/watch-the-panama-papers-at-10-live-panel-event</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ See the recording of a live conversation between ICIJ&#039;s Gerard Ryle and tax expert Tove Maria Ryding, going behind the scenes of the groundbreaking investigation and exploring its global impact. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2022/07/ICIJ-2.0-Announcement.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:50:02 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>WATCH:, The, Panama, Papers, live, panel, event</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Behind the veil of secrecy: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 2</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/behind-the-veil-of-secrecy-ten-years-of-the-panama-papers-part-2</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/behind-the-veil-of-secrecy-ten-years-of-the-panama-papers-part-2</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ On the 10-year anniversary of the Panama Papers, journalists recall how it all happened, and how the investigation took the world by storm. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/04/Panama-City-GettyImages-519702804.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:50:02 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Behind, the, veil, secrecy:, Ten, years, the, Panama, Papers, part</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Ten years after the Panama Papers, enablers and tax cheats are still being brought to justice</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ten-years-after-the-panama-papers-enablers-and-tax-cheats-are-still-being-brought-to-justice</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ten-years-after-the-panama-papers-enablers-and-tax-cheats-are-still-being-brought-to-justice</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A look back at a decade of changes after the Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation sent a shock through the offshore world. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:13:31 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ten, years, after, the, Panama, Papers, enablers, and, tax, cheats, are, still, being, brought, justice</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grant applications due April 27; webinar on proposal&#45;writing April 8</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grant-applications-due-april-27-webinar-on-proposal-writing-april-8</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grant-applications-due-april-27-webinar-on-proposal-writing-april-8</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Fund for Investigative Journalism is accepting applications for regular grants (up to $10,000 for full investigative stories) and seed grants for early reporting (up to $2,500). Proposals for both types of grants are due on April 27, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Details are below. In advance of the deadline, on April 8 at […]
The post Grant applications due April 27; webinar on proposal-writing April 8 appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:26:31 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grant, applications, due, April, 27, webinar, proposal-writing, April</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Investigation raises serious questions about Oklahoma homebuyers not being informed of Superfund site hazards</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/investigation-raises-serious-questions-about-oklahoma-homebuyers-not-being-informed-of-superfund-site-hazards</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/investigation-raises-serious-questions-about-oklahoma-homebuyers-not-being-informed-of-superfund-site-hazards</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Tar Creek area of Oklahoma was a mining site for a nearly a century, leading it to be designated a Superfund site because of significant toxic pollution. As recently as the 1990s, one-third of children in the area had elevated levels of lead in their blood. The federal government managed a “buyout” of the […]
The post Investigation raises serious questions about Oklahoma homebuyers not being informed of Superfund site hazards appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:21:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Investigation, raises, serious, questions, about, Oklahoma, homebuyers, not, being, informed, Superfund, site, hazards</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee examines health impact of pesticides in the Midwest – and zeroes in on state and federal government complicity</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-health-impact-of-pesticides-in-the-midwest-and-zeroes-in-on-state-and-federal-government-complicity</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-health-impact-of-pesticides-in-the-midwest-and-zeroes-in-on-state-and-federal-government-complicity</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, Investigate Midwest analyzed data about pesticide use and caner rates and interviewed more than 100 farmers, environmentalists, lawmakers and scientists. The result is a picture of a nation at a crossroads in dealing with this public health crisis that has not just been ignored by state and federal health officials, […]
The post Grantee examines health impact of pesticides in the Midwest – and zeroes in on state and federal government complicity appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:21:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, examines, health, impact, pesticides, the, Midwest, –, and, zeroes, state, and, federal, government, complicity</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>To determine if hemp products in Wisconsin are safe and legal, grantee conducts independent testing</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/to-determine-if-hemp-products-in-wisconsin-are-safe-and-legal-grantee-conducts-independent-testing</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/to-determine-if-hemp-products-in-wisconsin-are-safe-and-legal-grantee-conducts-independent-testing</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Hemp products are legal in Wisconsin, but only if they have very low levels of THC, the chemical in marijuana that makes people high. With support from the Fund, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel commissioned independent testing on 30 gummies, vapes and edibles bought at hemp stores – and found that most of them contained illegal […]
The post To determine if hemp products in Wisconsin are safe and legal, grantee conducts independent testing appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:21:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>determine, hemp, products, Wisconsin, are, safe, and, legal, grantee, conducts, independent, testing</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>State reverses course on prison sex&#45;assault case after grantee locates alleged abuser</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/state-reverses-course-on-prison-sex-assault-case-after-grantee-locates-alleged-abuser</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/state-reverses-course-on-prison-sex-assault-case-after-grantee-locates-alleged-abuser</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ When a woman sued New York State, alleging that a guard routinely sexually assaulted her when she was in prison, the state claimed it couldn’t find the guard and filed a motion to dismiss her lawsuit. Reporters at New York Focus and Hell Gate easily located the guard – and, as a result of their […]
The post State reverses course on prison sex-assault case after grantee locates alleged abuser appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:21:04 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>State, reverses, course, prison, sex-assault, case, after, grantee, locates, alleged, abuser</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantees document toll of Trump cuts on HIV and STI infections in Uganda</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantees-document-toll-of-trump-cuts-on-hiv-and-sti-infections-in-uganda</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantees-document-toll-of-trump-cuts-on-hiv-and-sti-infections-in-uganda</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A stop-work order for all foreign aid that President Donald Trump issued on the first day of his second term is having a devastating and far-reaching impact on public health in Uganda, journalists Steven Thrasher and Afeef Nessouli found. With support from the Fund, the pair documented the sudden and severe restrictions to condoms and […]
The post Grantees document toll of Trump cuts on HIV and STI infections in Uganda appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:20:20 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantees, document, toll, Trump, cuts, HIV, and, STI, infections, Uganda</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The story that rocked the world: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 1</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-story-that-rocked-the-world-ten-years-of-the-panama-papers-part-1</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-story-that-rocked-the-world-ten-years-of-the-panama-papers-part-1</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Ten years after the Panama Papers hit front pages around the world, ICIJ unpacks how the groundbreaking investigation came together, beginning with an unprecedented data leak. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:08:05 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, story, that, rocked, the, world:, Ten, years, the, Panama, Papers, part</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How to tell this missile image is real</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-to-tell-this-missile-image-is-real</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-to-tell-this-missile-image-is-real</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Huge amounts of false images and video circulating about the conflict in Iran are often making it difficult to distinguish genuine news from manipulated fakery.ABC NEWS Verify has observed social media users calling ABC verified and published content &quot;AI slop&quot;, &quot;obviously fake&quot;, and even saying &quot;photoshop much.&quot; ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 03:43:03 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, tell, this, missile, image, real</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>France to try alleged Magnitsky Affair mastermind Dimitry Klyuev in absentia</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/france-to-try-alleged-magnitsky-affair-mastermind-dimitry-klyuev-in-absentia</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/france-to-try-alleged-magnitsky-affair-mastermind-dimitry-klyuev-in-absentia</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Prosecutors are set to unseal &quot;aggravated money laundering&quot; charges against Klyuev in one of the most prominent cases tied to the alleged tax fraud scheme. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/03/Paris_Courts_GettyImages-2256055414.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2026 03:44:50 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>France, try, alleged, Magnitsky, Affair, mastermind, Dimitry, Klyuev, absentia</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Ishak Ismail ambil alih Pengerusi NexG, Hanifah kembali sebagai CEO: Pulihkan syarikat, singkir Pengaruh Mafia Korporat Victor Chin jika mahu selamat</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ishak-ismail-ambil-alih-pengerusi-nexg-hanifah-kembali-sebagai-ceo-pulihkan-syarikat-singkir-pengaruh-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-jika-mahu-selamat</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ishak-ismail-ambil-alih-pengerusi-nexg-hanifah-kembali-sebagai-ceo-pulihkan-syarikat-singkir-pengaruh-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-jika-mahu-selamat</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ NexG Bhd mengumumkan penyusunan semula kepimpinan tertingginya dengan pelantikan Datuk Ishak Ismail sebagai Pengerusi Eksekutif, manakala pengasas syarikat, ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2026/03/nexG-baru-1.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 28 Mar 2026 04:10:33 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ishak, Ismail, ambil, alih, Pengerusi, NexG, Hanifah, kembali, sebagai, CEO:, Pulihkan, syarikat, singkir, Pengaruh, Mafia, Korporat, Victor, Chin, jika, mahu, selamat</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>‘A muzzle on elected officials’: NDAs ‘cloak’ Louisiana’s biggest business developments</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-muzzle-on-elected-officials-ndas-cloak-louisianas-biggest-business-developments</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-muzzle-on-elected-officials-ndas-cloak-louisianas-biggest-business-developments</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This story was produced as part of the Springboard Project. In November last year, Abigail Whittington heard there might be a data center coming to her hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.  She had concerns about how it might impact her community.  The massive warehouse-like facilities that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and streaming services — are […]
The post ‘A muzzle on elected officials’: NDAs ‘cloak’ Louisiana’s biggest business developments appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:42:52 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>‘A, muzzle, elected, officials’:, NDAs, ‘cloak’, Louisiana’s, biggest, business, developments</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Exclusive: FBI Files Counter Government Argument in Texas “Antifa” Trial </title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/exclusive-fbi-files-counter-government-argument-in-texas-antifa-trial</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/exclusive-fbi-files-counter-government-argument-in-texas-antifa-trial</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Fort Worth, Texas—On the last day of testimony in the federal “Prairieland” trial—wherein nine activists faced charges related to a protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center—the government called its star witness back to the stand. Kyle Shideler, director of counterterrorism research at the right-wing think tank Center for Security Policy, had been […]
The post Exclusive: FBI Files Counter Government Argument in Texas “Antifa” Trial  appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:18:23 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Exclusive:, FBI, Files, Counter, Government, Argument, Texas, “Antifa”, Trial </media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Signal Phishing Attack: Digital Evidence Points to Russia</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/signal-phishing-attack-digital-evidence-points-to-russia</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/signal-phishing-attack-digital-evidence-points-to-russia</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For weeks, a wave of attacks has been targeting Signal users in Germany and abroad. Among those targeted are security officials, politicians, and journalists. A CORRECTIV investigation found digital evidence pointing to Russian involvement in the campaign – and a connection to previous attacks in Ukraine and Moldova. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://correctiv.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/signal-phishing-hack-russland-defisher-1445x790.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:11:53 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Signal, Phishing, Attack:, Digital, Evidence, Points, Russia</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Victor Chin mengaku lebih 500 akaun dibeku tapi mengapa tidak dedah pegawai cina SPRM Wong Yun Fui dalang mafia korporat?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/victor-chin-mengaku-lebih-500-akaun-dibeku-tapi-mengapa-tidak-dedah-pegawai-cina-sprm-wong-yun-fui-dalang-mafia-korporat</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/victor-chin-mengaku-lebih-500-akaun-dibeku-tapi-mengapa-tidak-dedah-pegawai-cina-sprm-wong-yun-fui-dalang-mafia-korporat</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Selepas lebih tiga tahun pendedahan portal The Corporate Secret dan laporan media perdana terhadap ahli korporat kontroversi Victor ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:08:49 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Victor, Chin, mengaku, lebih, 500, akaun, dibeku, tapi, mengapa, tidak, dedah, pegawai, cina, SPRM, Wong, Yun, Fui, dalang, mafia, korporat</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Canada revokes dozens of crypto firms’ registrations</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/canada-revokes-dozens-of-crypto-firms-registrations</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/canada-revokes-dozens-of-crypto-firms-registrations</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Reporting by The Toronto Star as part of ICIJ&#039;s Coin Laundry investigation found clusters of crypto services operating unlawfully. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 03:44:23 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Canada, revokes, dozens, crypto, firms’, registrations</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The ABC is investigating aged care again and we want to hear from you</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-abc-is-investigating-aged-care-again-and-we-want-to-hear-from-you</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-abc-is-investigating-aged-care-again-and-we-want-to-hear-from-you</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Are you getting the aged care reform you were promised?In 2021 the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety released its final report after more than 10,000 submissions revealed the system was fundamentally failing — marked by widespread neglect, substandard care, and systemic disregard for the dignity of older Australians. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:43:03 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, ABC, investigating, aged, care, again, and, want, hear, from, you</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Georgia Lawmakers With Real Estate Ties Are Writing the State’s Housing Laws</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/georgia-lawmakers-with-real-estate-ties-are-writing-the-states-housing-laws</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/georgia-lawmakers-with-real-estate-ties-are-writing-the-states-housing-laws</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ When Kenneth Porter moved to Atlanta from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 2016 to advance his career in the entertainment industry, he rented part of a two-bedroom townhouse on Atlanta’s eastside for about $600 per month. Over the past decade, however, even as he’s moved into a smaller apartment, he’s watched his rent double — and […]
The post Georgia Lawmakers With Real Estate Ties Are Writing the State’s Housing Laws appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:42:56 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Georgia, Lawmakers, With, Real, Estate, Ties, Are, Writing, the, State’s, Housing, Laws</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Questions swirl around US plans for record $15B Prince Group crypto seizure</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/questions-swirl-around-us-plans-for-record-15b-prince-group-crypto-seizure</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/questions-swirl-around-us-plans-for-record-15b-prince-group-crypto-seizure</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Victim advocates fear the funds seized from the Prince Group’s founder will be stashed away for the U.S.’s new strategic cryptocurrency reserve. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/03/Chen-Zhi-arrested.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:43:53 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Questions, swirl, around, plans, for, record, 15B, Prince, Group, crypto, seizure</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Introducing Our 2026 Springboard Project Partners</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/introducing-our-2026-springboard-project-partners</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/introducing-our-2026-springboard-project-partners</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Type Investigations is pleased to announce three new Springboard Project partnerships for 2026: India Currents, Puente News Collaborative, and South Side Weekly. Through the Springboard Project, Type will be offering these newsrooms an infusion of editorial, research, and financial support to help strengthen their investigative capacity. They join ongoing Springboard partners Gulf States Newsroom and […]
The post Introducing Our 2026 Springboard Project Partners appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.typeinvestigations.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/SPRINGBOARD_Logo_TI-1-scaled.png" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:42:58 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Introducing, Our, 2026, Springboard, Project, Partners</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Petrol prices are rising. This map shows why</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/petrol-prices-are-rising-this-map-shows-why</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/petrol-prices-are-rising-this-map-shows-why</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Oil refineries, depots and tankers have all been key targets of US-Israeli and Iranian drone and missile strikes in the first weeks of the war in the Middle East.The attacks have driven oil prices higher internationally, prompting the International Energy Agency (IEA) to announce the release of 400 million barrels of oil from its 32-member countries. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 04:31:28 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Petrol, prices, are, rising., This, map, shows, why</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>SC Keluarkan Waran Tangkap CEO Serba Dinamik, Datuk Mohd Abdul Karim Diburu — Tetapi “Mafia Korporat” Victor Chin Boon Long Masih Terlepas</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sc-keluarkan-waran-tangkap-ceo-serba-dinamik-datuk-mohd-abdul-karim-diburu-tetapi-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-boon-long-masih-terlepas</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sc-keluarkan-waran-tangkap-ceo-serba-dinamik-datuk-mohd-abdul-karim-diburu-tetapi-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-boon-long-masih-terlepas</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — Suruhanjaya Sekuriti Malaysia (SC) dilaporkan telah mengeluarkan waran tangkap terhadap bekas Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif Serba ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 04:30:58 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Keluarkan, Waran, Tangkap, CEO, Serba, Dinamik, Datuk, Mohd, Abdul, Karim, Diburu, —, Tetapi, “Mafia, Korporat”, Victor, Chin, Boon, Long, Masih, Terlepas</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Human rights court calls on governments to crack down on weapons trafficking</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/human-rights-court-calls-on-governments-to-crack-down-on-weapons-trafficking</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/human-rights-court-calls-on-governments-to-crack-down-on-weapons-trafficking</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Inter-American Court of Human Rights said that governments have a duty to more closely monitor firearms manufacturers and put a stop to illegal trafficking. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/03/Mexico-guns-GettyImages-2160754100.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:29:52 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Human, rights, court, calls, governments, crack, down, weapons, trafficking</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Italian authorities order expulsion of Chinese agents responsible for spying on dissidents</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/italian-authorities-order-expulsion-of-chinese-agents-responsible-for-spying-on-dissidents</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/italian-authorities-order-expulsion-of-chinese-agents-responsible-for-spying-on-dissidents</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Interior Ministry acted days after local media reported that Chinese state actors in 2024 hacked the database of a police unit assigned to protecting Chinese dissidents. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-463077240-1-e1773271661581.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 04:29:26 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Italian, authorities, order, expulsion, Chinese, agents, responsible, for, spying, dissidents</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>MMAG Lupus 51% Saham Anak Syarikat Penerbangan Pada Harga RM100,000 – Sedangkan Jana RM591 Juta</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/mmag-lupus-51-saham-anak-syarikat-penerbangan-pada-harga-rm100000-sedangkan-jana-rm591-juta</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/mmag-lupus-51-saham-anak-syarikat-penerbangan-pada-harga-rm100000-sedangkan-jana-rm591-juta</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR: Satu lagi transaksi mencurigakan melibatkan syarikat berkaitan individu yang sering dikaitkan dengan rangkaian mafia korporat kembali ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:30:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>MMAG, Lupus, 51, Saham, Anak, Syarikat, Penerbangan, Pada, Harga, RM100, 000, –, Sedangkan, Jana, RM591, Juta</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>BPMB Aries Loan Saga Series: The Spurned Lifeline</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/bpmb-aries-loan-saga-series-the-spurned-lifeline</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/bpmb-aries-loan-saga-series-the-spurned-lifeline</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ BPMB&#039;s 2019 Rejection of a Shareholder Restructuring Offer as Evidence of Targeted Destruction ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:29:03 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Satellite imagery shows strikes around Iranian school where girls were killed</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/satellite-imagery-shows-strikes-around-iranian-school-where-girls-were-killed</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/satellite-imagery-shows-strikes-around-iranian-school-where-girls-were-killed</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ New satellite imagery shows strikes hit at least seven buildings around an Iranian school where the country&#039;s government said more than 150 mostly young girls were killed last Saturday.Funerals have been held for some of the people, including children, killed when the Shajereh Tayyebeh school was hit in the coastal city of Minab, according to state media. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:47:47 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Satellite, imagery, shows, strikes, around, Iranian, school, where, girls, were, killed</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Lawmakers seek to stop sales to the public of ammunition made at U.S. Army plant</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/lawmakers-seek-to-stop-sales-to-the-public-of-ammunition-made-at-us-army-plant</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/lawmakers-seek-to-stop-sales-to-the-public-of-ammunition-made-at-us-army-plant</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A new bill backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and three other Democrats came in response to an ICIJ and The New York Times investigation. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2255805606-e1772828236563.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 05:44:51 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Lawmakers, seek, stop, sales, the, public, ammunition, made, U.S., Army, plant</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Eight Journalists Receive Alicia Patterson Fellowships for In&#45;Depth Reporting in 2026</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/eight-journalists-receive-alicia-patterson-fellowships-for-in-depth-reporting-in-2026</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/eight-journalists-receive-alicia-patterson-fellowships-for-in-depth-reporting-in-2026</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ WASHNGTON, DC; March 5, 2026 – The Fund for Investigative Journalism today announced that eight accomplished journalists have been awarded Alicia Patterson Fellowships to conduct public-service reporting this year. The annual fellowships foster independent, in-depth reporting on topics of public interest. The fellowships were established in 1965 in memory of Alicia Patterson, the founding editor […]
The post Eight Journalists Receive Alicia Patterson Fellowships for In-Depth Reporting in 2026 appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:48:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Eight, Journalists, Receive, Alicia, Patterson, Fellowships, for, In-Depth, Reporting, 2026</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>IRS criminal referrals against big corporations and ultrawealthy plummeted during Trump’s first year</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/irs-criminal-referrals-against-big-corporations-and-ultrawealthy-plummeted-during-trumps-first-year</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/irs-criminal-referrals-against-big-corporations-and-ultrawealthy-plummeted-during-trumps-first-year</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ New data shows how a key office hammered by layoffs and cost-cutting referred at most two cases in fiscal year 2025. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:44:26 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>IRS, criminal, referrals, against, big, corporations, and, ultrawealthy, plummeted, during, Trump’s, first, year</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Advocacy group files formal grievance claiming World Bank ‘failed’ to address harm caused by controversial Tanzanian project</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/advocacy-group-files-formal-grievance-claiming-world-bank-failed-to-address-harm-caused-by-controversial-tanzanian-project</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/advocacy-group-files-formal-grievance-claiming-world-bank-failed-to-address-harm-caused-by-controversial-tanzanian-project</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The project, which aimed to expand protected environmental areas and boost tourism, was terminated in 2024 after allegations of human rights abuses. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/01/affected-community.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 05:44:00 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Advocacy, group, files, formal, grievance, claiming, World, Bank, ‘failed’, address, harm, caused, controversial, Tanzanian, project</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Investigating the return of the Islamic State terrorist group</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/investigating-the-return-of-the-islamic-state-terrorist-group</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/investigating-the-return-of-the-islamic-state-terrorist-group</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Investigating the return of the Islamic State terrorist groupThe Bondi Beach terrorist attack signalled the resurgence of the Islamic State terrorist group in Australia. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:01:20 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Investigating, the, return, the, Islamic, State, terrorist, group</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>What verified videos tell us about what&amp;apos;s unfolded in the Middle East</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-verified-videos-tell-us-about-whats-unfolded-in-the-middle-east</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-verified-videos-tell-us-about-whats-unfolded-in-the-middle-east</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Iran, Israel and the United States are now engaged in war, with the fallout spreading across the region.Strikes have been reported in at least 18 provinces of Iran. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:01:58 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, verified, videos, tell, about, whats, unfolded, the, Middle, East</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee uncovers evidence of murder in a Mississippi jail; story leads state to reopen the case and launch new investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-evidence-of-murder-in-a-mississippi-jail-story-leads-state-to-reopen-the-case-and-launch-new-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-evidence-of-murder-in-a-mississippi-jail-story-leads-state-to-reopen-the-case-and-launch-new-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In 2018, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was quick to write off the death of Rankin County jail inmate William Wade Aycock IV as an accident. But an investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times unearthed new evidence in the case that suggests Aycock was killed. With support from the Fund, the reporting […]
The post Grantee uncovers evidence of murder in a Mississippi jail; story leads state to reopen the case and launch new investigation appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 02:53:51 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, uncovers, evidence, murder, Mississippi, jail, story, leads, state, reopen, the, case, and, launch, new, investigation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Former prison officers speak out against culture of silence</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/former-prison-officers-speak-out-against-culture-of-silence</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/former-prison-officers-speak-out-against-culture-of-silence</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ As a single mother of two, Leanne Farrugia was proud to secure a stable job as a junior prison guard at Metropolitan Remand &amp; Reception Centre at Silverwater, in Sydney&#039;s west, in 2018.That sense of security was shattered one night in May 2022. She was at home sick when her supervisor, then-senior correctional officer Scott Hawken, arrived at her house and drugged her. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:57:16 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Former, prison, officers, speak, out, against, culture, silence</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Satellite images show extent of destruction where Iran&amp;apos;s supreme leader was killed</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/satellite-images-show-extent-of-destruction-where-irans-supreme-leader-was-killed</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/satellite-images-show-extent-of-destruction-where-irans-supreme-leader-was-killed</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ High-definition satellite imagery shows the massive destruction caused by the bombing of the compound of Iran&#039;s supreme leader in the heart of Tehran.US President Donald Trump declared Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in the assault by Israel and the United States. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:09:08 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Satellite, images, show, extent, destruction, where, Irans, supreme, leader, was, killed</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Flood Re Set to ‘Layer Up’ on Cat Bonds Amid Hedge Fund Demand</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/flood-re-set-to-layer-up-on-cat-bonds-amid-hedge-fund-demand</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/flood-re-set-to-layer-up-on-cat-bonds-amid-hedge-fund-demand</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Britain’s ultimate backstop against flood-related losses is planning to rely more on the capital markets, after its first ever catastrophe bond drew a lot of interest from specialist investors including hedge fund Fermat Capital Management. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:00:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Flood, Set, ‘Layer, Up’, Cat, Bonds, Amid, Hedge, Fund, Demand</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Deutscher Rüstungsboom</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/deutscher-rustungsboom</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/deutscher-rustungsboom</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Die Aufrüstung der Bundeswehr beflügelt die deutsche Wirtschaft mehr als viele erwartet hatten. Die Investitionen könnten möglicherweise sogar wichtiger sein als das Infrastrukturpaket. (Source: Bloomberg) ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:59:56 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Deutscher, Rüstungsboom</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>BPMB VTEL Loan Saga Series: Facts vs Fiction</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/bpmb-vtel-loan-saga-series-facts-vs-fiction</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/bpmb-vtel-loan-saga-series-facts-vs-fiction</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A summary of findings established by legal review and ICIJnews’ direct consultations with individuals close to the matter ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:13:20 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>PPB  Group Bhd Syarikat Taikun Tan Sri Robert Kuok Rugi RM2.73 Bilion Akibat Rosot Nilai Pelaburan Wilmar</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ppb-group-bhd-syarikat-taikun-tan-sri-robert-kuok-rugi-rm273-bilion-akibat-rosot-nilai-pelaburan-wilmar</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ppb-group-bhd-syarikat-taikun-tan-sri-robert-kuok-rugi-rm273-bilion-akibat-rosot-nilai-pelaburan-wilmar</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR: PPB Group Bhd milik taikun Malaysia Tan Sri Robert Kuok merekodkan kerugian bersih sebanyak RM2.73 bilion ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 05:47:13 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>PPB,  Group, Bhd, Syarikat, Taikun, Tan, Sri, Robert, Kuok, Rugi, RM2.73, Bilion, Akibat, Rosot, Nilai, Pelaburan, Wilmar</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantees find that New York State is trying to toss hundreds of sex&#45;abuse cases because of typos; reporting sparks calls for reform</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantees-find-that-new-york-state-is-trying-to-toss-hundreds-of-sex-abuse-cases-because-of-typos-reporting-sparks-calls-for-reform</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantees-find-that-new-york-state-is-trying-to-toss-hundreds-of-sex-abuse-cases-because-of-typos-reporting-sparks-calls-for-reform</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The State of New York plans to ask a judge to dismiss 500 prison sexual abuse cases because of typos and other technicalities in the victims’ legal filings, according to new reporting in New York Focus and Hell Gate. With support from the Fund, Chris Gelardi and Jessy Edwards have spent months compiling and analyzing […]
The post Grantees find that New York State is trying to toss hundreds of sex-abuse cases because of typos; reporting sparks calls for reform appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:51:15 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantees, find, that, New, York, State, trying, toss, hundreds, sex-abuse, cases, because, typos, reporting, sparks, calls, for, reform</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-officials-attended-a-summit-of-election-deniers-who-want-the-president-to-take-over-the-midterms</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-officials-attended-a-summit-of-election-deniers-who-want-the-president-to-take-over-the-midterms</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/social-GettyImages-2008859283.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:47:30 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump, Officials, Attended, Summit, Election, Deniers, Who, Want, the, President, Take, Over, the, Midterms</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Secret Survey From Inside a Women’s Prison Tells Stories of Domestic Abuse Untold in Court</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-secret-survey-from-inside-a-womens-prison-tells-stories-of-domestic-abuse-untold-in-court</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-secret-survey-from-inside-a-womens-prison-tells-stories-of-domestic-abuse-untold-in-court</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Secret Survey From Inside a Women’s Prison Tells Stories of Domestic Abuse Untold in Court appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/20260227-survivor-paper-stack.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:47:01 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Secret, Survey, From, Inside, Women’s, Prison, Tells, Stories, Domestic, Abuse, Untold, Court</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>BPMB VTEL Loan Saga Series: The Cold&#45;Blooded Institutional Assassination of Malaysia’s 1,500 km Terabit Backbone</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/bpmb-vtel-loan-saga-series-the-cold-blooded-institutional-assassination-of-malaysias-1500-km-terabit-backbone</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/bpmb-vtel-loan-saga-series-the-cold-blooded-institutional-assassination-of-malaysias-1500-km-terabit-backbone</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ How BPMB’s Own Verifications, Audited Revenues, Official Launches and Surviving Physical Traces Expose the “Corrupt Loan” Narrative as a Deliberate, Self-Serving Fabrication Designed to Conceal Economic Sabotage and Human Carnage ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:59:11 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Bankruptcy laws shift burden of cleaning up environmental contamination from oil companies to taxpayers, grantee finds</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/bankruptcy-laws-shift-burden-of-cleaning-up-environmental-contamination-from-oil-companies-to-taxpayers-grantee-finds</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/bankruptcy-laws-shift-burden-of-cleaning-up-environmental-contamination-from-oil-companies-to-taxpayers-grantee-finds</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Cleaning oilfield pollution in West Texas is costly and complicated – and bankruptcy laws let oil companies off the hook, sticking taxpayers with the bill – according to reporting by Martha Pskowski for Inside Climate News. With support from the Fund, Pskowski spent six months investigating contamination and cleanup efforts on property that the city […]
The post Bankruptcy laws shift burden of cleaning up environmental contamination from oil companies to taxpayers, grantee finds appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:50:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Bankruptcy, laws, shift, burden, cleaning, environmental, contamination, from, oil, companies, taxpayers, grantee, finds</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee obtains records showing how Hawaii officials overlooked red flags to place dozens of foster boys with predator</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-obtains-records-showing-how-hawaii-officials-overlooked-red-flags-to-place-dozens-of-foster-boys-with-predator</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-obtains-records-showing-how-hawaii-officials-overlooked-red-flags-to-place-dozens-of-foster-boys-with-predator</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In its ongoing investigation of Hawaii’s child welfare system, with support from the Fund, Honolulu Civil Beat won a legal battle to unseal records that show how one man was allowed to be a foster parent to the boys he sexually preyed on and abused. The records show that the state stood behind the man […]
The post Grantee obtains records showing how Hawaii officials overlooked red flags to place dozens of foster boys with predator appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:49:47 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, obtains, records, showing, how, Hawaii, officials, overlooked, red, flags, place, dozens, foster, boys, with, predator</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>5 Investigations Sparking Change This Month</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/5-investigations-sparking-change-this-month</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/5-investigations-sparking-change-this-month</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post 5 Investigations Sparking Change This Month appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:46:34 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Investigations, Sparking, Change, This, Month</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Seized Art, Eavesdropping Guards: Parents Describe a Clampdown at Dilley Detention Center as Kids Shared Their Stories</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/seized-art-eavesdropping-guards-parents-describe-a-clampdown-at-dilley-detention-center-as-kids-shared-their-stories</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/seized-art-eavesdropping-guards-parents-describe-a-clampdown-at-dilley-detention-center-as-kids-shared-their-stories</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Seized Art, Eavesdropping Guards: Parents Describe a Clampdown at Dilley Detention Center as Kids Shared Their Stories appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:46:04 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Seized, Art, Eavesdropping, Guards:, Parents, Describe, Clampdown, Dilley, Detention, Center, Kids, Shared, Their, Stories</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Senate Leaders Warn Defense Department About Procuring Generic Drugs Overseas</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/senate-leaders-warn-defense-department-about-procuring-generic-drugs-overseas</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/senate-leaders-warn-defense-department-about-procuring-generic-drugs-overseas</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Senate Leaders Warn Defense Department About Procuring Generic Drugs Overseas appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:45:39 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Senate, Leaders, Warn, Defense, Department, About, Procuring, Generic, Drugs, Overseas</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Massachusetts sues Bitcoin Depot, alleging the crypto ATM operator knowingly facilitated crypto scams</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/massachusetts-sues-bitcoin-depot-alleging-the-crypto-atm-operator-knowingly-facilitated-crypto-scams</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/massachusetts-sues-bitcoin-depot-alleging-the-crypto-atm-operator-knowingly-facilitated-crypto-scams</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Massachusetts Attorney General’s lawsuit is the latest in a series of state legal actions against one of the world’s largest crypto ATM operators. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/12/Bitcoin-Depot-ATM-CNN.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:36:11 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Massachusetts, sues, Bitcoin, Depot, alleging, the, crypto, ATM, operator, knowingly, facilitated, crypto, scams</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Greek court convicts Intellexa founder Tal Dilian, three others in wiretapping scandal</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/greek-court-convicts-intellexa-founder-tal-dilian-three-others-in-wiretapping-scandal</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/greek-court-convicts-intellexa-founder-tal-dilian-three-others-in-wiretapping-scandal</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The former Israeli intelligence officer’s spyware has helped some of the world’s most brutal regimes spy on journalists and political opponents. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:12:57 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Greek, court, convicts, Intellexa, founder, Tal, Dilian, three, others, wiretapping, scandal</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Donate to ICIJ</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/donate-to-icij</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/donate-to-icij</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Support our journalism. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2023/12/Give.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:12:50 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Donate, ICIJ</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Suspected serial offender linked to IS walks free over filmed gay bashing</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/suspected-serial-offender-linked-to-is-walks-free-over-filmed-gay-bashing</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/suspected-serial-offender-linked-to-is-walks-free-over-filmed-gay-bashing</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence that may distress some readers.Nathan*, 20, was left for dead in a Sydney underpass by a teenager linked to an Islamic State (IS) terrorist network, who filmed himself repeatedly stomping on the university student&#039;s head in a snuff-video-style gay bashing. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:08:59 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Suspected, serial, offender, linked, walks, free, over, filmed, gay, bashing</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee identifies multiple cases of Utah police officers violating body&#45;cam policies</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-identifies-multiple-cases-of-utah-police-officers-violating-body-cam-policies</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-identifies-multiple-cases-of-utah-police-officers-violating-body-cam-policies</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Utah Investigative Journalism Project filed more than 170 records requests with 48 local law-enforcement agencies across the state to see what happens to police officers who are disciplined for not properly using body-worn cameras. The records identified 25 officers across 11 agencies with such violations. The reporting, supported by the Fund, also highlighted agencies’ […]
The post Grantee identifies multiple cases of Utah police officers violating body-cam policies appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:52:15 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, identifies, multiple, cases, Utah, police, officers, violating, body-cam, policies</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>  Grantee tracks influence campaign’s efforts to marginalize homeless people</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-tracks-influence-campaigns-efforts-to-marginalize-homeless-people</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-tracks-influence-campaigns-efforts-to-marginalize-homeless-people</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In continuing coverage of a Dallas-based hotelier and Republican megadonor’s efforts to influence local politics, the Texas Observer began digging into his latest venture, a nonprofit organization to address homelessness in Dallas. With support from the Fund, Steven Monacelli traced how the organization positioned itself as a statewide expert and advocate on homelessness, while pushing […]
The post   Grantee tracks influence campaign’s efforts to marginalize homeless people appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:51:50 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords> , Grantee, tracks, influence, campaign’s, efforts, marginalize, homeless, people</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump Administration Moves to Allow Intelligence Agencies Easier Access to Law Enforcement Files</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-administration-moves-to-allow-intelligence-agencies-easier-access-to-law-enforcement-files</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-administration-moves-to-allow-intelligence-agencies-easier-access-to-law-enforcement-files</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump Administration Moves to Allow Intelligence Agencies Easier Access to Law Enforcement Files appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Federal-Law-Enforcement-and-Privacy-Lead-3.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:08:46 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump, Administration, Moves, Allow, Intelligence, Agencies, Easier, Access, Law, Enforcement, Files</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee reporting documents problems with Maine program that provides heat for low&#45;income residents of mobile homes</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-reporting-documents-problems-with-maine-program-that-provides-heat-for-low-income-residents-of-mobile-homes</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-reporting-documents-problems-with-maine-program-that-provides-heat-for-low-income-residents-of-mobile-homes</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, reporter Emmett Gartner dug into the case of an elderly couple in Maine who couldn’t get help from a state program that funds electric heating for low-income people living in mobile homes. He collected court documents, and he interviewed participants of the low-income mobile home heating program and oversight officials. […]
The post Grantee reporting documents problems with Maine program that provides heat for low-income residents of mobile homes appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 02:52:39 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, reporting, documents, problems, with, Maine, program, that, provides, heat, for, low-income, residents, mobile, homes</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trumps-latest-deportation-tactic-targeting-immigrants-with-minor-family-court-cases</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trumps-latest-deportation-tactic-targeting-immigrants-with-minor-family-court-cases</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 02:44:52 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump’s, Latest, Deportation, Tactic:, Targeting, Immigrants, With, Minor, Family, Court, Cases</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The Victims Who Fought Back</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-victims-who-fought-back</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-victims-who-fought-back</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post The Victims Who Fought Back appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:08:33 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Victims, Who, Fought, Back</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Loose rules let state police in New York hand out lax discipline for misconduct, grantee finds</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/loose-rules-let-state-police-in-new-york-hand-out-lax-discipline-for-misconduct-grantee-finds</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/loose-rules-let-state-police-in-new-york-hand-out-lax-discipline-for-misconduct-grantee-finds</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For decades, the State Police, New York’s second-largest law enforcement agency, has had no formal disciplinary guidelines for misconduct, and action against officers is inconsistent and sometimes lax, according to reporting by Sassy Sussman for The New York Times and New York Focus. With support from the Fund, Sussman reviewed thousands of police disciplinary files. […]
The post Loose rules let state police in New York hand out lax discipline for misconduct, grantee finds appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:52:52 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Loose, rules, let, state, police, New, York, hand, out, lax, discipline, for, misconduct, grantee, finds</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Democrats Demand Answers for Federal Prison Staffing Shortage After Corrections Officers Flee for ICE Jobs</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/democrats-demand-answers-for-federal-prison-staffing-shortage-after-corrections-officers-flee-for-ice-jobs</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/democrats-demand-answers-for-federal-prison-staffing-shortage-after-corrections-officers-flee-for-ice-jobs</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Democrats Demand Answers for Federal Prison Staffing Shortage After Corrections Officers Flee for ICE Jobs appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/20260224-GettyImages-2235695923.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:45:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Democrats, Demand, Answers, for, Federal, Prison, Staffing, Shortage, After, Corrections, Officers, Flee, for, ICE, Jobs</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>U.S. Forest Service Stops Issuing Firefighter Pants That Contain PFAS, Following ProPublica’s Reporting</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/us-forest-service-stops-issuing-firefighter-pants-that-contain-pfas-following-propublicas-reporting</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/us-forest-service-stops-issuing-firefighter-pants-that-contain-pfas-following-propublicas-reporting</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post U.S. Forest Service Stops Issuing Firefighter Pants That Contain PFAS, Following ProPublica’s Reporting appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:44:29 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>U.S., Forest, Service, Stops, Issuing, Firefighter, Pants, That, Contain, PFAS, Following, ProPublica’s, Reporting</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Dari Skim MBI ke Kontrak PETRONAS: T7 Global Bangkit Selepas Dihancurkan Tan Sri Tan Kean Soon?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/dari-skim-mbi-ke-kontrak-petronas-t7-global-bangkit-selepas-dihancurkan-tan-sri-tan-kean-soon</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/dari-skim-mbi-ke-kontrak-petronas-t7-global-bangkit-selepas-dihancurkan-tan-sri-tan-kean-soon</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ T7 Global Bhd bukan asing dengan badai kontroversi sepanjang 2025. Pada April tahun lalu, syarikat itu dikaitkan dengan ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 22 Feb 2026 05:46:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Dari, Skim, MBI, Kontrak, PETRONAS:, Global, Bangkit, Selepas, Dihancurkan, Tan, Sri, Tan, Kean, Soon</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>In a three&#45;year reporting project, grantee uncovers systemic lack of oversight for Texas homes for elderly and disabled people</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/in-a-three-year-reporting-project-grantee-uncovers-systemic-lack-of-oversight-for-texas-homes-for-elderly-and-disabled-people</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/in-a-three-year-reporting-project-grantee-uncovers-systemic-lack-of-oversight-for-texas-homes-for-elderly-and-disabled-people</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Hundreds of “boarding homes” for elderly and disabled people in Texas operate without oversight, leaving residents vulnerable to neglect and abuse, according to new reporting by Ottavia Spaggiari for Type Investigations and In These Times, co-published in the Texas Observer. With support from the Fund, Spaggiari spent three years tracking more than 100 cases of […]
The post In a three-year reporting project, grantee uncovers systemic lack of oversight for Texas homes for elderly and disabled people appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 22 Feb 2026 02:53:07 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>three-year, reporting, project, grantee, uncovers, systemic, lack, oversight, for, Texas, homes, for, elderly, and, disabled, people</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Efforts to crack down on smoke shops selling marijuana in Pennsylvania have been haphazard and ineffective, grantee finds</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/efforts-to-crack-down-on-smoke-shops-selling-marijuana-in-pennsylvania-have-been-haphazard-and-ineffective-grantee-finds</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/efforts-to-crack-down-on-smoke-shops-selling-marijuana-in-pennsylvania-have-been-haphazard-and-ineffective-grantee-finds</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Shops that sell hemp products – often black-market marijuana – have opened across Pennsylvania, and law enforcement efforts to crack down on them have been inconsistent and haphazard, according to an investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer, with support from the Fund. The Inquirer found that shops operate and sell drugs and drug paraphernalia openly and […]
The post Efforts to crack down on smoke shops selling marijuana in Pennsylvania have been haphazard and ineffective, grantee finds appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 21 Feb 2026 02:53:25 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Efforts, crack, down, smoke, shops, selling, marijuana, Pennsylvania, have, been, haphazard, and, ineffective, grantee, finds</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>South Carolina Hospitals Aren’t Required to Disclose Measles&#45;Related Admissions. That Leaves Doctors in the Dark.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/south-carolina-hospitals-arent-required-to-disclose-measles-related-admissions-that-leaves-doctors-in-the-dark</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/south-carolina-hospitals-arent-required-to-disclose-measles-related-admissions-that-leaves-doctors-in-the-dark</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post South Carolina Hospitals Aren’t Required to Disclose Measles-Related Admissions. That Leaves Doctors in the Dark. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 02:44:02 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>South, Carolina, Hospitals, Aren’t, Required, Disclose, Measles-Related, Admissions., That, Leaves, Doctors, the, Dark.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>New Moms in Wisconsin to Get Extension of Vital Benefits After GOP Powerbroker Ends Holdout</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/new-moms-in-wisconsin-to-get-extension-of-vital-benefits-after-gop-powerbroker-ends-holdout</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/new-moms-in-wisconsin-to-get-extension-of-vital-benefits-after-gop-powerbroker-ends-holdout</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post New Moms in Wisconsin to Get Extension of Vital Benefits After GOP Powerbroker Ends Holdout appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:43:36 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>New, Moms, Wisconsin, Get, Extension, Vital, Benefits, After, GOP, Powerbroker, Ends, Holdout</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Insurer Agrees to Pay Millions for Failing to Fix Errors That Made It Harder for Customers to Get Mental Health Care</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/insurer-agrees-to-pay-millions-for-failing-to-fix-errors-that-made-it-harder-for-customers-to-get-mental-health-care</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/insurer-agrees-to-pay-millions-for-failing-to-fix-errors-that-made-it-harder-for-customers-to-get-mental-health-care</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Insurer Agrees to Pay Millions for Failing to Fix Errors That Made It Harder for Customers to Get Mental Health Care appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:08:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Insurer, Agrees, Pay, Millions, for, Failing, Fix, Errors, That, Made, Harder, for, Customers, Get, Mental, Health, Care</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Amid Mass ICE Arrests, Trump Pardon Recipient Juan Orlando Hernández Given Special Treatment</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/amid-mass-ice-arrests-trump-pardon-recipient-juan-orlando-hernandez-given-special-treatment</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/amid-mass-ice-arrests-trump-pardon-recipient-juan-orlando-hernandez-given-special-treatment</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Amid Mass ICE Arrests, Trump Pardon Recipient Juan Orlando Hernández Given Special Treatment appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:43:08 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Amid, Mass, ICE, Arrests, Trump, Pardon, Recipient, Juan, Orlando, Hernández, Given, Special, Treatment</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Chlorine Dioxide, Raw Camel Milk: The FDA No Longer Warns Against These and Other Ineffective Autism Treatments</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/chlorine-dioxide-raw-camel-milk-the-fda-no-longer-warns-against-these-and-other-ineffective-autism-treatments</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/chlorine-dioxide-raw-camel-milk-the-fda-no-longer-warns-against-these-and-other-ineffective-autism-treatments</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Chlorine Dioxide, Raw Camel Milk: The FDA No Longer Warns Against These and Other Ineffective Autism Treatments appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:42:45 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Chlorine, Dioxide, Raw, Camel, Milk:, The, FDA, Longer, Warns, Against, These, and, Other, Ineffective, Autism, Treatments</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Hong Kong firms feed European tech to Russia’s war in Ukraine, report says</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/hong-kong-firms-feed-european-tech-to-russias-war-in-ukraine-report-says</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/hong-kong-firms-feed-european-tech-to-russias-war-in-ukraine-report-says</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Researchers at the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation identify Hong Kong as a key hub in the illicit trade of Western military technology to Russia. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:35:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Hong, Kong, firms, feed, European, tech, Russia’s, war, Ukraine, report, says</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>As crypto industry expands, U.S. slashes office examining dirty money safeguards of cryptocurrency exchanges</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/as-crypto-industry-expands-us-slashes-office-examining-dirty-money-safeguards-of-cryptocurrency-exchanges</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/as-crypto-industry-expands-us-slashes-office-examining-dirty-money-safeguards-of-cryptocurrency-exchanges</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The number of IRS staff assigned to oversee anti-money laundering practices at the firms  dropped to its lowest level in nearly decade. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:12:45 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>crypto, industry, expands, U.S., slashes, office, examining, dirty, money, safeguards, cryptocurrency, exchanges</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Housing Cost: One in Seven Municipalities in Europe Unaffordable for Nurses</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/housing-cost-one-in-seven-municipalities-in-europe-unaffordable-for-nurses</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/housing-cost-one-in-seven-municipalities-in-europe-unaffordable-for-nurses</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Data analysis by CORRECTIV.Europe reveals: In these European locations, even a mid-level salary like a nurse&#039;s is not enough to afford a small apartment. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:08:53 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Housing, Cost:, One, Seven, Municipalities, Europe, Unaffordable, for, Nurses</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How a Planned Disney World Vacation Turned Into Four Months in Immigration Detention</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-a-planned-disney-world-vacation-turned-into-four-months-in-immigration-detention</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-a-planned-disney-world-vacation-turned-into-four-months-in-immigration-detention</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post How a Planned Disney World Vacation Turned Into Four Months in Immigration Detention appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:42:15 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, Planned, Disney, World, Vacation, Turned, Into, Four, Months, Immigration, Detention</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>What Meetings Among Trump Lawyers Reveal About the FBI’s Seizure of Election Records in Georgia</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-meetings-among-trump-lawyers-reveal-about-the-fbis-seizure-of-election-records-in-georgia</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-meetings-among-trump-lawyers-reveal-about-the-fbis-seizure-of-election-records-in-georgia</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post What Meetings Among Trump Lawyers Reveal About the FBI’s Seizure of Election Records in Georgia appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:41:50 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, Meetings, Among, Trump, Lawyers, Reveal, About, the, FBI’s, Seizure, Election, Records, Georgia</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/not-ready-for-prime-time-a-federal-tool-to-check-voter-citizenship-keeps-making-mistakes</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/not-ready-for-prime-time-a-federal-tool-to-check-voter-citizenship-keeps-making-mistakes</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:41:21 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“Not, Ready, for, Prime, Time.”, Federal, Tool, Check, Voter, Citizenship, Keeps, Making, Mistakes.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Trump Is Threatening to Block the Michigan&#45;Canada Bridge. He Used to Cheer It.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-is-threatening-to-block-the-michigan-canada-bridge-he-used-to-cheer-it</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-is-threatening-to-block-the-michigan-canada-bridge-he-used-to-cheer-it</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump Is Threatening to Block the Michigan-Canada Bridge. He Used to Cheer It. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:40:47 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump, Threatening, Block, the, Michigan-Canada, Bridge., Used, Cheer, It.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How the Trump Administration Rolled Back Efforts to Fight Human Trafficking</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-the-trump-administration-rolled-back-efforts-to-fight-human-trafficking</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-the-trump-administration-rolled-back-efforts-to-fight-human-trafficking</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Trump administration has aggressively rolled back efforts across the federal government to combat human trafficking, according to a series of investigations in The Guardian, produced with support from Type Investigations, Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley Journalism. The government’s sweeping retreat threatens […]
The post How the Trump Administration Rolled Back Efforts to Fight Human Trafficking appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:49:27 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, the, Trump, Administration, Rolled, Back, Efforts, Fight, Human, Trafficking</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>New video shows violent arrest of 76yo at Herzog protest</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/new-video-shows-violent-arrest-of-76yo-at-herzog-protest</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/new-video-shows-violent-arrest-of-76yo-at-herzog-protest</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ ABC NEWS Verify has obtained fresh video of the arrest of a 76-year-old protester who says he sustained injuries and was taken into police custody before being released without charge.Australian filmmaker James Ricketson was forced to the ground by several police officers on Monday evening in a scuffle that began with a touch on the shoulder. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:48:39 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>New, video, shows, violent, arrest, 76yo, Herzog, protest</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Salty, Oily Drinking Water Left Sores in Their Mouths. Oklahoma Refused to Find Out Why.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/salty-oily-drinking-water-left-sores-in-their-mouths-oklahoma-refused-to-find-out-why</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/salty-oily-drinking-water-left-sores-in-their-mouths-oklahoma-refused-to-find-out-why</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Salty, Oily Drinking Water Left Sores in Their Mouths. Oklahoma Refused to Find Out Why. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:40:23 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Salty, Oily, Drinking, Water, Left, Sores, Their, Mouths., Oklahoma, Refused, Find, Out, Why.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Bondi: Path to Terror</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/bondi-path-to-terror</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/bondi-path-to-terror</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 02:48:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Bondi:, Path, Terror</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Pengerusi IJM Dalam Siasatan SPRM Berkait Hal Peribadi, Operasi Syarikat Tidak Terjejas</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pengerusi-ijm-dalam-siasatan-sprm-berkait-hal-peribadi-operasi-syarikat-tidak-terjejas</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pengerusi-ijm-dalam-siasatan-sprm-berkait-hal-peribadi-operasi-syarikat-tidak-terjejas</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR: Pengerusi bukan eksekutif IJM Corporation Bhd, Tan Sri Krishnan Tan, mengesahkan beliau sedang bekerjasama sepenuhnya dengan ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 05:46:17 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pengerusi, IJM, Dalam, Siasatan, SPRM, Berkait, Hal, Peribadi, Operasi, Syarikat, Tidak, Terjejas</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Learning to Backslide: How Autocrats Share Money, Methods, and Models</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/learning-to-backslide-how-autocrats-share-money-methods-and-models</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/learning-to-backslide-how-autocrats-share-money-methods-and-models</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Democracy is not dying by sudden coup – it is being dismantled through the law itself, using a shared playbook refined across continents. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 02:47:55 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Learning, Backslide:, How, Autocrats, Share, Money, Methods, and, Models</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Nearly half of powerful .50&#45;caliber ammo seized by Mexican government came from US Army plant, defense minister says</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/nearly-half-of-powerful-50-caliber-ammo-seized-by-mexican-government-came-from-us-army-plant-defense-minister-says</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/nearly-half-of-powerful-50-caliber-ammo-seized-by-mexican-government-came-from-us-army-plant-defense-minister-says</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Mexican officials shared the data in response to an investigation by ICIJ and media partners.  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 02:35:24 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Nearly, half, powerful, .50-caliber, ammo, seized, Mexican, government, came, from, Army, plant, defense, minister, says</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Mexican cartels overpower police with ammunition made for the US military</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/mexican-cartels-overpower-police-with-ammunition-made-for-the-us-military</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/mexican-cartels-overpower-police-with-ammunition-made-for-the-us-military</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Drug syndicates have used .50-caliber ammunition produced at a plant owned by the U.S. Army and smuggled across the border in attacks on Mexican civilians and police. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 02:34:57 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Mexican, cartels, overpower, police, with, ammunition, made, for, the, military</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Former Nigerian oil minister stands trial in the UK on bribery charges</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/former-nigerian-oil-minister-stands-trial-in-the-uk-on-bribery-charges</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/former-nigerian-oil-minister-stands-trial-in-the-uk-on-bribery-charges</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Prosecutors accused former minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, who featured in the ICIJ-led Panama Papers investigation, of living a “life of luxury in London” fueled by corrupt Nigerian oil deals.  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 02:12:38 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Former, Nigerian, oil, minister, stands, trial, the, bribery, charges</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Pengerusi IJM Digesa Letak Jawatan — 15 Pegawai Terkesan Selepas Akaun Dibeku Dalam Siasatan Tertumpu Terhadap Tan Sri Krishnan Tan</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pengerusi-ijm-digesa-letak-jawatan-15-pegawai-terkesan-selepas-akaun-dibeku-dalam-siasatan-tertumpu-terhadap-tan-sri-krishnan-tan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pengerusi-ijm-digesa-letak-jawatan-15-pegawai-terkesan-selepas-akaun-dibeku-dalam-siasatan-tertumpu-terhadap-tan-sri-krishnan-tan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Tekanan terhadap Krishnan Tan semakin memuncak apabila semakin banyak pihak pasaran melihat kedudukannya sebagai Pengerusi IJM Corporation Berhad ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 05 Feb 2026 05:45:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pengerusi, IJM, Digesa, Letak, Jawatan, —, Pegawai, Terkesan, Selepas, Akaun, Dibeku, Dalam, Siasatan, Tertumpu, Terhadap, Tan, Sri, Krishnan, Tan</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Canada names first foreign interference watchdog</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/canada-names-first-foreign-interference-watchdog</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/canada-names-first-foreign-interference-watchdog</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Canadian parliament voted to create the position over a year and a half ago to counter a rising threat of transnational repression. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:34:35 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Canada, names, first, foreign, interference, watchdog</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Beijing’s backtrack on Xinjiang detention camps spurred by ICIJ investigation, research finds</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/beijings-backtrack-on-xinjiang-detention-camps-spurred-by-icij-investigation-research-finds</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/beijings-backtrack-on-xinjiang-detention-camps-spurred-by-icij-investigation-research-finds</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Academic research shows that investigative reporting, NGO advocacy, and scholarly scrutiny pushed Chinese authorities from denial to dismantling parts of their mass detention system for Uyghurs. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 04 Feb 2026 02:34:11 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Beijing’s, backtrack, Xinjiang, detention, camps, spurred, ICIJ, investigation, research, finds</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Investigation reveals how Chinese firms blindsided Malawian government over strategic mine ownership</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/investigation-reveals-how-chinese-firms-blindsided-malawian-government-over-strategic-mine-ownership</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/investigation-reveals-how-chinese-firms-blindsided-malawian-government-over-strategic-mine-ownership</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Malawi’s government has promised a “fact-finding exercise” as the local community grows increasingly resentful of the mining venture’s unfulfilled development promises. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:12:33 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Investigation, reveals, how, Chinese, firms, blindsided, Malawian, government, over, strategic, mine, ownership</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>As LA maternity wards close, patients are giving birth in ERs: ‘There’s no system to care for these women’</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/as-la-maternity-wards-close-patients-are-giving-birth-in-ers-theres-no-system-to-care-for-these-women</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/as-la-maternity-wards-close-patients-are-giving-birth-in-ers-theres-no-system-to-care-for-these-women</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This story was produced in partnership with the investigative reporting program at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Sigita Cahoon’s 16 September 2024 marathon stretched through the night. From 3am to 6am, she bolted among three rooms in the Los Angeles general medical center, until three babies were safely delivered. […]
The post As LA maternity wards close, patients are giving birth in ERs: ‘There’s no system to care for these women’ appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 02:09:08 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>maternity, wards, close, patients, are, giving, birth, ERs:, ‘There’s, system, care, for, these, women’</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>What happened when Gavin Newsom sent a ‘surge’ of state troopers to fight crime in Oakland</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-happened-when-gavin-newsom-sent-a-surge-of-state-troopers-to-fight-crime-in-oakland</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-happened-when-gavin-newsom-sent-a-surge-of-state-troopers-to-fight-crime-in-oakland</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This article was produced with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. On August 28, Gov. Gavin Newsom sat down behind a desk against a backdrop of American and California state flags, flanked by state patrolmen, to meet the press. Earlier that year, President Donald Trump had sent military troops into Los Angeles to guard against “violence […]
The post What happened when Gavin Newsom sent a ‘surge’ of state troopers to fight crime in Oakland appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 02:49:01 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, happened, when, Gavin, Newsom, sent, ‘surge’, state, troopers, fight, crime, Oakland</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump Administration Orders USDA Employees to Investigate Foreign Researchers They Work With</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-administration-orders-usda-employees-to-investigate-foreign-researchers-they-work-with</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-administration-orders-usda-employees-to-investigate-foreign-researchers-they-work-with</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump Administration Orders USDA Employees to Investigate Foreign Researchers They Work With appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 06:19:13 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump, Administration, Orders, USDA, Employees, Investigate, Foreign, Researchers, They, Work, With</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Pimpinan Ehsan Berhad Berdepan Risiko Digantung &amp;amp; Dinyahsenarai, Bursa Beri Tempoh Akhir Hingga 30 Jun 2026</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pimpinan-ehsan-berhad-berdepan-risiko-digantung-dinyahsenarai-bursa-beri-tempoh-akhir-hingga-30-jun-2026</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pimpinan-ehsan-berhad-berdepan-risiko-digantung-dinyahsenarai-bursa-beri-tempoh-akhir-hingga-30-jun-2026</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR: Pimpinan Ehsan Berhad (PEB) kini berada di ambang penggantungan dagangan dan penyah-senaraian daripada Bursa Malaysia, selepas ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 06:18:09 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pimpinan, Ehsan, Berhad, Berdepan, Risiko, Digantung, Dinyahsenarai, Bursa, Beri, Tempoh, Akhir, Hingga, Jun, 2026</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>RRPT RM4.8 Bilion MMAG: Urus Niaga Sah atau Konflik Kepentingan Terancang Dato’ Kevin Jit Singh?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/rrpt-rm48-bilion-mmag-urus-niaga-sah-atau-konflik-kepentingan-terancang-dato-kevin-jit-singh</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/rrpt-rm48-bilion-mmag-urus-niaga-sah-atau-konflik-kepentingan-terancang-dato-kevin-jit-singh</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — Pengumuman MMAG Holdings Berhad pada 30 Disember 2025 lalu mengenai Recurrent Related Party Transactions (RRPT) ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 06:17:29 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>RRPT, RM4.8, Bilion, MMAG:, Urus, Niaga, Sah, atau, Konflik, Kepentingan, Terancang, Dato’, Kevin, Jit, Singh</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Head of Idaho prison system outlines reforms after grantee reporting exposed abuses</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/head-of-idaho-prison-system-outlines-reforms-after-grantee-reporting-exposed-abuses</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/head-of-idaho-prison-system-outlines-reforms-after-grantee-reporting-exposed-abuses</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ After InvestigateWest, with support from the Fund, uncovered widespread sexual abuse in Idaho prisons, the state’s Department of Corrections is working with state legislators to change a state law that makes it difficult to prosecute prison staff. The director of the prison system also said the state is updating its policies and working to ensure […]
The post Head of Idaho prison system outlines reforms after grantee reporting exposed abuses appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Head, Idaho, prison, system, outlines, reforms, after, grantee, reporting, exposed, abuses</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee film about police raid on Kansas newspaper to premiere at Sundance</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-film-about-police-raid-on-kansas-newspaper-to-premiere-at-sundance</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-film-about-police-raid-on-kansas-newspaper-to-premiere-at-sundance</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ “Seized,” a feature documentary about the police raid on a Kansas newspaper, will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The film, directed and produced by Sharon Liese, with support from the Fund, takes viewers inside the police raid on the Marion County Record newsroom, which captured national attention. It unfolds in real time […]
The post Grantee film about police raid on Kansas newspaper to premiere at Sundance appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, film, about, police, raid, Kansas, newspaper, premiere, Sundance</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee investigation prompts state changes to protect underage farmworkers</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-investigation-prompts-state-changes-to-protect-underage-farmworkers</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-investigation-prompts-state-changes-to-protect-underage-farmworkers</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Following an investigation by Robert Lopez, with support from the Fund, which found that children are working in unsafe conditions in California’s agriculture industry, officials announced changes. For the Los Angeles Times and Capital &amp; Main, Lopez interviewed dozens of young farmworkers who described toiling in fields that reeked of chemicals, laboring for piece-rate wages […]
The post Grantee investigation prompts state changes to protect underage farmworkers appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, investigation, prompts, state, changes, protect, underage, farmworkers</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee launches statewide effort to document missing/murdered Indigenous cases in South Dakota</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-launches-statewide-effort-to-document-missingmurdered-indigenous-cases-in-south-dakota</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-launches-statewide-effort-to-document-missingmurdered-indigenous-cases-in-south-dakota</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ South Dakota Searchlight, with support from the Fund, is cataloging Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) cases in the state, which has no definitive record of such cases. In collaboration with ICT News, Searchlight is combining data from official databases with names solicited from family members who may have never reported their loved one’s case […]
The post Grantee launches statewide effort to document missing/murdered Indigenous cases in South Dakota appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, launches, statewide, effort, document, missingmurdered, Indigenous, cases, South, Dakota</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>In sweeping yearlong investigation, grantees probe Chicago agencies’ efforts to conceal public information</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/in-sweeping-yearlong-investigation-grantees-probe-chicago-agencies-efforts-to-conceal-public-information</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/in-sweeping-yearlong-investigation-grantees-probe-chicago-agencies-efforts-to-conceal-public-information</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ When a pair of journalists in Chicago both received questionable rejections for open-records requests, they asked the Fund to support a yearlong investigation into city agencies increasingly using “trade secret exemptions” to block access to information. For the Chicago Reader, Max Blaisdell and Matt Chapman filed 70 records requests across 35 city and county agencies […]
The post In sweeping yearlong investigation, grantees probe Chicago agencies’ efforts to conceal public information appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>sweeping, yearlong, investigation, grantees, probe, Chicago, agencies’, efforts, conceal, public, information</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Public&#45;lands grazing program benefits billionaires, amid poor federal oversight and a negative impact on Western states, grantee finds</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/public-lands-grazing-program-benefits-billionaires-amid-poor-federal-oversight-and-a-negative-impact-on-western-states-grantee-finds</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/public-lands-grazing-program-benefits-billionaires-amid-poor-federal-oversight-and-a-negative-impact-on-western-states-grantee-finds</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The federal government’s public-lands grazing system gives private livestock operators access to more than 370,000 square miles of public land across the American West – a system propped up by subsidies that benefits billionaires, mining companies and corporate interests, according to reporting by High Country News and ProPublica, with support from the Fund. For more […]
The post Public-lands grazing program benefits billionaires, amid poor federal oversight and a negative impact on Western states, grantee finds appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Public-lands, grazing, program, benefits, billionaires, amid, poor, federal, oversight, and, negative, impact, Western, states, grantee, finds</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee probes reports that U.S. helicopters are used to kill civilians in Philippines</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-probes-reports-that-us-helicopters-are-used-to-kill-civilians-in-philippines</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-probes-reports-that-us-helicopters-are-used-to-kill-civilians-in-philippines</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Philippine military is using aircraft it received in U.S.-sanctioned arms deals to target civilians and political opponents under the auspices of its campaign against local communist rebels, according to reporting by Nick Aspinwall, with support from the Fund. He reported that the U.S. helps arm the Philippine military to help contain China, but the […]
The post Grantee probes reports that U.S. helicopters are used to kill civilians in Philippines appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, probes, reports, that, U.S., helicopters, are, used, kill, civilians, Philippines</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee examines how Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-how-oregons-data-center-boom-is-supercharging-a-water-crisis</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-how-oregons-data-center-boom-is-supercharging-a-water-crisis</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For Rolling Stone, and with support from the Fund, Sean Patrick Cooper dug into the impact of Amazon’s rapidly expanding data centers on water pollution in Eastern Oregon. Cooper has been tracking data center developments nationwide, and he spent more than a year interviewing sources and obtaining public records in to expose political and financial […]
The post Grantee examines how Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, examines, how, Oregon’s, data, center, boom, supercharging, water, crisis</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee documents continued problems in Chicago’s newly merged shelter system for homeless people and migrants</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-documents-continued-problems-in-chicagos-newly-merged-shelter-system-for-homeless-people-and-migrants</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-documents-continued-problems-in-chicagos-newly-merged-shelter-system-for-homeless-people-and-migrants</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Two years after Borderless uncovered inhumane conditions and the death of a five-year-old boy at a city-run shelter in Chicago, the local nonprofit outlet documented long waits for shelter placement and persistent issues with shelter conditions, in a new investigation supported by the Fund. Reporters Aydali Campa and Katrina Pham obtained public records and interviewed […]
The post Grantee documents continued problems in Chicago’s newly merged shelter system for homeless people and migrants appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, documents, continued, problems, Chicago’s, newly, merged, shelter, system, for, homeless, people, and, migrants</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Big Los Angeles landlords avoid low&#45;income Section 8 tenants, despite state law, grantee reveals</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/big-los-angeles-landlords-avoid-low-income-section-8-tenants-despite-state-law-grantee-reveals</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/big-los-angeles-landlords-avoid-low-income-section-8-tenants-despite-state-law-grantee-reveals</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Some of Los Angeles’ largest landlords skirt anti-discrimination laws that are supposed to protect low-income people applying for apartments, according to an investigation by Capital &amp; Main, with support from the Fund. The yearlong investigation used public records, interviews and fair housing tests to examine Section 8 voucher acceptance by seven of the city’s largest […]
The post Big Los Angeles landlords avoid low-income Section 8 tenants, despite state law, grantee reveals appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:07:07 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Big, Los, Angeles, landlords, avoid, low-income, Section, tenants, despite, state, law, grantee, reveals</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>A Black Teen Died Over a $12 Shoplifting Attempt. 13 Years Later, Two Men Plead Guilty in His Killing.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-black-teen-died-over-a-12-shoplifting-attempt-13-years-later-two-men-plead-guilty-in-his-killing</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-black-teen-died-over-a-12-shoplifting-attempt-13-years-later-two-men-plead-guilty-in-his-killing</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Black Teen Died Over a $12 Shoplifting Attempt. 13 Years Later, Two Men Plead Guilty in His Killing. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:18:43 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Black, Teen, Died, Over, 12, Shoplifting, Attempt., Years, Later, Two, Men, Plead, Guilty, His, Killing.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Her Daughter Died After Taking a Generic Version of a Lifesaving Drug. This Is What She Wants You to Know.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/her-daughter-died-after-taking-a-generic-version-of-a-lifesaving-drug-this-is-what-she-wants-you-to-know</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/her-daughter-died-after-taking-a-generic-version-of-a-lifesaving-drug-this-is-what-she-wants-you-to-know</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Her Daughter Died After Taking a Generic Version of a Lifesaving Drug. This Is What She Wants You to Know. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:06:27 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Her, Daughter, Died, After, Taking, Generic, Version, Lifesaving, Drug., This, What, She, Wants, You, Know.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Dato’ Fam Chee Way Lupus &amp;amp; Berhenti Sebagai Pemegang Saham MMAG, Tinggalkan “Mafia Korporat” Victor Chin Boon Long</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/dato-fam-chee-way-lupus-berhenti-sebagai-pemegang-saham-mmag-tinggalkan-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-boon-long</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/dato-fam-chee-way-lupus-berhenti-sebagai-pemegang-saham-mmag-tinggalkan-mafia-korporat-victor-chin-boon-long</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR — Tirai akhirnya ditutup. Dato’ Fam Chee Way @ Dato’ Ben, figura korporat ‘Underworld’ yang sering ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:05:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Dato’, Fam, Chee, Way, Lupus, Berhenti, Sebagai, Pemegang, Saham, MMAG, Tinggalkan, “Mafia, Korporat”, Victor, Chin, Boon, Long</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Chin Hin batal perjanjian jual pegangan saham RM74 juta dalam empat syarikat</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/chin-hin-batal-perjanjian-jual-pegangan-saham-rm74-juta-dalam-empat-syarikat</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/chin-hin-batal-perjanjian-jual-pegangan-saham-rm74-juta-dalam-empat-syarikat</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR, 15 Jan — Chin Hin Group Property Bhd (CHGP) membatalkan perjanjian jual beli saham (SSA) melibatkan ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:04:38 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Chin, Hin, batal, perjanjian, jual, pegangan, saham, RM74, juta, dalam, empat, syarikat</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Pregnant Woman at Risk of Heart Failure Couldn’t Get Urgent Treatment. She Died Waiting for an Abortion.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-pregnant-woman-at-risk-of-heart-failure-couldnt-get-urgent-treatment-she-died-waiting-for-an-abortion</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-pregnant-woman-at-risk-of-heart-failure-couldnt-get-urgent-treatment-she-died-waiting-for-an-abortion</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Pregnant Woman at Risk of Heart Failure Couldn’t Get Urgent Treatment. She Died Waiting for an Abortion. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:37:37 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pregnant, Woman, Risk, Heart, Failure, Couldn’t, Get, Urgent, Treatment., She, Died, Waiting, for, Abortion.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>After Sowing Distrust in Fluoridated Water, Kennedy and Skeptics Turn to Obstructing Other Fluoride Sources</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/after-sowing-distrust-in-fluoridated-water-kennedy-and-skeptics-turn-to-obstructing-other-fluoride-sources</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/after-sowing-distrust-in-fluoridated-water-kennedy-and-skeptics-turn-to-obstructing-other-fluoride-sources</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post After Sowing Distrust in Fluoridated Water, Kennedy and Skeptics Turn to Obstructing Other Fluoride Sources appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:37:15 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>After, Sowing, Distrust, Fluoridated, Water, Kennedy, and, Skeptics, Turn, Obstructing, Other, Fluoride, Sources</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Rare verified footage of Iran&amp;apos;s protests shows how they spread</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/rare-verified-footage-of-irans-protests-shows-how-they-spread</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/rare-verified-footage-of-irans-protests-shows-how-they-spread</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Anti-government protests across Iran have swelled in violence and size from their beginnings in late December last year.Getting clear information out of Iran is almost impossible, with the theocratic regime restricting access to basic forms of communication and implementing a total blackout of the internet in more recent days. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 05:06:51 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Rare, verified, footage, Irans, protests, shows, how, they, spread</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Father’s Quest for Justice Finds Resolution After 13 Years</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-fathers-quest-for-justice-finds-resolution-after-13-years</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-fathers-quest-for-justice-finds-resolution-after-13-years</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Father’s Quest for Justice Finds Resolution After 13 Years appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 13 Jan 2026 05:06:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Father’s, Quest, for, Justice, Finds, Resolution, After, Years</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>We Found More Than 40 Cases of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds and Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/we-found-more-than-40-cases-of-immigration-agents-using-banned-chokeholds-and-other-moves-that-can-cut-off-breathing</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/we-found-more-than-40-cases-of-immigration-agents-using-banned-chokeholds-and-other-moves-that-can-cut-off-breathing</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post We Found More Than 40 Cases of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds and Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 13 Jan 2026 05:05:39 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Found, More, Than, Cases, Immigration, Agents, Using, Banned, Chokeholds, and, Other, Moves, That, Can, Cut, Off, Breathing</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Pengambilalihan IJM oleh Sunway: Pemilikan Bumiputera Terancam &amp;amp; Usaha Menutup Skandal Tan Sri Krishnan Tan?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pengambilalihan-ijm-oleh-sunway-pemilikan-bumiputera-terancam-usaha-menutup-skandal-tan-sri-krishnan-tan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pengambilalihan-ijm-oleh-sunway-pemilikan-bumiputera-terancam-usaha-menutup-skandal-tan-sri-krishnan-tan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Seperti yang telah didedahkan sebelum ini, cadangan pengambilalihan IJM Corporation Berhad oleh Sunway Berhad bukan sekadar urus niaga ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 13 Jan 2026 05:05:05 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pengambilalihan, IJM, oleh, Sunway:, Pemilikan, Bumiputera, Terancam, Usaha, Menutup, Skandal, Tan, Sri, Krishnan, Tan</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grant proposals due Jan. 30; workshop sessions available</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grant-proposals-due-jan-30-workshop-sessions-available</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grant-proposals-due-jan-30-workshop-sessions-available</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Fund for Investigative Journalism is accepting proposals for regular grants (up to $10,000 for full investigative stories) and seed grants for early reporting (up to $2,500). Proposals for both types of grants are due on Jan. 30, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Details are below. In advance of the deadline, there are two opportunities […]
The post Grant proposals due Jan. 30; workshop sessions available appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 04:13:52 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grant, proposals, due, Jan., 30, workshop, sessions, available</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The Biggest Takeaways From Our Investigation Into Grazing on Public Lands</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-biggest-takeaways-from-our-investigation-into-grazing-on-public-lands</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-biggest-takeaways-from-our-investigation-into-grazing-on-public-lands</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post The Biggest Takeaways From Our Investigation Into Grazing on Public Lands appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 04:12:46 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Biggest, Takeaways, From, Our, Investigation, Into, Grazing, Public, Lands</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Vouchers, Patriotism and Prayer: The Trump Administration’s Plan to Remake Public Education</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/vouchers-patriotism-and-prayer-the-trump-administrations-plan-to-remake-public-education</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/vouchers-patriotism-and-prayer-the-trump-administrations-plan-to-remake-public-education</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Vouchers, Patriotism and Prayer: The Trump Administration’s Plan to Remake Public Education appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2026 04:12:19 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Vouchers, Patriotism, and, Prayer:, The, Trump, Administration’s, Plan, Remake, Public, Education</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>They Couldn’t Access Mental Health Care When They Needed It. Now They’re Suing Their Insurer.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/they-couldnt-access-mental-health-care-when-they-needed-it-now-theyre-suing-their-insurer</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/they-couldnt-access-mental-health-care-when-they-needed-it-now-theyre-suing-their-insurer</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post They Couldn’t Access Mental Health Care When They Needed It. Now They’re Suing Their Insurer. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2026 04:11:49 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>They, Couldn’t, Access, Mental, Health, Care, When, They, Needed, It., Now, They’re, Suing, Their, Insurer.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>An ICE shooting was filmed from multiple angles. No&#45;one agrees on what happened</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/an-ice-shooting-was-filmed-from-multiple-angles-no-one-agrees-on-what-happened</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/an-ice-shooting-was-filmed-from-multiple-angles-no-one-agrees-on-what-happened</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The fatal shooting of a 37-year-old woman by immigration agents in the US city of Minneapolis has sparked a political firestorm.In a statement released shortly after the incident, the Department of Homeland Security stated that &quot;violent rioters weaponised&quot; a vehicle and attempted to run over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2026 04:13:28 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>ICE, shooting, was, filmed, from, multiple, angles., No-one, agrees, what, happened</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>“We’re Too Close to the Debris”</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/were-too-close-to-the-debris</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/were-too-close-to-the-debris</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “We’re Too Close to the Debris” appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2026 04:10:43 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“We’re, Too, Close, the, Debris”</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Our Year in Visual Journalism</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/our-year-in-visual-journalism</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/our-year-in-visual-journalism</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Our Year in Visual Journalism appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2026 04:10:05 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Our, Year, Visual, Journalism</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>“Step in the Right Direction”: Connecticut DMV Commissioner Calls for More Reforms to State Towing Law to Protect Drivers</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/step-in-the-right-direction-connecticut-dmv-commissioner-calls-for-more-reforms-to-state-towing-law-to-protect-drivers</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/step-in-the-right-direction-connecticut-dmv-commissioner-calls-for-more-reforms-to-state-towing-law-to-protect-drivers</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “Step in the Right Direction”: Connecticut DMV Commissioner Calls for More Reforms to State Towing Law to Protect Drivers appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:09:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“Step, the, Right, Direction”:, Connecticut, DMV, Commissioner, Calls, for, More, Reforms, State, Towing, Law, Protect, Drivers</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump’s EPA Could Limit Its Own Ability to Use New Science to Strengthen Air Pollution Rules</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trumps-epa-could-limit-its-own-ability-to-use-new-science-to-strengthen-air-pollution-rules</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trumps-epa-could-limit-its-own-ability-to-use-new-science-to-strengthen-air-pollution-rules</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump’s EPA Could Limit Its Own Ability to Use New Science to Strengthen Air Pollution Rules appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:09:06 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump’s, EPA, Could, Limit, Its, Own, Ability, Use, New, Science, Strengthen, Air, Pollution, Rules</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Her Parenting Time Was Restricted After a Positive Drug Test. By Federal Standards, It Would’ve Been Negative.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/her-parenting-time-was-restricted-after-a-positive-drug-test-by-federal-standards-it-wouldve-been-negative</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/her-parenting-time-was-restricted-after-a-positive-drug-test-by-federal-standards-it-wouldve-been-negative</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Her Parenting Time Was Restricted After a Positive Drug Test. By Federal Standards, It Would’ve Been Negative. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 04:08:34 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Her, Parenting, Time, Was, Restricted, After, Positive, Drug, Test., Federal, Standards, Would’ve, Been, Negative.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grant proposals due Jan. 30; webinar and workshop sessions available</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grant-proposals-due-jan-30-webinar-and-workshop-sessions-available</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grant-proposals-due-jan-30-webinar-and-workshop-sessions-available</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Fund for Investigative Journalism is accepting proposals for regular grants (up to $10,000 for full investigative stories) and seed grants for early reporting (up to $2,500). Proposals for both types of grants are due on Jan. 30, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Details are below. In advance of the deadline, there are two opportunities […]
The post Grant proposals due Jan. 30; webinar and workshop sessions available appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grant, proposals, due, Jan., 30, webinar, and, workshop, sessions, available</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantees’ New York Times/Mississippi Today investigation sparks state review of jail brutality</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantees-new-york-timesmississippi-today-investigation-sparks-state-review-of-jail-brutality</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantees-new-york-timesmississippi-today-investigation-sparks-state-review-of-jail-brutality</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Guards in a Mississippi jail terrorized people in their care for years, according to a new investigation published by The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Reveal. With support from the Fund, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield spent nearly a year reviewing 69 alleged incidents of violence against inmates at the jail that occurred from […]
The post Grantees’ New York Times/Mississippi Today investigation sparks state review of jail brutality appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantees’, New, York, TimesMississippi, Today, investigation, sparks, state, review, jail, brutality</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>For The Frontier and ProPublica, grantee uncovers failure of Oklahoma regulators to stop toxic wastewater from oil fields</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/for-the-frontier-and-propublica-grantee-uncovers-failure-of-oklahoma-regulators-to-stop-toxic-wastewater-from-oil-fields</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/for-the-frontier-and-propublica-grantee-uncovers-failure-of-oklahoma-regulators-to-stop-toxic-wastewater-from-oil-fields</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For five years, toxic oilfield wastewater has been pouring out of the ground across Oklahoma. It has blasted out of old orphan wells, poured out of the ground, and spread widely below the surface – polluting water supplies used by farmers, tribal nations, towns and citizens. State regulators have long known about the scale and […]
The post For The Frontier and ProPublica, grantee uncovers failure of Oklahoma regulators to stop toxic wastewater from oil fields appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>For, The, Frontier, and, ProPublica, grantee, uncovers, failure, Oklahoma, regulators, stop, toxic, wastewater, from, oil, fields</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee uncovers pervasive sexual abuse in Idaho’s women’s prisons, prompting state review</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-pervasive-sexual-abuse-in-idahos-womens-prisons-prompting-state-review</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-pervasive-sexual-abuse-in-idahos-womens-prisons-prompting-state-review</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In a deeply sourced year-long investigation supported by the Fund, InvestigateWest uncovered pervasive staff sexual abuse in Idaho’s women’s prisons, documenting at least 59 formal allegations since 2020 and interviewing 25 survivors whose stories expose routine retaliation and institutional coverups. The reporting shows that over the past decade, 37 prison workers have been accused of […]
The post Grantee uncovers pervasive sexual abuse in Idaho’s women’s prisons, prompting state review appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, uncovers, pervasive, sexual, abuse, Idaho’s, women’s, prisons, prompting, state, review</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Lax oversight leaves child farmworkers exposed to toxic pesticides, grantee finds; earlier reporting sparked change</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/lax-oversight-leaves-child-farmworkers-exposed-to-toxic-pesticides-grantee-finds-earlier-reporting-sparked-change</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/lax-oversight-leaves-child-farmworkers-exposed-to-toxic-pesticides-grantee-finds-earlier-reporting-sparked-change</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Children who work on California farms are particularly susceptible to harm from toxic pesticides, which they’re exposed to because of poor oversight from regulators, reporter Robert Lopez found. For an investigation published in the Los Angeles Times and Capital &amp; Main, and with support from the Fund, Lopez reviewed more than 40,000 records of pesticide […]
The post Lax oversight leaves child farmworkers exposed to toxic pesticides, grantee finds; earlier reporting sparked change appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Lax, oversight, leaves, child, farmworkers, exposed, toxic, pesticides, grantee, finds, earlier, reporting, sparked, change</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee data analysis finds that unreliable power has become the norm in rural California</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-data-analysis-finds-that-unreliable-power-has-become-the-norm-in-rural-california</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-data-analysis-finds-that-unreliable-power-has-become-the-norm-in-rural-california</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Across northern and central California, customers experience thousands of power outages a year due to new power line settings designed to prevent wildfires. With support from the Fund, Emma Foehringer Merchant and Maria Parazo Rose conducted a first-of-its-kind analysis of data on so-called “fast-trip” outages and found that they’ve increased over time and are often […]
The post Grantee data analysis finds that unreliable power has become the norm in rural California appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, data, analysis, finds, that, unreliable, power, has, become, the, norm, rural, California</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Illegal offshore betting websites offer wagers on U.S. college soccer games</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/illegal-offshore-betting-websites-offer-wagers-on-us-college-soccer-games</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/illegal-offshore-betting-websites-offer-wagers-on-us-college-soccer-games</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Offshore betting websites are offering risky, prop bets on amateur college soccer despite the NCAA trying to prevent this, a team of reporters found in a story for Soccer America. Unlike regulated operators, offshore operators do not report suspicious betting movements that can indicate manipulation, so these bets are the perfect place for potential match-fixers […]
The post Illegal offshore betting websites offer wagers on U.S. college soccer games appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Illegal, offshore, betting, websites, offer, wagers, U.S., college, soccer, games</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>After decades, the EPA still doesn’t have a plan to clean watersheds at one of the oldest Superfund sites in the country, grantee finds</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/after-decades-the-epa-still-doesnt-have-a-plan-to-clean-watersheds-at-one-of-the-oldest-superfund-sites-in-the-country-grantee-finds</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/after-decades-the-epa-still-doesnt-have-a-plan-to-clean-watersheds-at-one-of-the-oldest-superfund-sites-in-the-country-grantee-finds</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ At one of the oldest Superfund sites in the country, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has yet to publish a plan that is required to clean areas where rain and other water is collected. A five-month investigation by the nonprofit outlet Streetlight, supported by the Fund, found that engineers who have devoted their careers to […]
The post After decades, the EPA still doesn’t have a plan to clean watersheds at one of the oldest Superfund sites in the country, grantee finds appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>After, decades, the, EPA, still, doesn’t, have, plan, clean, watersheds, one, the, oldest, Superfund, sites, the, country, grantee, finds</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee reveals that DC housing agency lost millions in federal funds while bailing out well&#45;connected developer; story sparks action from DC Council</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-reveals-that-dc-housing-agency-lost-millions-in-federal-funds-while-bailing-out-well-connected-developer-story-sparks-action-from-dc-council</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-reveals-that-dc-housing-agency-lost-millions-in-federal-funds-while-bailing-out-well-connected-developer-story-sparks-action-from-dc-council</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, Suzie Amanuel’s months-long investigation of Washington, DC’s at-risk affordable housing stock uncovered that the District quietly forfeited more than $3 million in competitive federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, resulting in a permanent loss of tens of millions of dollars in affordable housing equity. The Washington City Paper investigation revealed that […]
The post Grantee reveals that DC housing agency lost millions in federal funds while bailing out well-connected developer; story sparks action from DC Council appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:25:12 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, reveals, that, housing, agency, lost, millions, federal, funds, while, bailing, out, well-connected, developer, story, sparks, action, from, Council</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Grantee uncovers systemic failure of New York’s rental&#45;assistance program</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-systemic-failure-of-new-yorks-rental-assistance-program</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-systemic-failure-of-new-yorks-rental-assistance-program</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Private managers of federally subsidized housing projects in New York City are systematically failing to properly screen tenants for rental-assistance programs, resulting in rent miscalculations and eviction filings, Patrick Spauster found in an investigation for City Limits that was supported by the Fund. Spauster obtained and analyzed thousands of pages of public records to determine […]
The post Grantee uncovers systemic failure of New York’s rental-assistance program appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:24:28 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, uncovers, systemic, failure, New, York’s, rental-assistance, program</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Arizona Judges Launch Effort Seeking Quicker Resolutions to Death Penalty Cases</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/arizona-judges-launch-effort-seeking-quicker-resolutions-to-death-penalty-cases</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/arizona-judges-launch-effort-seeking-quicker-resolutions-to-death-penalty-cases</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Arizona Judges Launch Effort Seeking Quicker Resolutions to Death Penalty Cases appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 04:06:35 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Arizona, Judges, Launch, Effort, Seeking, Quicker, Resolutions, Death, Penalty, Cases</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Farhash Wafa Salvador Letak Jawatan Pengerusi MMAG, Lupus Keseluruhan Pegangan Saham</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/farhash-wafa-salvador-letak-jawatan-pengerusi-mmag-lupus-keseluruhan-pegangan-saham</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/farhash-wafa-salvador-letak-jawatan-pengerusi-mmag-lupus-keseluruhan-pegangan-saham</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ MMAG Holdings Berhad mengumumkan peletakan jawatan Dato’ Seri Farhash Wafa Salvador sebagai pengerusi syarikat itu, berkuat kuasa 2 ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 03:59:37 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Farhash, Wafa, Salvador, Letak, Jawatan, Pengerusi, MMAG, Lupus, Keseluruhan, Pegangan, Saham</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Elite Portuguese investigative unit to probe Spacey movie producer with ties to alleged crypto scammer</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/elite-portuguese-investigative-unit-to-probe-spacey-movie-producer-with-ties-to-alleged-crypto-scammer</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/elite-portuguese-investigative-unit-to-probe-spacey-movie-producer-with-ties-to-alleged-crypto-scammer</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ As international authorities warn the public against investing in Vladimir Okhotnikov’s latest crypto scheme, specialized prosecutors in Portugal are investigating the Ukrainian influencer who helped promote his start-ups. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 03:56:53 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Elite, Portuguese, investigative, unit, probe, Spacey, movie, producer, with, ties, alleged, crypto, scammer</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China&#45;Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-signs-defense-bill-prohibiting-china-based-engineers-in-pentagon-it-work</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-signs-defense-bill-prohibiting-china-based-engineers-in-pentagon-it-work</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2025 04:06:05 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Trump, Signs, Defense, Bill, Prohibiting, China-Based, Engineers, Pentagon, Work</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Mohd Nizom Sairi  Bekas CEO LHDN dilantik Pengerusi Baharu BAT Malaysia</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/mohd-nizom-sairi-bekas-ceo-lhdn-dilantik-pengerusi-baharu-bat-malaysia</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/mohd-nizom-sairi-bekas-ceo-lhdn-dilantik-pengerusi-baharu-bat-malaysia</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR, 31 Dis: British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Bhd (BAT Malaysia) melantik Datuk Seri Mohd Nizom Sairi sebagai ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:59:04 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Mohd, Nizom, Sairi,  Bekas, CEO, LHDN, dilantik, Pengerusi, Baharu, BAT, Malaysia</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Sentoria Group Bhd dihimpit tuntutan hutang &amp;amp; tunggakan KWSP, risiko gulung tikar</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sentoria-group-bhd-dihimpit-tuntutan-hutang-tunggakan-kwsp-risiko-gulung-tikar</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sentoria-group-bhd-dihimpit-tuntutan-hutang-tunggakan-kwsp-risiko-gulung-tikar</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Kumpulan Sentoria Berhad terus berdepan tekanan kewangan serius apabila satu lagi tindakan undang-undang difailkan terhadap syarikat itu, sekali ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:58:32 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Sentoria, Group, Bhd, dihimpit, tuntutan, hutang, tunggakan, KWSP, risiko, gulung, tikar</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Oregon Faced a Huge Obstacle in Adding Green Energy. Here’s What Changed This Year.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/oregon-faced-a-huge-obstacle-in-adding-green-energy-heres-what-changed-this-year</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/oregon-faced-a-huge-obstacle-in-adding-green-energy-heres-what-changed-this-year</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Oregon Faced a Huge Obstacle in Adding Green Energy. Here’s What Changed This Year. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:05:33 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Oregon, Faced, Huge, Obstacle, Adding, Green, Energy., Here’s, What, Changed, This, Year.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>25 Investigations You May Have Missed This Year</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/25-investigations-you-may-have-missed-this-year</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/25-investigations-you-may-have-missed-this-year</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post 25 Investigations You May Have Missed This Year appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:05:04 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Investigations, You, May, Have, Missed, This, Year</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The Most&#45;Read ProPublica Stories of 2025</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-most-read-propublica-stories-of-2025</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-most-read-propublica-stories-of-2025</guid>
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<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:04:32 +0100</pubDate>
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<item>
<title>Medical Examiners Warn That Controversial Lung Float Test Could Be Dangerous</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/medical-examiners-warn-that-controversial-lung-float-test-could-be-dangerous</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/medical-examiners-warn-that-controversial-lung-float-test-could-be-dangerous</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Medical Examiners Warn That Controversial Lung Float Test Could Be Dangerous appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2025 04:04:01 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Medical, Examiners, Warn, That, Controversial, Lung, Float, Test, Could, Dangerous</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How GOP Lawmakers’ Power Transfers Are Reshaping Everything From Utilities to Environmental Regulation in North Carolina</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-gop-lawmakers-power-transfers-are-reshaping-everything-from-utilities-to-environmental-regulation-in-north-carolina</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-gop-lawmakers-power-transfers-are-reshaping-everything-from-utilities-to-environmental-regulation-in-north-carolina</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post How GOP Lawmakers’ Power Transfers Are Reshaping Everything From Utilities to Environmental Regulation in North Carolina appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2025 04:03:32 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>How, GOP, Lawmakers’, Power, Transfers, Are, Reshaping, Everything, From, Utilities, Environmental, Regulation, North, Carolina</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Our Reporters Reached Out for Comment. They Were Accused of Stalking and Intimidation.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/our-reporters-reached-out-for-comment-they-were-accused-of-stalking-and-intimidation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/our-reporters-reached-out-for-comment-they-were-accused-of-stalking-and-intimidation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Our Reporters Reached Out for Comment. They Were Accused of Stalking and Intimidation. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2025 04:03:03 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Our, Reporters, Reached, Out, for, Comment., They, Were, Accused, Stalking, and, Intimidation.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Someone Is Getting Away With Eunice Whitman’s Killing. Alaska’s Slow Justice System Let It Happen.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/someone-is-getting-away-with-eunice-whitmans-killing-alaskas-slow-justice-system-let-it-happen</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/someone-is-getting-away-with-eunice-whitmans-killing-alaskas-slow-justice-system-let-it-happen</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Someone Is Getting Away With Eunice Whitman’s Killing. Alaska’s Slow Justice System Let It Happen. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 04:02:31 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Someone, Getting, Away, With, Eunice, Whitman’s, Killing., Alaska’s, Slow, Justice, System, Let, Happen.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>ITMAX Terus Dominasi Projek CCTV &amp;amp; Trafik Pintar PBT, Menang Kontrak RM42 Juta DBKL</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/itmax-terus-dominasi-projek-cctv-trafik-pintar-pbt-menang-kontrak-rm42-juta-dbkl</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/itmax-terus-dominasi-projek-cctv-trafik-pintar-pbt-menang-kontrak-rm42-juta-dbkl</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR: ITMAX System Bhd terus mengukuhkan kedudukannya sebagai pemain utama dalam ekosistem bandar pintar negara apabila sekali ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:57:57 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>ITMAX, Terus, Dominasi, Projek, CCTV, Trafik, Pintar, PBT, Menang, Kontrak, RM42, Juta, DBKL</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Medical License Revoked for Montana Doctor Linked to Suspicious Deaths</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/medical-license-revoked-for-montana-doctor-linked-to-suspicious-deaths</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/medical-license-revoked-for-montana-doctor-linked-to-suspicious-deaths</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Medical License Revoked for Montana Doctor Linked to Suspicious Deaths appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:01:57 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Medical, License, Revoked, for, Montana, Doctor, Linked, Suspicious, Deaths</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>What I Saw at a Maternity Ward in Kenya After the U.S. Cut Off Food and Foreign Aid</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-i-saw-at-a-maternity-ward-in-kenya-after-the-us-cut-off-food-and-foreign-aid</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-i-saw-at-a-maternity-ward-in-kenya-after-the-us-cut-off-food-and-foreign-aid</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post What I Saw at a Maternity Ward in Kenya After the U.S. Cut Off Food and Foreign Aid appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:01:28 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>What, Saw, Maternity, Ward, Kenya, After, the, U.S., Cut, Off, Food, and, Foreign, Aid</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Lawmaker Calls for Stronger Mandatory Reporting Rules Following Our Investigation Into Church Abuse Case</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/lawmaker-calls-for-stronger-mandatory-reporting-rules-following-our-investigation-into-church-abuse-case</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/lawmaker-calls-for-stronger-mandatory-reporting-rules-following-our-investigation-into-church-abuse-case</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Lawmaker Calls for Stronger Mandatory Reporting Rules Following Our Investigation Into Church Abuse Case appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:00:54 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Lawmaker, Calls, for, Stronger, Mandatory, Reporting, Rules, Following, Our, Investigation, Into, Church, Abuse, Case</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Connecticut DMV Task Force Was Asked to Develop Towing Reforms. As Deadline Looms, Members Struggle to Agree.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-connecticut-dmv-task-force-was-asked-to-develop-towing-reforms-as-deadline-looms-members-struggle-to-agree</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-connecticut-dmv-task-force-was-asked-to-develop-towing-reforms-as-deadline-looms-members-struggle-to-agree</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Connecticut DMV Task Force Was Asked to Develop Towing Reforms. As Deadline Looms, Members Struggle to Agree. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:00:23 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Connecticut, DMV, Task, Force, Was, Asked, Develop, Towing, Reforms., Deadline, Looms, Members, Struggle, Agree.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A film festival silenced — and the global reach of China’s repression</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-film-festival-silenced-and-the-global-reach-of-chinas-repression</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-film-festival-silenced-and-the-global-reach-of-chinas-repression</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The abrupt cancellation of an independent Chinese film festival in New York reveals how Beijing and its proxies increasingly pressure critics abroad — a pattern documented by ICIJ and now drawing alarm at the United Nations and the European Parliament. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 03:56:19 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>film, festival, silenced, —, and, the, global, reach, China’s, repression</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The FDA Often Doesn’t Test Generic Drugs for Quality Concerns, So ProPublica Did</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-fda-often-doesnt-test-generic-drugs-for-quality-concerns-so-propublica-did</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-fda-often-doesnt-test-generic-drugs-for-quality-concerns-so-propublica-did</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post The FDA Often Doesn’t Test Generic Drugs for Quality Concerns, So ProPublica Did appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:40:16 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>The, FDA, Often, Doesn’t, Test, Generic, Drugs, for, Quality, Concerns, ProPublica, Did</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Inside the North Carolina GOP’s Decade&#45;Long Push to Seize Power From the State’s Democratic Governors</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/inside-the-north-carolina-gops-decade-long-push-to-seize-power-from-the-states-democratic-governors</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/inside-the-north-carolina-gops-decade-long-push-to-seize-power-from-the-states-democratic-governors</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Inside the North Carolina GOP’s Decade-Long Push to Seize Power From the State’s Democratic Governors appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:38:32 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Inside, the, North, Carolina, GOP’s, Decade-Long, Push, Seize, Power, From, the, State’s, Democratic, Governors</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Top DOJ Official Shut Down Enforcement Against Crypto Companies While Holding More Than $150,000 in Crypto Investments</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/top-doj-official-shut-down-enforcement-against-crypto-companies-while-holding-more-than-150000-in-crypto-investments</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/top-doj-official-shut-down-enforcement-against-crypto-companies-while-holding-more-than-150000-in-crypto-investments</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Top DOJ Official Shut Down Enforcement Against Crypto Companies While Holding More Than $150,000 in Crypto Investments appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:37:59 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Top, DOJ, Official, Shut, Down, Enforcement, Against, Crypto, Companies, While, Holding, More, Than, 150, 000, Crypto, Investments</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Bad Evidence Got Him Indicted for Murder. He Waited 7 Years to Walk Free.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/bad-evidence-got-him-indicted-for-murder-he-waited-7-years-to-walk-free</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/bad-evidence-got-him-indicted-for-murder-he-waited-7-years-to-walk-free</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Bad Evidence Got Him Indicted for Murder. He Waited 7 Years to Walk Free. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:37:18 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Bad, Evidence, Got, Him, Indicted, for, Murder., Waited, Years, Walk, Free.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A County’s Move to Protect Domestic Violence Victims Is Spreading Across Tennessee After Legislative Delay</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-countys-move-to-protect-domestic-violence-victims-is-spreading-across-tennessee-after-legislative-delay</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-countys-move-to-protect-domestic-violence-victims-is-spreading-across-tennessee-after-legislative-delay</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A County’s Move to Protect Domestic Violence Victims Is Spreading Across Tennessee After Legislative Delay appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 02:36:16 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>County’s, Move, Protect, Domestic, Violence, Victims, Spreading, Across, Tennessee, After, Legislative, Delay</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>I Started Covering the COVID&#45;19 Crisis in Albany, Georgia. This Moment Made Me Realize There Was a Bigger Story to Tell.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/i-started-covering-the-covid-19-crisis-in-albany-georgia-this-moment-made-me-realize-there-was-a-bigger-story-to-tell</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/i-started-covering-the-covid-19-crisis-in-albany-georgia-this-moment-made-me-realize-there-was-a-bigger-story-to-tell</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post I Started Covering the COVID-19 Crisis in Albany, Georgia. This Moment Made Me Realize There Was a Bigger Story to Tell. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 02:35:40 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Started, Covering, the, COVID-19, Crisis, Albany, Georgia., This, Moment, Made, Realize, There, Was, Bigger, Story, Tell.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Damascus Dossier stories from around the world</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/damascus-dossier-stories-from-around-the-world</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/damascus-dossier-stories-from-around-the-world</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Reporters from 26 newsrooms across 20 countries uncovered new details about the Assad regime’s crimes — and how authorities are still seeking justice. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2025 03:55:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Damascus, Dossier, stories, from, around, the, world</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>How the FDA’s Lax Generic Drug Rules Put Her Life at Risk</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-the-fdas-lax-generic-drug-rules-put-her-life-at-risk</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-the-fdas-lax-generic-drug-rules-put-her-life-at-risk</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post How the FDA’s Lax Generic Drug Rules Put Her Life at Risk appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2025 02:34:52 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, the, FDA’s, Lax, Generic, Drug, Rules, Put, Her, Life, Risk</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The New German War Machine</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-new-german-war-machine</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-new-german-war-machine</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Germany’s transformation into a military power is in full swing: confidential government documents reveal plans to channel billions into ammunition and controversial weapons systems. Is the country prepared for the consequences? ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2025 02:33:33 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, New, German, War, Machine</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>AI deepfakes of Bondi gunman spread online</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ai-deepfakes-of-bondi-gunman-spread-online</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ai-deepfakes-of-bondi-gunman-spread-online</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Falsehoods and conspiracy theories are spreading online following the horrific Bondi Beach attack.ABC NEWS Verify has analysed three instances where AI-generated images, or in one case a real image taken out of context, are attempting to twist the narrative on social media. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 02:32:00 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>deepfakes, Bondi, gunman, spread, online</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Retailers keep cashing in on crypto ATMs as scams surge</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/retailers-keep-cashing-in-on-crypto-atms-as-scams-surge</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/retailers-keep-cashing-in-on-crypto-atms-as-scams-surge</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Partnerships with convenience stores and gas stations fueled the rapid growth of crypto ATM networks — creating a fertile hunting ground for fraudsters. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2025 03:55:11 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Retailers, keep, cashing, crypto, ATMs, scams, surge</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Azerbaijan: The Price of Victory and the Silence of Dissent</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/azerbaijan-the-price-of-victory-and-the-silence-of-dissent</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/azerbaijan-the-price-of-victory-and-the-silence-of-dissent</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In this article series, we take a second look at current events in countries that often remain only briefly spotlighted in German reporting. Together with local experts, we ask: What political and social developments lie behind the current events that we see in the news? What does this mean for democracy and media freedom? With our exile expertise, we want to reveal global connections and understand what we can learn from this for free, democratic coexistence.
In this episode, Azerbaijani journalist Fatima Karimova writes about the repression of media workers in her homeland and why the European Union repeatedly turns a blind eye to it. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:32:59 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Azerbaijan:, The, Price, Victory, and, the, Silence, Dissent</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>5 Must&#45;Read Investigations From 2025</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/5-must-read-investigations-from-2025</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/5-must-read-investigations-from-2025</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A look back at some of our most memorable stories
The post 5 Must-Read Investigations From 2025 appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2025 02:28:13 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Must-Read, Investigations, From, 2025</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Inmigrantes en busca de apoyo legal caen en manos de estafadores</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/inmigrantes-en-busca-de-apoyo-legal-caen-en-manos-de-estafadores</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/inmigrantes-en-busca-de-apoyo-legal-caen-en-manos-de-estafadores</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Este reportaje fue realizado en colaboración con South Side Weekly, con el apoyo del Wayne Barrett Project. Traducido por Gisela Orozco. Read this article in English here. CHICAGO — Cuando la mujer venezolana llegó a la ciudad en diciembre de 2023 con sus tres hijos, buscaba estabilidad y una vía para mejorar su situación. Un […]
The post Inmigrantes en busca de apoyo legal caen en manos de estafadores appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2025 02:27:42 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Inmigrantes, busca, apoyo, legal, caen, manos, estafadores</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Backstory: Adam Federman, Tanvi Misra, and Kathryn Joyce</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-adam-federman-tanvi-misra-and-kathryn-joyce</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-adam-federman-tanvi-misra-and-kathryn-joyce</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Paco Alvarez: Tanvi, as expected, immigration has been a large priority for the Trump administration. What has stood out to you about how the administration has pursued its deportation agenda? And is there anything that you’ve been seeing on the ground in terms of immigration policy that you feel has been overlooked?  Tanvi Misra: So […]
The post The Backstory: Adam Federman, Tanvi Misra, and Kathryn Joyce appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2025 02:27:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Backstory:, Adam, Federman, Tanvi, Misra, and, Kathryn, Joyce</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Tanco Holdings umum kontrak RM3.53 bilion pembangunan Pelabuhan Pintar di Port Dickson, ketika siasatan Skim MBI semakin meluas</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/tanco-holdings-umum-kontrak-rm353-bilion-pembangunan-pelabuhan-pintar-di-port-dickson-ketika-siasatan-skim-mbi-semakin-meluas</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/tanco-holdings-umum-kontrak-rm353-bilion-pembangunan-pelabuhan-pintar-di-port-dickson-ketika-siasatan-skim-mbi-semakin-meluas</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Tanco Holdings Bhd, di bawah kendalian Pengarah Urusan Kumpulan Dato’ Sri Andrew Tan Jun Suan, mengumumkan satu perjanjian ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2025 03:57:24 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Tanco, Holdings, umum, kontrak, RM3.53, bilion, pembangunan, Pelabuhan, Pintar, Port, Dickson, ketika, siasatan, Skim, MBI, semakin, meluas</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Tracing firms say Binance’s claims of improving financial crime left out key stats</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/tracing-firms-say-binances-claims-of-improving-financial-crime-left-out-key-stats</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/tracing-firms-say-binances-claims-of-improving-financial-crime-left-out-key-stats</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Analytics firm Chainalysis said a Binance report claiming illicit activity on the platform plummeted failed to factor in funds stolen through hacks and ransomware. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2025 03:54:41 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Tracing, firms, say, Binance’s, claims, improving, financial, crime, left, out, key, stats</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Inside the Damascus Dossier: From leaked images to verified data</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/inside-the-damascus-dossier-from-leaked-images-to-verified-data</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/inside-the-damascus-dossier-from-leaked-images-to-verified-data</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ ICIJ and its partners organized and analyzed thousands of chilling photographs to assemble comprehensive victim lists and quantify the human toll behind a sensitive data leak. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:54:09 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Inside, the, Damascus, Dossier:, From, leaked, images, verified, data</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Cambodian payment processor freezes customer funds before regulators shut it down</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/cambodian-payment-processor-freezes-customer-funds-before-regulators-shut-it-down</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/cambodian-payment-processor-freezes-customer-funds-before-regulators-shut-it-down</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Huione Pay, a key arm of Huione Group spotlighted in ICIJ’s Coin Laundry investigation, has been closed by Cambodia’s national bank and its assets liquidated. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2025 03:53:35 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Cambodian, payment, processor, freezes, customer, funds, before, regulators, shut, down</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Nowhere to Go: Inside the Texas Boarding Home System Where Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation are Widespread</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/nowhere-to-go-inside-the-texas-boarding-home-system-where-abuse-neglect-and-exploitation-are-widespread</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/nowhere-to-go-inside-the-texas-boarding-home-system-where-abuse-neglect-and-exploitation-are-widespread</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This article was produced in partnership with In These Times, with support from the Puffin Foundation and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Puede leer este artículo en español aquí. Angelique Estes knew her stay would be rough as soon as she arrived at her new home in Arlington, Texas, in early December 2023. At 53 years […]
The post Nowhere to Go: Inside the Texas Boarding Home System Where Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation are Widespread appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:52:34 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Nowhere, Go:, Inside, the, Texas, Boarding, Home, System, Where, Abuse, Neglect, and, Exploitation, are, Widespread</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trumps-own-mortgages-match-his-description-of-mortgage-fraud-records-reveal</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trumps-own-mortgages-match-his-description-of-mortgage-fraud-records-reveal</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:51:13 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump’s, Own, Mortgages, Match, His, Description, Mortgage, Fraud, Records, Reveal</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/under-former-chemical-industry-insiders-trump-epa-nearly-doubles-amount-of-formaldehyde-considered-safe-to-inhale</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/under-former-chemical-industry-insiders-trump-epa-nearly-doubles-amount-of-formaldehyde-considered-safe-to-inhale</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:50:47 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Under, Former, Chemical, Industry, Insiders, Trump, EPA, Nearly, Doubles, Amount, Formaldehyde, Considered, Safe, Inhale</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 5: Too Big to Fight</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-5-too-big-to-fight</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-5-too-big-to-fight</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 5: Too Big to Fight appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:50:25 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Sick, Hospital, Town, Part, Too, Big, Fight</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 4: The Last Safety Net</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-4-the-last-safety-net</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-4-the-last-safety-net</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 4: The Last Safety Net appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:49:59 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Sick, Hospital, Town, Part, The, Last, Safety, Net</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 3: Poor Grades, Poor Outcomes</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-3-poor-grades-poor-outcomes</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-3-poor-grades-poor-outcomes</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 3: Poor Grades, Poor Outcomes appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:49:34 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Sick, Hospital, Town, Part, Poor, Grades, Poor, Outcomes</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 2: The Making of a Monopoly</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-2-the-making-of-a-monopoly</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-2-the-making-of-a-monopoly</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 2: The Making of a Monopoly appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:49:07 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Sick, Hospital, Town, Part, The, Making, Monopoly</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 1: The Business of Care</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-1-the-business-of-care</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town-part-1-the-business-of-care</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Sick in a Hospital Town, Part 1: The Business of Care appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:48:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Sick, Hospital, Town, Part, The, Business, Care</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Sick in a Hospital Town</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/sick-in-a-hospital-town</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Sick in a Hospital Town appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:47:15 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Sick, Hospital, Town</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Data Doesn’t Lie: How ProPublica Reports the Truth in an Era of False Claims</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-data-doesnt-lie-how-propublica-reports-the-truth-in-an-era-of-false-claims</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-data-doesnt-lie-how-propublica-reports-the-truth-in-an-era-of-false-claims</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post The Data Doesn’t Lie: How ProPublica Reports the Truth in an Era of False Claims appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 06 Dec 2025 04:46:53 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Data, Doesn’t, Lie:, How, ProPublica, Reports, the, Truth, Era, False, Claims</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>What a Recorded Interview Between Police and Preachers Reveals About How a Minnesota Church Handled Sexual Abuse</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-a-recorded-interview-between-police-and-preachers-reveals-about-how-a-minnesota-church-handled-sexual-abuse</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-a-recorded-interview-between-police-and-preachers-reveals-about-how-a-minnesota-church-handled-sexual-abuse</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post What a Recorded Interview Between Police and Preachers Reveals About How a Minnesota Church Handled Sexual Abuse appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 04:46:31 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, Recorded, Interview, Between, Police, and, Preachers, Reveals, About, How, Minnesota, Church, Handled, Sexual, Abuse</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy Once Defended Congress’ Power of the Purse. Now He Defies It.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trumps-transportation-secretary-sean-duffy-once-defended-congress-power-of-the-purse-now-he-defies-it</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trumps-transportation-secretary-sean-duffy-once-defended-congress-power-of-the-purse-now-he-defies-it</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy Once Defended Congress’ Power of the Purse. Now He Defies It. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 04:46:09 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump’s, Transportation, Secretary, Sean, Duffy, Once, Defended, Congress’, Power, the, Purse., Now, Defies, It.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Deepening support for public&#45;service reporting, Alicia Patterson Foundation merges into Fund for Investigative Journalism</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/deepening-support-for-public-service-reporting-alicia-patterson-foundation-merges-into-fund-for-investigative-journalism</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/deepening-support-for-public-service-reporting-alicia-patterson-foundation-merges-into-fund-for-investigative-journalism</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ WASHINGTON, DC; December 4, 2025 – The Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Alicia Patterson Foundation announced today that the two organizations are merging, bringing together two of the oldest and largest funders of independent journalism in the United States.  Effective immediately, the Alicia Patterson Foundation will close, and its flagship six- and 12-month reporting […]
The post Deepening support for public-service reporting, Alicia Patterson Foundation merges into Fund for Investigative Journalism appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:53:05 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Deepening, support, for, public-service, reporting, Alicia, Patterson, Foundation, merges, into, Fund, for, Investigative, Journalism</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Fraudsters target immigrants seeking legal help</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/fraudsters-target-immigrants-seeking-legal-help</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/fraudsters-target-immigrants-seeking-legal-help</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This article was produced in partnership with South Side Weekly, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. CHICAGO — When the Venezuelan woman arrived in the city in December 2023 with her three children, she was looking for stability and a path to legal status. A friend referred her to a man who claimed he […]
The post Fraudsters target immigrants seeking legal help appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:52:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Fraudsters, target, immigrants, seeking, legal, help</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Chicago Promoted Two Police Officers After Investigators Found They Engaged in Sexual Misconduct</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/chicago-promoted-two-police-officers-after-investigators-found-they-engaged-in-sexual-misconduct</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/chicago-promoted-two-police-officers-after-investigators-found-they-engaged-in-sexual-misconduct</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Chicago Promoted Two Police Officers After Investigators Found They Engaged in Sexual Misconduct appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:45:44 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Chicago, Promoted, Two, Police, Officers, After, Investigators, Found, They, Engaged, Sexual, Misconduct</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>After 13 years of searching, a Syrian man learns his brother’s fate</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/after-13-years-of-searching-a-syrian-man-learns-his-brothers-fate</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/after-13-years-of-searching-a-syrian-man-learns-his-brothers-fate</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A trove of leaked records provides new evidence of thousands of Assad regime killings — and a chance for closure for families.  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:42:28 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>After, years, searching, Syrian, man, learns, his, brother’s, fate</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Assad’s archive of death</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/assads-archive-of-death</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/assads-archive-of-death</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Photographs of more than 10,000 regime victims capture a campaign of torture and mass murder in haunting, meticulous detail. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:42:04 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Assad’s, archive, death</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>United Nations paid $11M to Syrian security firm owned by Assad intelligence services, documents show</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/united-nations-paid-11m-to-syrian-security-firm-owned-by-assad-intelligence-services-documents-show</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/united-nations-paid-11m-to-syrian-security-firm-owned-by-assad-intelligence-services-documents-show</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For over a decade, U.N. aid agencies poured millions into the company despite warnings from human rights advocates. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:41:34 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>United, Nations, paid, 11M, Syrian, security, firm, owned, Assad, intelligence, services, documents, show</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>WATCH: Damascus Dossier exposes the Assad regime’s killing machine</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/watch-damascus-dossier-exposes-the-assad-regimes-killing-machine</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/watch-damascus-dossier-exposes-the-assad-regimes-killing-machine</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Journalists from around the world have joined forces to uncover harrowing new details about one of the most brutal state-run killing systems of the 21st century: the regime of former Syrian president Bashar Assad. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:41:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>WATCH:, Damascus, Dossier, exposes, the, Assad, regime’s, killing, machine</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>About the Damascus Dossier investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/about-the-damascus-dossier-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/about-the-damascus-dossier-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ An exposé into Assad’s vast system for the detention, torture and murder of Syrian citizens — and the international forces that financed his regime. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:40:41 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>About, the, Damascus, Dossier, investigation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Frequently asked questions about the Damascus Dossier investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-damascus-dossier-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-damascus-dossier-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Is the Damascus Dossier based on leaked documents? What are ICIJ’s most significant findings? These questions and more, answered. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:40:14 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Frequently, asked, questions, about, the, Damascus, Dossier, investigation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Death Row Inmate Was Released on Bail After His Conviction Was Overturned. Louisiana Still Wants to Execute Him.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-death-row-inmate-was-released-on-bail-after-his-conviction-was-overturned-louisiana-still-wants-to-execute-him</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-death-row-inmate-was-released-on-bail-after-his-conviction-was-overturned-louisiana-still-wants-to-execute-him</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Death Row Inmate Was Released on Bail After His Conviction Was Overturned. Louisiana Still Wants to Execute Him. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2025 04:45:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Death, Row, Inmate, Was, Released, Bail, After, His, Conviction, Was, Overturned., Louisiana, Still, Wants, Execute, Him.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Texas Lawmakers Criticized Kerr Leaders for Rejecting State Flood Money. Other Communities Did the Same.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/texas-lawmakers-criticized-kerr-leaders-for-rejecting-state-flood-money-other-communities-did-the-same</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/texas-lawmakers-criticized-kerr-leaders-for-rejecting-state-flood-money-other-communities-did-the-same</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Texas Lawmakers Criticized Kerr Leaders for Rejecting State Flood Money. Other Communities Did the Same. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2025 04:44:49 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Texas, Lawmakers, Criticized, Kerr, Leaders, for, Rejecting, State, Flood, Money., Other, Communities, Did, the, Same.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Powerful Friends: Sympathetic Officials and “Cultural Power” Help Ranchers Dodge Oversight</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/powerful-friends-sympathetic-officials-and-cultural-power-help-ranchers-dodge-oversight</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/powerful-friends-sympathetic-officials-and-cultural-power-help-ranchers-dodge-oversight</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Powerful Friends: Sympathetic Officials and “Cultural Power” Help Ranchers Dodge Oversight appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2025 04:44:17 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Powerful, Friends:, Sympathetic, Officials, and, “Cultural, Power”, Help, Ranchers, Dodge, Oversight</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Oregon Struggles to Land Federal Counterterrorism Money as Trump Orders Troops to Stop “Terrorists” Hindering ICE</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/oregon-struggles-to-land-federal-counterterrorism-money-as-trump-orders-troops-to-stop-terrorists-hindering-ice</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/oregon-struggles-to-land-federal-counterterrorism-money-as-trump-orders-troops-to-stop-terrorists-hindering-ice</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Oregon Struggles to Land Federal Counterterrorism Money as Trump Orders Troops to Stop “Terrorists” Hindering ICE appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:43:47 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Oregon, Struggles, Land, Federal, Counterterrorism, Money, Trump, Orders, Troops, Stop, “Terrorists”, Hindering, ICE</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Wealthy Ranchers Profit From Public Lands. Taxpayers Pick Up the Tab.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/wealthy-ranchers-profit-from-public-lands-taxpayers-pick-up-the-tab</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/wealthy-ranchers-profit-from-public-lands-taxpayers-pick-up-the-tab</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Wealthy Ranchers Profit From Public Lands. Taxpayers Pick Up the Tab. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:43:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Wealthy, Ranchers, Profit, From, Public, Lands., Taxpayers, Pick, the, Tab.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>In Congress, He Said Tariffs Were Bad for Business. As Trump’s Ambassador to Canada, He’s Reversed Course.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/in-congress-he-said-tariffs-were-bad-for-business-as-trumps-ambassador-to-canada-hes-reversed-course</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/in-congress-he-said-tariffs-were-bad-for-business-as-trumps-ambassador-to-canada-hes-reversed-course</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post In Congress, He Said Tariffs Were Bad for Business. As Trump’s Ambassador to Canada, He’s Reversed Course. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:59:31 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Congress, Said, Tariffs, Were, Bad, for, Business., Trump’s, Ambassador, Canada, He’s, Reversed, Course.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>A Loophole Allows Ranchers to Renew Grazing Permits With Little Scrutiny of the Environmental Impact</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-loophole-allows-ranchers-to-renew-grazing-permits-with-little-scrutiny-of-the-environmental-impact</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-loophole-allows-ranchers-to-renew-grazing-permits-with-little-scrutiny-of-the-environmental-impact</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Loophole Allows Ranchers to Renew Grazing Permits With Little Scrutiny of the Environmental Impact appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:58:39 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Loophole, Allows, Ranchers, Renew, Grazing, Permits, With, Little, Scrutiny, the, Environmental, Impact</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Cryptocurrency giant Tether is wildly profitable. Can it do more to stop financial crime?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/cryptocurrency-giant-tether-is-wildly-profitable-can-it-do-more-to-stop-financial-crime</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/cryptocurrency-giant-tether-is-wildly-profitable-can-it-do-more-to-stop-financial-crime</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ At least $1.4 billion of its tokens passed through a crypto wallet linked to scams, hacks, and human trafficking. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:57:47 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Cryptocurrency, giant, Tether, wildly, profitable., Can, more, stop, financial, crime</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Swiss lawyer from Panama Papers firm to face court on tax evasion charges</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/swiss-lawyer-from-panama-papers-firm-to-face-court-on-tax-evasion-charges</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/swiss-lawyer-from-panama-papers-firm-to-face-court-on-tax-evasion-charges</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Christoph Zollinger was once one of Mossack Fonseca’s most senior employees. Now, he’s due to face trial in Germany. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:31:58 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Swiss, lawyer, from, Panama, Papers, firm, face, court, tax, evasion, charges</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>„White Gold“: Debris and Deception</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/white-gold-debris-and-deception</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/white-gold-debris-and-deception</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Crooked deals with waste are just as lucrative to drug deals – only easier to conceal. An investigation by CORRECTIV.Europe shows how two companies from Germany and Czechia are making hundreds of thousands of tonnes of debris disappear just behind the border. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:35:49 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>„White, Gold“:, Debris, and, Deception</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>DOJ and RealPage Agree to Settle Rental Price&#45;Fixing Case</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/doj-and-realpage-agree-to-settle-rental-price-fixing-case</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/doj-and-realpage-agree-to-settle-rental-price-fixing-case</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post DOJ and RealPage Agree to Settle Rental Price-Fixing Case appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:34:39 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>DOJ, and, RealPage, Agree, Settle, Rental, Price-Fixing, Case</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Do You Work at a Federal Prison? Help ProPublica Investigate the Federal Prison System</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/do-you-work-at-a-federal-prison-help-propublica-investigate-the-federal-prison-system</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/do-you-work-at-a-federal-prison-help-propublica-investigate-the-federal-prison-system</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Do You Work at a Federal Prison? Help ProPublica Investigate the Federal Prison System appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:34:11 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>You, Work, Federal, Prison, Help, ProPublica, Investigate, the, Federal, Prison, System</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Amid Confusing CDC Guidance About Vaccines, Study Highlights New Risk of COVID&#45;19 During Pregnancy</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/amid-confusing-cdc-guidance-about-vaccines-study-highlights-new-risk-of-covid-19-during-pregnancy</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/amid-confusing-cdc-guidance-about-vaccines-study-highlights-new-risk-of-covid-19-during-pregnancy</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Amid Confusing CDC Guidance About Vaccines, Study Highlights New Risk of COVID-19 During Pregnancy appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:33:41 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Amid, Confusing, CDC, Guidance, About, Vaccines, Study, Highlights, New, Risk, COVID-19, During, Pregnancy</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Undercover crypto transactions, shady multimillion&#45;dollar schemes, and more Coin Laundry stories from ICIJ’s partners</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/undercover-crypto-transactions-shady-multimillion-dollar-schemes-and-more-coin-laundry-stories-from-icijs-partners</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/undercover-crypto-transactions-shady-multimillion-dollar-schemes-and-more-coin-laundry-stories-from-icijs-partners</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ To investigate the global crypto industry, ICIJ’s media partners stepped inside a shadow economy awash with dirty money.  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:31:22 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Undercover, crypto, transactions, shady, multimillion-dollar, schemes, and, more, Coin, Laundry, stories, from, ICIJ’s, partners</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Russia declares CORRECTIV an “undesirable organization”</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/russia-declares-correctiv-an-undesirable-organization</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/russia-declares-correctiv-an-undesirable-organization</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Russian Prosecutor General&#039;s Office has designated CORRECTIV as an “undesirable foreign organization.” With this move, the Russian state is placing our journalistic work under blanket threat of punishment—while simultaneously demonstrating that our reporting is effective. Independent investigations are to be made impossible in Russia. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2025 02:35:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Russia, declares, CORRECTIV, “undesirable, organization”</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump’s Immigration Forces Deploy “Less Lethal” Weapons in Dangerous Ways, Skirting Rules and Maiming Protesters</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trumps-immigration-forces-deploy-less-lethal-weapons-in-dangerous-ways-skirting-rules-and-maiming-protesters</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trumps-immigration-forces-deploy-less-lethal-weapons-in-dangerous-ways-skirting-rules-and-maiming-protesters</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump’s Immigration Forces Deploy “Less Lethal” Weapons in Dangerous Ways, Skirting Rules and Maiming Protesters appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2025 02:33:02 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump’s, Immigration, Forces, Deploy, “Less, Lethal”, Weapons, Dangerous, Ways, Skirting, Rules, and, Maiming, Protesters</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Connecticut DMV Fires Employee Who Made Thousands Selling Towed Cars</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/connecticut-dmv-fires-employee-who-made-thousands-selling-towed-cars</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/connecticut-dmv-fires-employee-who-made-thousands-selling-towed-cars</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Connecticut DMV Fires Employee Who Made Thousands Selling Towed Cars appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2025 02:32:30 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Connecticut, DMV, Fires, Employee, Who, Made, Thousands, Selling, Towed, Cars</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ice-sent-600-immigrant-kids-to-detention-in-federal-shelters-this-year-its-a-new-record</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ice-sent-600-immigrant-kids-to-detention-in-federal-shelters-this-year-its-a-new-record</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 02:48:53 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>ICE, Sent, 600, Immigrant, Kids, Detention, Federal, Shelters, This, Year., It’s, New, Record.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Lawmakers Call for Probe of How Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Got Piece of $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/lawmakers-call-for-probe-of-how-firm-tied-to-kristi-noem-got-piece-of-220-million-dhs-ad-contracts</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/lawmakers-call-for-probe-of-how-firm-tied-to-kristi-noem-got-piece-of-220-million-dhs-ad-contracts</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Lawmakers Call for Probe of How Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Got Piece of $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 02:48:29 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Lawmakers, Call, for, Probe, How, Firm, Tied, Kristi, Noem, Got, Piece, 220, Million, DHS, Contracts</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Long a Defender of States’ Rights, Embraces Trump’s Push to Expand Presidential Power</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/texas-gov-greg-abbott-long-a-defender-of-states-rights-embraces-trumps-push-to-expand-presidential-power</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/texas-gov-greg-abbott-long-a-defender-of-states-rights-embraces-trumps-push-to-expand-presidential-power</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Long a Defender of States’ Rights, Embraces Trump’s Push to Expand Presidential Power appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 02:48:00 +0100</pubDate>
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<media:keywords>Texas, Gov., Greg, Abbott, Long, Defender, States’, Rights, Embraces, Trump’s, Push, Expand, Presidential, Power</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Louisiana Made It Nearly Impossible to Get Parole. Now It’s Releasing Prisoners to Deport Them.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/louisiana-made-it-nearly-impossible-to-get-parole-now-its-releasing-prisoners-to-deport-them</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/louisiana-made-it-nearly-impossible-to-get-parole-now-its-releasing-prisoners-to-deport-them</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Louisiana Made It Nearly Impossible to Get Parole. Now It’s Releasing Prisoners to Deport Them. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 02:47:32 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Louisiana, Made, Nearly, Impossible, Get, Parole., Now, It’s, Releasing, Prisoners, Deport, Them.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>5 Takeaways From Our Investigation Into How Leaders of a Minnesota Church Community Enabled a Child Abuser</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/5-takeaways-from-our-investigation-into-how-leaders-of-a-minnesota-church-community-enabled-a-child-abuser</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/5-takeaways-from-our-investigation-into-how-leaders-of-a-minnesota-church-community-enabled-a-child-abuser</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation Into How Leaders of a Minnesota Church Community Enabled a Child Abuser appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 23 Nov 2025 02:47:06 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Takeaways, From, Our, Investigation, Into, How, Leaders, Minnesota, Church, Community, Enabled, Child, Abuser</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Senators Launch Inquiry After a White House Official Intervened on Behalf of Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/senators-launch-inquiry-after-a-white-house-official-intervened-on-behalf-of-andrew-tate-during-a-federal-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/senators-launch-inquiry-after-a-white-house-official-intervened-on-behalf-of-andrew-tate-during-a-federal-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Senators Launch Inquiry After a White House Official Intervened on Behalf of Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 02:46:41 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Senators, Launch, Inquiry, After, White, House, Official, Intervened, Behalf, Andrew, Tate, During, Federal, Investigation</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“We’re Broken”: As Federal Prisons Run Low on Food and Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Are Leaving in Droves for ICE</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/were-broken-as-federal-prisons-run-low-on-food-and-toilet-paper-corrections-officers-are-leaving-in-droves-for-ice</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/were-broken-as-federal-prisons-run-low-on-food-and-toilet-paper-corrections-officers-are-leaving-in-droves-for-ice</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “We’re Broken”: As Federal Prisons Run Low on Food and Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Are Leaving in Droves for ICE appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 02:46:08 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“We’re, Broken”:, Federal, Prisons, Run, Low, Food, and, Toilet, Paper, Corrections, Officers, Are, Leaving, Droves, for, ICE</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Indian Health Service Is Flagging Vaccine&#45;Related Speech. Doctors Say They’re Being Censored.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-indian-health-service-is-flagging-vaccine-related-speech-doctors-say-theyre-being-censored</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-indian-health-service-is-flagging-vaccine-related-speech-doctors-say-theyre-being-censored</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post The Indian Health Service Is Flagging Vaccine-Related Speech. Doctors Say They’re Being Censored. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 02:45:36 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Indian, Health, Service, Flagging, Vaccine-Related, Speech., Doctors, Say, They’re, Being, Censored.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How the Trump Administration Abandoned Plans for a Major Cut in Disability Benefits for Older Workers</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-the-trump-administration-abandoned-plans-for-a-major-cut-in-disability-benefits-for-older-workers</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-the-trump-administration-abandoned-plans-for-a-major-cut-in-disability-benefits-for-older-workers</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post How the Trump Administration Abandoned Plans for a Major Cut in Disability Benefits for Older Workers appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:45:06 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, the, Trump, Administration, Abandoned, Plans, for, Major, Cut, Disability, Benefits, for, Older, Workers</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/young-girls-were-sexually-abused-by-a-church-member-they-were-told-to-forgive-and-forget</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/young-girls-were-sexually-abused-by-a-church-member-they-were-told-to-forgive-and-forget</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:44:34 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Young, Girls, Were, Sexually, Abused, Church, Member., They, Were, Told, Forgive, and, Forget.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How Trump’s Transportation Department Is Loosening Safety Rules Meant to Protect the Public</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-trumps-transportation-department-is-loosening-safety-rules-meant-to-protect-the-public</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-trumps-transportation-department-is-loosening-safety-rules-meant-to-protect-the-public</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post How Trump’s Transportation Department Is Loosening Safety Rules Meant to Protect the Public appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:43:55 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, Trump’s, Transportation, Department, Loosening, Safety, Rules, Meant, Protect, the, Public</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>New York Moves Forward With a Brooklyn Flood Protection Plan That Falls Short of Other City Projects</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/new-york-moves-forward-with-a-brooklyn-flood-protection-plan-that-falls-short-of-other-city-projects</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/new-york-moves-forward-with-a-brooklyn-flood-protection-plan-that-falls-short-of-other-city-projects</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post New York Moves Forward With a Brooklyn Flood Protection Plan That Falls Short of Other City Projects appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:43:23 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>New, York, Moves, Forward, With, Brooklyn, Flood, Protection, Plan, That, Falls, Short, Other, City, Projects</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Businessman targets Eswatini journalists with $9.9M lawsuit</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/businessman-targets-eswatini-journalists-with-99m-lawsuit</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/businessman-targets-eswatini-journalists-with-99m-lawsuit</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Farmers Bank, which featured in ICIJ’s Swazi Secrets investigation, and its founder are seeking damages from an independent media outlet that reported on the troubled banking venture. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:41:14 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Businessman, targets, Eswatini, journalists, with, 9.9M, lawsuit</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How ICIJ traced hundreds of millions from Huione Group to major crypto exchanges</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-icij-traced-hundreds-of-millions-from-huione-group-to-major-crypto-exchanges</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-icij-traced-hundreds-of-millions-from-huione-group-to-major-crypto-exchanges</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ ICIJ&#039;s trailblazing blockchain analysis has uncovered how cryptocurrency giants Binance and OKX are key conduits of illicit transactions. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:40:49 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, ICIJ, traced, hundreds, millions, from, Huione, Group, major, crypto, exchanges</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Hunt for missing millions unmasks one crypto exchange hidden inside another</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/hunt-for-missing-millions-unmasks-one-crypto-exchange-hidden-inside-another</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/hunt-for-missing-millions-unmasks-one-crypto-exchange-hidden-inside-another</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Kyrrex exploited technology and shell companies while serving suspected fraudsters and pro-Russian military activists, even as its owners claimed the exchange followed anti-money laundering rules. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:40:15 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Hunt, for, missing, millions, unmasks, one, crypto, exchange, hidden, inside, another</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How Washington State Discriminates Against Incarcerated Immigrants</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-washington-state-discriminates-against-incarcerated-immigrants</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-washington-state-discriminates-against-incarcerated-immigrants</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This story is part of the Inside/Out Journalism Project by Type Investigations, which works with incarcerated reporters to produce ambitious, feature-length investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation. Johnny Nguyen endured a grueling process to make it to Seattle in 1993. After leaving Vietnam, which was still recovering from the war with the United States […]
The post How Washington State Discriminates Against Incarcerated Immigrants appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:49:50 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, Washington, State, Discriminates, Against, Incarcerated, Immigrants</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Despite sanctions: Putin‘s war waged with European machinery</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/despite-sanctions-putins-war-waged-with-european-machinery</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/despite-sanctions-putins-war-waged-with-european-machinery</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Without machines from abroad, Russia’s weapons factories would grind to a halt. This analysis of Russian import data shows German and European companies supplied goods with potential dual-use applications over 28,000 times in the lead-up to the invasion. How this has impacted the war is often overlooked. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:49:23 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Despite, sanctions:, Putin‘s, war, waged, with, European, machinery</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>“Ticking Time Bomb”: A Pregnant Mother Kept Getting Sicker. She Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion in Texas.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ticking-time-bomb-a-pregnant-mother-kept-getting-sicker-she-died-after-she-couldnt-get-an-abortion-in-texas</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ticking-time-bomb-a-pregnant-mother-kept-getting-sicker-she-died-after-she-couldnt-get-an-abortion-in-texas</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “Ticking Time Bomb”: A Pregnant Mother Kept Getting Sicker. She Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion in Texas. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:42:48 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“Ticking, Time, Bomb”:, Pregnant, Mother, Kept, Getting, Sicker., She, Died, After, She, Couldn’t, Get, Abortion, Texas.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Gov. Greg Abbott Was Ordered to Release Some of His Emails With Elon Musk. Most Are Blacked Out.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/gov-greg-abbott-was-ordered-to-release-some-of-his-emails-with-elon-musk-most-are-blacked-out</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/gov-greg-abbott-was-ordered-to-release-some-of-his-emails-with-elon-musk-most-are-blacked-out</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Gov. Greg Abbott Was Ordered to Release Some of His Emails With Elon Musk. Most Are Blacked Out. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:42:19 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Gov., Greg, Abbott, Was, Ordered, Release, Some, His, Emails, With, Elon, Musk., Most, Are, Blacked, Out.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump’s Anti&#45;Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths. The Poorest Countries Will Be Impacted Most.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trumps-anti-green-agenda-could-lead-to-13-million-more-climate-deaths-the-poorest-countries-will-be-impacted-most</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trumps-anti-green-agenda-could-lead-to-13-million-more-climate-deaths-the-poorest-countries-will-be-impacted-most</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump’s Anti-Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths. The Poorest Countries Will Be Impacted Most. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:41:45 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump’s, Anti-Green, Agenda, Could, Lead, 1.3, Million, More, Climate, Deaths., The, Poorest, Countries, Will, Impacted, Most.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-white-house-intervened-on-behalf-of-accused-sex-trafficker-andrew-tate-during-a-federal-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-white-house-intervened-on-behalf-of-accused-sex-trafficker-andrew-tate-during-a-federal-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 05:03:15 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, White, House, Intervened, Behalf, Accused, Sex, Trafficker, Andrew, Tate, During, Federal, Investigation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>What the U.S. Government Is Dismissing That Could Seed a Bird Flu Pandemic</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-the-us-government-is-dismissing-that-could-seed-a-bird-flu-pandemic</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-the-us-government-is-dismissing-that-could-seed-a-bird-flu-pandemic</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post What the U.S. Government Is Dismissing That Could Seed a Bird Flu Pandemic appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 05:02:41 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, the, U.S., Government, Dismissing, That, Could, Seed, Bird, Flu, Pandemic</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>How ProPublica Investigated a Bird Flu Outbreak in America’s Heartland</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-propublica-investigated-a-bird-flu-outbreak-in-americas-heartland</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-propublica-investigated-a-bird-flu-outbreak-in-americas-heartland</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post How ProPublica Investigated a Bird Flu Outbreak in America’s Heartland appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:54:14 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, ProPublica, Investigated, Bird, Flu, Outbreak, America’s, Heartland</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Pihak Berkuasa China Menyekat Kerjasama &amp;amp; Pembiayaan Terhadap IJM Corporation kerana Skandal Pengubahan Wang Haram</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pihak-berkuasa-china-menyekat-kerjasama-pembiayaan-terhadap-ijm-corporation-kerana-skandal-pengubahan-wang-haram</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pihak-berkuasa-china-menyekat-kerjasama-pembiayaan-terhadap-ijm-corporation-kerana-skandal-pengubahan-wang-haram</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Gelombang baharu menggoncang reputasi IJM Corporation Berhad — bukan dari London, bukan dari Kuala Lumpur, tetapi dari Beijing. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:49:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pihak, Berkuasa, China, Menyekat, Kerjasama, Pembiayaan, Terhadap, IJM, Corporation, kerana, Skandal, Pengubahan, Wang, Haram</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>From Dubai to Toronto, inside the crypto&#45;to&#45;cash storefronts fueling money laundering’s new frontier</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/from-dubai-to-toronto-inside-the-crypto-to-cash-storefronts-fueling-money-launderings-new-frontier</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/from-dubai-to-toronto-inside-the-crypto-to-cash-storefronts-fueling-money-launderings-new-frontier</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ These shadowy operations have made it easier than ever to move dirty money around the world. One man is on a mission to expose them. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:18:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>From, Dubai, Toronto, inside, the, crypto-to-cash, storefronts, fueling, money, laundering’s, new, frontier</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>&amp;apos;Time to go home&amp;apos;: Visa of man who attended Neo&#45;Nazi protest revoked</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/time-to-go-home-visa-of-man-who-attended-neo-nazi-protest-revoked</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/time-to-go-home-visa-of-man-who-attended-neo-nazi-protest-revoked</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A South African man who attended a Neo-Nazi protest outside NSW parliament house has had his visa revoked by the federal government.Matthew Gruter was photographed wearing black and standing in the front row of the protest on November 8. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:17:05 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Time, home:, Visa, man, who, attended, Neo-Nazi, protest, revoked</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>He Vowed to “Protect the Unborn.” Now He’s Blocking a Bill to Expand Medicaid for Wisconsin’s New Moms.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/he-vowed-to-protect-the-unborn-now-hes-blocking-a-bill-to-expand-medicaid-for-wisconsins-new-moms</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/he-vowed-to-protect-the-unborn-now-hes-blocking-a-bill-to-expand-medicaid-for-wisconsins-new-moms</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post He Vowed to “Protect the Unborn.” Now He’s Blocking a Bill to Expand Medicaid for Wisconsin’s New Moms. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:16:36 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Vowed, “Protect, the, Unborn.”, Now, He’s, Blocking, Bill, Expand, Medicaid, for, Wisconsin’s, New, Moms.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>What the Trump Administration’s Videos From a Chicago Immigration Raid Don’t Show</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-the-trump-administrations-videos-from-a-chicago-immigration-raid-dont-show</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-the-trump-administrations-videos-from-a-chicago-immigration-raid-dont-show</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post What the Trump Administration’s Videos From a Chicago Immigration Raid Don’t Show appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:14:37 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, the, Trump, Administration’s, Videos, From, Chicago, Immigration, Raid, Don’t, Show</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Alaska Owns Dozens of Deteriorating Schools. Now It Wants Under&#45;Resourced Districts to Take Them On.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/alaska-owns-dozens-of-deteriorating-schools-now-it-wants-under-resourced-districts-to-take-them-on</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/alaska-owns-dozens-of-deteriorating-schools-now-it-wants-under-resourced-districts-to-take-them-on</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Alaska Owns Dozens of Deteriorating Schools. Now It Wants Under-Resourced Districts to Take Them On. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:13:00 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Alaska, Owns, Dozens, Deteriorating, Schools., Now, Wants, Under-Resourced, Districts, Take, Them, On.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Crypto giants moved billions linked to money launderers, drug traffickers and North Korean hackers</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/crypto-giants-moved-billions-linked-to-money-launderers-drug-traffickers-and-north-korean-hackers</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/crypto-giants-moved-billions-linked-to-money-launderers-drug-traffickers-and-north-korean-hackers</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists traced tens of thousands of transactions and found major crypto trading platforms awash with dirty money. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:06:43 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Crypto, giants, moved, billions, linked, money, launderers, drug, traffickers, and, North, Korean, hackers</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The Russian crypto guru’s Hollywood gambit</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-russian-crypto-gurus-hollywood-gambit</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-russian-crypto-gurus-hollywood-gambit</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ How the alleged mastermind of a multimillion-dollar crypto scam teamed up with a globe-trotting influencer and a disgraced Oscar winner as he pushed his latest dubious project. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:05:36 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Russian, crypto, guru’s, Hollywood, gambit</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>WATCH: How crypto companies have empowered a shadow economy</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/watch-how-crypto-companies-have-empowered-a-shadow-economy</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/watch-how-crypto-companies-have-empowered-a-shadow-economy</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ As governments grapple with the burgeoning crypto industry, this new investigation from ICIJ reveals how cryptocurrency companies have profited from a new shadow economy that&#039;s awash with crime. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:05:08 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>WATCH:, How, crypto, companies, have, empowered, shadow, economy</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>From trading bans to total embrace, a global guide to crypto regulation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/from-trading-bans-to-total-embrace-a-global-guide-to-crypto-regulation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/from-trading-bans-to-total-embrace-a-global-guide-to-crypto-regulation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Across jurisdictions, governments are struggling to rein in a volatile industry worth more than $3 trillion, leading to patchy oversight. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:03:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>From, trading, bans, total, embrace, global, guide, crypto, regulation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>WATCH: Cryptocurrency exchanges, explained</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/watch-cryptocurrency-exchanges-explained</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/watch-cryptocurrency-exchanges-explained</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Are cryptocurrency exchanges the banks of the digital world? While there are some similarities, there are also important differences. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2022/07/ICIJ-2.0-Announcement.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:02:54 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>WATCH:, Cryptocurrency, exchanges, explained</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>About The Coin Laundry investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/about-the-coin-laundry-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/about-the-coin-laundry-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The investigation reveals how crypto companies profited from crime while victims were financially ruined. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/11/ICIJ_generic2_r2-1.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:02:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>About, The, Coin, Laundry, investigation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Frequently asked questions about The Coin Laundry investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-coin-laundry-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-coin-laundry-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ What’s a blockchain? Is The Coin Laundry based on leaked documents? Are crypto transactions anonymous? These questions and more, answered. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:01:28 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Frequently, asked, questions, about, The, Coin, Laundry, investigation</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Connecticut Towing Companies Frequently Value Cars Low, Allowing Them to Sell Vehicles Quickly</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/connecticut-towing-companies-frequently-value-cars-low-allowing-them-to-sell-vehicles-quickly</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/connecticut-towing-companies-frequently-value-cars-low-allowing-them-to-sell-vehicles-quickly</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Connecticut Towing Companies Frequently Value Cars Low, Allowing Them to Sell Vehicles Quickly appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 16 Nov 2025 02:11:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Connecticut, Towing, Companies, Frequently, Value, Cars, Low, Allowing, Them, Sell, Vehicles, Quickly</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Webinar Fri 11/21: How to get &amp;amp; use prison legal records</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/webinar-fri-1121-how-to-get-use-prison-legal-records</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/webinar-fri-1121-how-to-get-use-prison-legal-records</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Please join us next Friday, November 21, at noon Eastern for a free webinar on how to obtain and use prison litigation records in investigative reporting. The webinar will include information on how to get funding and legal help for these stories. Click here to register for this free webinar. Freelance journalist Beth Shelburne will […]
The post Webinar Fri 11/21: How to get &amp; use prison legal records appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:17:47 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Webinar, Fri, 1121:, How, get, use, prison, legal, records</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>A Tale of Two Terms: How Powerful Figures Were Prosecuted in Trump’s First Term, Then Pardoned in His Second</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-tale-of-two-terms-how-powerful-figures-were-prosecuted-in-trumps-first-term-then-pardoned-in-his-second</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-tale-of-two-terms-how-powerful-figures-were-prosecuted-in-trumps-first-term-then-pardoned-in-his-second</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post A Tale of Two Terms: How Powerful Figures Were Prosecuted in Trump’s First Term, Then Pardoned in His Second appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:10:45 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Tale, Two, Terms:, How, Powerful, Figures, Were, Prosecuted, Trump’s, First, Term, Then, Pardoned, His, Second</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/fbi-director-kash-patel-waived-polygraph-security-screening-for-dan-bongino-two-other-senior-staff</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/fbi-director-kash-patel-waived-polygraph-security-screening-for-dan-bongino-two-other-senior-staff</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2025 02:10:13 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>FBI, Director, Kash, Patel, Waived, Polygraph, Security, Screening, for, Dan, Bongino, Two, Other, Senior, Staff</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/firm-tied-to-kristi-noem-secretly-got-money-from-220-million-dhs-ad-contracts</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/firm-tied-to-kristi-noem-secretly-got-money-from-220-million-dhs-ad-contracts</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Noem-Social.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2025 02:09:33 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Firm, Tied, Kristi, Noem, Secretly, Got, Money, From, 220, Million, DHS, Contracts</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>European Parliament pledges to tackle transnational repression against human rights defenders</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/european-parliament-pledges-to-tackle-transnational-repression-against-human-rights-defenders</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/european-parliament-pledges-to-tackle-transnational-repression-against-human-rights-defenders</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A parliamentary report identified China and other authoritarian regimes as harassing and attacking dissidents abroad, echoing findings from ICIJ’s China Targets. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2025 02:00:26 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>European, Parliament, pledges, tackle, transnational, repression, against, human, rights, defenders</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“I Lost Everything”: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/i-lost-everything-venezuelans-were-rounded-up-in-a-dramatic-midnight-raid-but-never-charged-with-a-crime</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/i-lost-everything-venezuelans-were-rounded-up-in-a-dramatic-midnight-raid-but-never-charged-with-a-crime</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “I Lost Everything”: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2025 02:08:02 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“I, Lost, Everything”:, Venezuelans, Were, Rounded, Dramatic, Midnight, Raid, but, Never, Charged, With, Crime</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Fund for Investigative Journalism Awards Record 53 New Grants </title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/fund-for-investigative-journalism-awards-record-53-new-grants</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/fund-for-investigative-journalism-awards-record-53-new-grants</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ WASHINGTON, DC; Nov. 12, 2025 – The Fund for Investigative Journalism announced today that it is providing 53 new grants to journalists for groundbreaking investigations. The grants cover the expenses of specific investigative stories, and recipients can also receive free editorial and legal support. The new group of grants is the largest in the Fund’s […]
The post Fund for Investigative Journalism Awards Record 53 New Grants  appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 03:22:16 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Fund, for, Investigative, Journalism, Awards, Record, New, Grants </media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>How Trump Has Exploited Pardons and Clemency to Reward Allies and Supporters</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-trump-has-exploited-pardons-and-clemency-to-reward-allies-and-supporters</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-trump-has-exploited-pardons-and-clemency-to-reward-allies-and-supporters</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post How Trump Has Exploited Pardons and Clemency to Reward Allies and Supporters appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 03:20:57 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, Trump, Has, Exploited, Pardons, and, Clemency, Reward, Allies, and, Supporters</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/riots-raging-the-misleading-story-fox-news-told-about-portland-before-trump-sent-troops</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/riots-raging-the-misleading-story-fox-news-told-about-portland-before-trump-sent-troops</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 03:20:17 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“Riots, Raging”:, The, Misleading, Story, Fox, News, Told, About, Portland, Before, Trump, Sent, Troops</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Ranapkan pemilikan bumiputera: Tun M dalang dibelakang penggabungan Sunway Bhd dan IJM Corporation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ranapkan-pemilikan-bumiputera-tun-m-dalang-dibelakang-penggabungan-sunway-bhd-dan-ijm-corporation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ranapkan-pemilikan-bumiputera-tun-m-dalang-dibelakang-penggabungan-sunway-bhd-dan-ijm-corporation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Selepas diserbu SPRM kerana rasuah pusat data Sunway Berhad sejak julai lalu dunia korporat kembali panas apabila desas-desus ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 03:14:27 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ranapkan, pemilikan, bumiputera:, Tun, dalang, dibelakang, penggabungan, Sunway, Bhd, dan, IJM, Corporation</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>‘Censorship disguised as law’: Investigative journalists in Peru push back against government crackdown</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/censorship-disguised-as-law-investigative-journalists-in-peru-push-back-against-government-crackdown</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/censorship-disguised-as-law-investigative-journalists-in-peru-push-back-against-government-crackdown</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ ICIJ media partners are spearheading an attempt to overturn a law that could curtail crucial foreign funding. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 03:13:55 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>‘Censorship, disguised, law’:, Investigative, journalists, Peru, push, back, against, government, crackdown</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The Eviction Kings</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-eviction-kings</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-eviction-kings</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This story was produced with support from the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism. Over a year after Diron Kelly faced down the judge at his eviction hearing, he still remembered her question: “How did you get to court?” He could have told her about the company that bought Conrad at Concord Mills, the Charlotte, […]
The post The Eviction Kings appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 03:21:29 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Eviction, Kings</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>She Begged for Help. This State’s Probation Gap May Have Put Her in Danger.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/she-begged-for-help-this-states-probation-gap-may-have-put-her-in-danger</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/she-begged-for-help-this-states-probation-gap-may-have-put-her-in-danger</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post She Begged for Help. This State’s Probation Gap May Have Put Her in Danger. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 03:19:37 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>She, Begged, for, Help., This, State’s, Probation, Gap, May, Have, Put, Her, Danger.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“No Separation Between Church and State”: Inside a Texas Church’s Training Academy for Christians Running for Office</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/no-separation-between-church-and-state-inside-a-texas-churchs-training-academy-for-christians-running-for-office</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/no-separation-between-church-and-state-inside-a-texas-churchs-training-academy-for-christians-running-for-office</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “No Separation Between Church and State”: Inside a Texas Church’s Training Academy for Christians Running for Office appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 03:19:05 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“No, Separation, Between, Church, and, State”:, Inside, Texas, Church’s, Training, Academy, for, Christians, Running, for, Office</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Al Jazeera investigations uncovered brutal tactics used by Myanmar&amp;apos;s junta against dissidents</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/al-jazeera-investigations-uncovered-brutal-tactics-used-by-myanmars-junta-against-dissidents-588</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/al-jazeera-investigations-uncovered-brutal-tactics-used-by-myanmars-junta-against-dissidents-588</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 02:22:44 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Al Jazeera investigations uncovered brutal tactics used by Myanmar&amp;apos;s junta against dissidents</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/al-jazeera-investigations-uncovered-brutal-tactics-used-by-myanmars-junta-against-dissidents</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/al-jazeera-investigations-uncovered-brutal-tactics-used-by-myanmars-junta-against-dissidents</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 03:28:10 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Exposing the hidden horrors on Myanmar’s battlefields I Al Jazeera Investigations</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/exposing-the-hidden-horrors-on-myanmars-battlefields-i-al-jazeera-investigations</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/exposing-the-hidden-horrors-on-myanmars-battlefields-i-al-jazeera-investigations</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2025 03:25:53 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Alaska’s Public Schools Serve as Emergency Shelters. Those Buildings Are Also in Crisis.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/alaskas-public-schools-serve-as-emergency-shelters-those-buildings-are-also-in-crisis</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/alaskas-public-schools-serve-as-emergency-shelters-those-buildings-are-also-in-crisis</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Alaska’s Public Schools Serve as Emergency Shelters. Those Buildings Are Also in Crisis. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2025 03:18:30 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Alaska’s, Public, Schools, Serve, Emergency, Shelters., Those, Buildings, Are, Also, Crisis.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/foreign-food-safety-inspections-hit-historic-low-after-trump-cuts</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/foreign-food-safety-inspections-hit-historic-low-after-trump-cuts</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 03:17:45 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Foreign, Food, Safety, Inspections, Hit, Historic, Low, After, Trump, Cuts</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Trump’s VA Made It Harder for Male Veterans to Get Treatment for Breast Cancer. Lawmakers Want to Fix That.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trumps-va-made-it-harder-for-male-veterans-to-get-treatment-for-breast-cancer-lawmakers-want-to-fix-that</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trumps-va-made-it-harder-for-male-veterans-to-get-treatment-for-breast-cancer-lawmakers-want-to-fix-that</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Trump’s VA Made It Harder for Male Veterans to Get Treatment for Breast Cancer. Lawmakers Want to Fix That. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 03:16:58 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump’s, Made, Harder, for, Male, Veterans, Get, Treatment, for, Breast, Cancer., Lawmakers, Want, Fix, That.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>AR&#45;15 ammunition at a crime scene? Good odds this US Army plant made it.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ar-15-ammunition-at-a-crime-scene-good-odds-this-us-army-plant-made-it</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ar-15-ammunition-at-a-crime-scene-good-odds-this-us-army-plant-made-it</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Popular AR-15 ammunition made at an Army-owned facility was far more likely than any other to turn up in a government database tracking evidence from gun crimes, new data shows.  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 03:13:25 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>AR-15, ammunition, crime, scene, Good, odds, this, Army, plant, made, it.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Tech Billionaire Marc Andreessen Bet Big on Trump. It’s Paying Off for Silicon Valley.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/tech-billionaire-marc-andreessen-bet-big-on-trump-its-paying-off-for-silicon-valley</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/tech-billionaire-marc-andreessen-bet-big-on-trump-its-paying-off-for-silicon-valley</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Tech Billionaire Marc Andreessen Bet Big on Trump. It’s Paying Off for Silicon Valley. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:52:41 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Tech, Billionaire, Marc, Andreessen, Bet, Big, Trump., It’s, Paying, Off, for, Silicon, Valley.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>What Really Happened in Portland Before Trump Deployed the National Guard</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-really-happened-in-portland-before-trump-deployed-the-national-guard</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-really-happened-in-portland-before-trump-deployed-the-national-guard</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post What Really Happened in Portland Before Trump Deployed the National Guard appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:52:06 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, Really, Happened, Portland, Before, Trump, Deployed, the, National, Guard</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Lights Out</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/lights-out</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/lights-out</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This story was supported by the Wayne Barrett Project, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. When the power cut out around 5 p.m. on a hot July weekend in 2023, Jerry Baker had one thought: “Here we go again.” First, Baker had to inform his nearly two dozen […]
The post Lights Out appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:15:18 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Lights, Out</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Appeals Court Upholds Shaken Baby Conviction Despite Medical Examiner Recanting Testimony</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/appeals-court-upholds-shaken-baby-conviction-despite-medical-examiner-recanting-testimony</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/appeals-court-upholds-shaken-baby-conviction-despite-medical-examiner-recanting-testimony</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Appeals Court Upholds Shaken Baby Conviction Despite Medical Examiner Recanting Testimony appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:14:50 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Appeals, Court, Upholds, Shaken, Baby, Conviction, Despite, Medical, Examiner, Recanting, Testimony</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“I Don’t Feel Safe”: Black Memphis Residents Report Harassment by Trump’s Police Task Force</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/i-dont-feel-safe-black-memphis-residents-report-harassment-by-trumps-police-task-force</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/i-dont-feel-safe-black-memphis-residents-report-harassment-by-trumps-police-task-force</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “I Don’t Feel Safe”: Black Memphis Residents Report Harassment by Trump’s Police Task Force appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:14:05 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“I, Don’t, Feel, Safe”:, Black, Memphis, Residents, Report, Harassment, Trump’s, Police, Task, Force</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Red State Workers Could Lose Out on Disability Benefits as Trump Administration Rewrites Eligibility Rules</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/red-state-workers-could-lose-out-on-disability-benefits-as-trump-administration-rewrites-eligibility-rules</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/red-state-workers-could-lose-out-on-disability-benefits-as-trump-administration-rewrites-eligibility-rules</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Red State Workers Could Lose Out on Disability Benefits as Trump Administration Rewrites Eligibility Rules appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:19:49 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Red, State, Workers, Could, Lose, Out, Disability, Benefits, Trump, Administration, Rewrites, Eligibility, Rules</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>DHS Wants States to Hand Over Driver’s License Data for Citizenship Checks</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/dhs-wants-states-to-hand-over-drivers-license-data-for-citizenship-checks</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/dhs-wants-states-to-hand-over-drivers-license-data-for-citizenship-checks</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post DHS Wants States to Hand Over Driver’s License Data for Citizenship Checks appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:59:45 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>DHS, Wants, States, Hand, Over, Driver’s, License, Data, for, Citizenship, Checks</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“Biblical Justice, Equal Justice, for All”: How North Carolina’s Chief Justice Transformed His State and America</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/biblical-justice-equal-justice-for-all-how-north-carolinas-chief-justice-transformed-his-state-and-america</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/biblical-justice-equal-justice-for-all-how-north-carolinas-chief-justice-transformed-his-state-and-america</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post “Biblical Justice, Equal Justice, for All”: How North Carolina’s Chief Justice Transformed His State and America appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:19:03 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“Biblical, Justice, Equal, Justice, for, All”:, How, North, Carolina’s, Chief, Justice, Transformed, His, State, and, America</media:keywords>
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<title>Details of DHS Agreement Reveal Risks of Trump Administration’s Use of Social Security Data for Voter Citizenship Checks</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/details-of-dhs-agreement-reveal-risks-of-trump-administrations-use-of-social-security-data-for-voter-citizenship-checks</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/details-of-dhs-agreement-reveal-risks-of-trump-administrations-use-of-social-security-data-for-voter-citizenship-checks</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Details of DHS Agreement Reveal Risks of Trump Administration’s Use of Social Security Data for Voter Citizenship Checks appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:18:30 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Details, DHS, Agreement, Reveal, Risks, Trump, Administration’s, Use, Social, Security, Data, for, Voter, Citizenship, Checks</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The EPA Let Companies Estimate Their Own Pollution Levels. We Discovered Real Emissions Are Far Worse.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-epa-let-companies-estimate-their-own-pollution-levels-we-discovered-real-emissions-are-far-worse</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-epa-let-companies-estimate-their-own-pollution-levels-we-discovered-real-emissions-are-far-worse</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post The EPA Let Companies Estimate Their Own Pollution Levels. We Discovered Real Emissions Are Far Worse. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:17:40 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, EPA, Let, Companies, Estimate, Their, Own, Pollution, Levels., Discovered, Real, Emissions, Are, Far, Worse.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Webinar Friday, Oct. 31: Police in shelters</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/webinar-friday-oct-31-police-in-shelters</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/webinar-friday-oct-31-police-in-shelters</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Please join us next Friday, October 31, at noon Eastern for a free webinar on how to cover police misconduct in shelters for homeless people and migrants. This webinar will include information on how to get funding for these investigations. Click here to register for this free webinar. Sammy Sussman will share how he uncovered […]
The post Webinar Friday, Oct. 31: Police in shelters appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:31:42 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Webinar, Friday, Oct., 31:, Police, shelters</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Psychiatric hospitals face few consequences for illegally turning away patients in crisis, grantee finds; story prompts calls for investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/psychiatric-hospitals-face-few-consequences-for-illegally-turning-away-patients-in-crisis-grantee-finds-story-prompts-calls-for-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/psychiatric-hospitals-face-few-consequences-for-illegally-turning-away-patients-in-crisis-grantee-finds-story-prompts-calls-for-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ For stories published by ProPublica, with support from the Fund, Eli Cahan found that dozens of psychiatric hospitals have turned away patients in crisis, in violation of federal law, but have rarely faced consequences from federal oversight authorities. Cahan identified more than 90 psychiatric hospitals across the country that have turned away patients in crisis […]
The post Psychiatric hospitals face few consequences for illegally turning away patients in crisis, grantee finds; story prompts calls for investigation appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:31:39 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Psychiatric, hospitals, face, few, consequences, for, illegally, turning, away, patients, crisis, grantee, finds, story, prompts, calls, for, investigation</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee uncovers proof that plastic industry knew recycling was a false solution in 1974</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-proof-that-plastic-industry-knew-recycling-was-a-false-solution-in-1974</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-uncovers-proof-that-plastic-industry-knew-recycling-was-a-false-solution-in-1974</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, Rebecca John obtained documents revealing that, as early as 1974, the plastics industry knew its products could not be recycled. For DeSmog, John assessed the relevance of the documents for current treaty negotiations in which fossil fuel-producing nations and companies that help make plastic have lobbied against limits on plastic […]
The post Grantee uncovers proof that plastic industry knew recycling was a false solution in 1974 appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:31:36 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, uncovers, proof, that, plastic, industry, knew, recycling, was, false, solution, 1974</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee investigation reveals how police officers in New York escape DWI charges</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-investigation-reveals-how-police-officers-in-new-york-escape-dwi-charges</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-investigation-reveals-how-police-officers-in-new-york-escape-dwi-charges</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Using thousands of police disciplinary records from across New York State gathered with support from the Fund, Sammy Sussman examined a pattern of police officers who were disciplined, but not criminally charged, after they drank and drove. The investigation for New York Focus and The New York Times, where Sussman is a Local Investigations Fellow, […]
The post Grantee investigation reveals how police officers in New York escape DWI charges appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:31:33 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, investigation, reveals, how, police, officers, New, York, escape, DWI, charges</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>As immigration enforcement expands, grantee shines a light on ‘medical deportations’</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/as-immigration-enforcement-expands-grantee-shines-a-light-on-medical-deportations</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/as-immigration-enforcement-expands-grantee-shines-a-light-on-medical-deportations</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, Liset Cruz dug into the practice of hospitals transferring undocumented patients back to their home countries for treatment, sometimes without patients’ consent. People who are uninsured, undocumented and have serious or chronic health conditions are most commonly subjected to these “medical deportations,” Cruz reported, and experts say the practice is […]
The post As immigration enforcement expands, grantee shines a light on ‘medical deportations’ appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:31:31 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>immigration, enforcement, expands, grantee, shines, light, ‘medical, deportations’</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Seattle City Council takes steps to protect tree canopy following grantee’s story</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/seattle-city-council-takes-steps-to-protect-tree-canopy-following-grantees-story</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/seattle-city-council-takes-steps-to-protect-tree-canopy-following-grantees-story</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Grantee Robert McClure documented how a Seattle ordinance led to a surge in tree removals, and he spotlighted analyses by the city showing trouble ahead for a key mechanism to replace felled trees. With support from the Fund, McClure’s reporting in InvestigateWest – distributed nationally by the Associated Press – showed that the city’s plans […]
The post Seattle City Council takes steps to protect tree canopy following grantee’s story appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:31:28 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Seattle, City, Council, takes, steps, protect, tree, canopy, following, grantee’s, story</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee examines legacy of public lands – and impact of Trump Administration cuts</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-legacy-of-public-lands-and-impact-of-trump-administration-cuts</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-legacy-of-public-lands-and-impact-of-trump-administration-cuts</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, Aspen Journalism (a local nonprofit news outlet in Colorado) published a three-part series on how public lands in America were acquired, exploited, privatized and protected. The series examined federal budget cuts affecting the White River National Forest, the largest national forest in Colorado and most visited in the nation – […]
The post Grantee examines legacy of public lands – and impact of Trump Administration cuts appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:31:00 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, examines, legacy, public, lands, –, and, impact, Trump, Administration, cuts</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee examines man’s death in jail and investigates broader conditions</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-mans-death-in-jail-and-investigates-broader-conditions</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-examines-mans-death-in-jail-and-investigates-broader-conditions</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With support from the Fund, the Racine County Eye (a local news outlet in Wisconsin) is investigating the case of a man who died in the county jail – and looking more broadly at conditions in the jail and rising costs to operate it. In 2021, Malcolm James died while experiencing a mental health crisis […]
The post Grantee examines man’s death in jail and investigates broader conditions appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:30:56 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, examines, man’s, death, jail, and, investigates, broader, conditions</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Investigation suggests US brands skirting forced&#45;labor laws to use goods produced in China</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/investigation-suggests-us-brands-skirting-forced-labor-laws-to-use-goods-produced-in-china</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/investigation-suggests-us-brands-skirting-forced-labor-laws-to-use-goods-produced-in-china</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, with support from the Fund, documented how Vans, The North Face and Timberland continued sourcing materials from a Fulgent Sun Group factory in Vietnam while Fulgent Sun’s China subsidiary was tied to Xinjiang labor transfers. Using geotagged social videos, state-media records and trade data, TBIJ showed Uyghur and other minorities […]
The post Investigation suggests US brands skirting forced-labor laws to use goods produced in China appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:30:20 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Investigation, suggests, brands, skirting, forced-labor, laws, use, goods, produced, China</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Grantee series uncovers Milwaukee police officer who was flagged for integrity concerns and lied under oath – but kept patrolling</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/grantee-series-uncovers-milwaukee-police-officer-who-was-flagged-for-integrity-concerns-and-lied-under-oath-but-kept-patrolling</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/grantee-series-uncovers-milwaukee-police-officer-who-was-flagged-for-integrity-concerns-and-lied-under-oath-but-kept-patrolling</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In the latest story in an ongoing investigation into the Milwaukee County district attorney’s list of law enforcement officers with credibility issues, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Ashley Luthern spotlighted a police officer who kept his job after landing on the county’s Brady list due to domestic violence allegations. He later lied under oath and kept […]
The post Grantee series uncovers Milwaukee police officer who was flagged for integrity concerns and lied under oath – but kept patrolling appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:29:04 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Grantee, series, uncovers, Milwaukee, police, officer, who, was, flagged, for, integrity, concerns, and, lied, under, oath, –, but, kept, patrolling</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Toxic Wastewater From Oil Fields Keeps Pouring Out of the Ground. Oklahoma Regulators Failed to Stop It.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/toxic-wastewater-from-oil-fields-keeps-pouring-out-of-the-ground-oklahoma-regulators-failed-to-stop-it</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/toxic-wastewater-from-oil-fields-keeps-pouring-out-of-the-ground-oklahoma-regulators-failed-to-stop-it</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Toxic Wastewater From Oil Fields Keeps Pouring Out of the Ground. Oklahoma Regulators Failed to Stop It. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:24:04 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Toxic, Wastewater, From, Oil, Fields, Keeps, Pouring, Out, the, Ground., Oklahoma, Regulators, Failed, Stop, It.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Help Us Report on the Impact of Oil Field Waste in Oklahoma</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/help-us-report-on-the-impact-of-oil-field-waste-in-oklahoma</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/help-us-report-on-the-impact-of-oil-field-waste-in-oklahoma</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Help Us Report on the Impact of Oil Field Waste in Oklahoma appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:23:45 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Help, Report, the, Impact, Oil, Field, Waste, Oklahoma</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Citing Trump Order on “Biological Truth,” VA Makes It Harder for Male Veterans With Breast Cancer to Get Coverage</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/citing-trump-order-on-biological-truth-va-makes-it-harder-for-male-veterans-with-breast-cancer-to-get-coverage</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/citing-trump-order-on-biological-truth-va-makes-it-harder-for-male-veterans-with-breast-cancer-to-get-coverage</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Citing Trump Order on “Biological Truth,” VA Makes It Harder for Male Veterans With Breast Cancer to Get Coverage appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:23:14 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Citing, Trump, Order, “Biological, Truth, ”, Makes, Harder, for, Male, Veterans, With, Breast, Cancer, Get, Coverage</media:keywords>
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<title>“Every minute, a building in Europe is destroyed”</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/every-minute-a-building-in-europe-is-destroyed</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/every-minute-a-building-in-europe-is-destroyed</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The EU wants millions of old buildings to be renovated. But frequently the opposite happens: existing houses are demolished and replaced by new builds. Exactly how many buildings are being torn down remains a blind spot. CORRECTIV wants to close this gap in the data. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2025 07:26:38 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“Every, minute, building, Europe, destroyed”</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>My State Banned Vaccine Mandates. Here’s How I Covered It as an Idaho Journalist.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/my-state-banned-vaccine-mandates-heres-how-i-covered-it-as-an-idaho-journalist</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/my-state-banned-vaccine-mandates-heres-how-i-covered-it-as-an-idaho-journalist</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post My State Banned Vaccine Mandates. Here’s How I Covered It as an Idaho Journalist. appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2025 07:26:05 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>State, Banned, Vaccine, Mandates., Here’s, How, Covered, Idaho, Journalist.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Dartmouth researchers use ICIJ database to show how the ultrawealthy exploit the offshore world</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/dartmouth-researchers-use-icij-database-to-show-how-the-ultrawealthy-exploit-the-offshore-world</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/dartmouth-researchers-use-icij-database-to-show-how-the-ultrawealthy-exploit-the-offshore-world</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ ICIJ spoke to author Herbert Chang about the study, which found that elites in both democratic and authoritarian countries are well-versed in financial secrecy tactics. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2025 07:24:25 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Dartmouth, researchers, use, ICIJ, database, show, how, the, ultrawealthy, exploit, the, offshore, world</media:keywords>
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<title>Senators Propose Sweeping Changes to Generic Drug Oversight</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/senators-propose-sweeping-changes-to-generic-drug-oversight</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/senators-propose-sweeping-changes-to-generic-drug-oversight</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post Senators Propose Sweeping Changes to Generic Drug Oversight appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 07:25:31 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Senators, Propose, Sweeping, Changes, Generic, Drug, Oversight</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>U.S. Postal Service Cuts Funding for a Phoenix Mail Room Assisting Homeless People</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/us-postal-service-cuts-funding-for-a-phoenix-mail-room-assisting-homeless-people</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/us-postal-service-cuts-funding-for-a-phoenix-mail-room-assisting-homeless-people</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The post U.S. Postal Service Cuts Funding for a Phoenix Mail Room Assisting Homeless People appeared first on ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 07:25:00 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>U.S., Postal, Service, Cuts, Funding, for, Phoenix, Mail, Room, Assisting, Homeless, People</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Hunting Ground</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/hunting-ground</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/hunting-ground</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 04:51:35 +0100</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Hunting, Ground</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Mafia Korporat Victor Chin Boon Long lari ke luar negara – orang kanan direman, isterinya Chan Swee Ying bakal ditahan</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/mafia-korporat-victor-chin-boon-long-lari-ke-luar-negara-orang-kanan-direman-isterinya-chan-swee-ying-bakal-ditahan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/mafia-korporat-victor-chin-boon-long-lari-ke-luar-negara-orang-kanan-direman-isterinya-chan-swee-ying-bakal-ditahan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Ahli korporat yang mendakwa dirinya kebal dari penguatkuasa Victor Chin Boon Long dilaporkan melarikan diri ke luar negara ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 25 Oct 2025 02:24:20 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Mafia, Korporat, Victor, Chin, Boon, Long, lari, luar, negara, –, orang, kanan, direman, isterinya, Chan, Swee, Ying, bakal, ditahan</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Meet ProPublica’s 2025 Class of Emerging Reporters</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/meet-propublicas-2025-class-of-emerging-reporters</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/meet-propublicas-2025-class-of-emerging-reporters</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Talia Buford                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
ProPublica’s Emerging Reporters Program provides support and mentorships to college students who are pursuing careers in investigative journalism and need additional training and financial support to help advance their goals.

Participants receive a $9,000 stipend, a trip to the annual NICAR investigative journalism conference, occasional training and presentations by speakers. They’ll also be paired one-on-one with ProPublica journalists who can help counsel them on stories, build their connections in the industry and expose them to the varied paths for careers in investigative journalism. Past Emerging Reporters have gone on to work at The New York Times, The Associated Press, Fresnoland, Capital B, The Tributary and other outlets.

Our goal is to encourage the next generation of journalists who seek to shine a light on abuses of power and produce stories of moral force that provoke change. In choosing the class, we look for students who demonstrate an early dedication to journalism as a career, through internships, work at local news outlets or work at campus publications. And where those opportunities — which are often unpaid — aren’t accessible, we look for other ways the student has shown an eagerness and a drive to learn the craft.
        
    
                            
    
                    
The 2025-26 academic year’s class of exceptional student journalists are from schools in California, Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia. Throughout the application process, we were impressed by their commitment to local news, their desire to pursue immersive training opportunities in newsrooms across the country and their dedication to careers in investigative journalism.

Meet our 2025 class:
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    
Annabelle Ink
Originally from Oahu, Hawaii, Annabelle Ink studies English at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Now in her senior year, she works as the creative director at The Student Life, the campus newspaper, and as the editor-in-chief of Agave Review, the campus literary and art magazine. She has done extensive reporting on political activism at the Claremont Colleges, covering student protests, arrests and administrative actions. Annabelle has also interned at Honolulu Magazine, Honolulu Civil Beat and the Claremont Courier. She is interested in exploring the intersection of creative and journalistic writing and in telling stories that challenge power structures and inspire human connection. After college, she hopes to pursue investigative journalism full time, using gender as a lens through which to report on criminal justice, climate change and resistance movements.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    
Gabriel Velasquez Neira
Gabriel Velasquez Neira is a senior studying journalism at the University of Florida. He is passionate about audio and data journalism. In addition to his studies, Gabriel works as an intern at WUSF-FM in Tampa and as a deputy editor at WUFT-FM in Gainesville. He has reported on topics like the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Hurricane Milton and state politics for WUFT. Gabriel was previously a general assignment reporting intern at The Daytona Beach News-Journal and as a news intern at NBC 6 in Miami.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    
Kahlie Wray
Kahlie Wray is a junior at Pennsylvania State University studying digital and print journalism and English. She is the managing editor of The Daily Collegian, Penn State’s student-run news outlet, where she assists in leading a team of reporters and editors in covering campus news. She is also an intern with Centre Daily Times, where she focuses on covering stories across the Centre County townships. Kahlie is working on a yearlong collaborative project investigating rural public health with a cohort of student journalists. Earlier this year, she participated in a six-month internship in Brno, Czech Republic, where she reported on religion and the expat experience for a local newsroom. She’s passionate about local journalism and its role in uplifting and informing communities.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    
Lee Ann Anderson
Lee Ann Anderson is a senior journalism major with a specialization in data and investigative journalism at the University of Florida. She’s driven to tell narrative, in-depth investigative stories on topics ranging from technology to business while incorporating the voices of marginalized groups. Anderson participated in the summer 2025 Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowship at Arizona State University, where her coverage of federal immigration policy was published in the Associated Press and picked up by 60 publications across the country. Anderson is an intern at The Hill in Washington, D.C., covering breaking news and pursuing enterprise stories. At UF, she was an officer of the student chapters of the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Press Photographer Association and the Florida Magazine Student Association. Anderson is an ambassador of UF’s College of Journalism and Communications and is a part of the Dean’s Student Advisory Council. She has also participated in UF’s Fresh Take Florida program, a political and investigative news service housed at the university that publishes students’ work across the state, and as a freelancer for Mainstreet Daily News in Gainesville.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    
Safa Wahidi
Safa Wahidi is a senior at Emory University studying political science and creative writing. She was an opinion editor and a columnist at The Emory Wheel, where her writing won national recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists. Off campus, Safa has worked at Forsyth County News, CNN International and her hometown newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her reporting interests include local government, political accountability and food access. Safa is especially passionate about investigative journalism at the city level and hopes her reporting can encourage readers to stay involved with their communities.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Cedeem Gumbs contributed research. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2025 02:30:16 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Meet, ProPublica’s, 2025, Class, Emerging, Reporters</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Is Your Medication Made in a Contaminated Factory? The FDA Won’t Tell You.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/is-your-medication-made-in-a-contaminated-factory-the-fda-wont-tell-you</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/is-your-medication-made-in-a-contaminated-factory-the-fda-wont-tell-you</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
They were the sort of disturbing discoveries that anyone taking generic medication would want to know.

At one Indian factory manufacturing drugs for the United States, pigeons infested a storage room and defecated on boxes of sterilized equipment. At another, pathogens contaminated purified water used to produce drugs. At a third, stagnant urine pooled on a bathroom floor not far from where injectable medication was made. 

But when the Food and Drug Administration released the grim inspection reports and hundreds of others like them, the agency made a decision that undermined its mission to protect Americans from dangerous drugs. 

Instead of sharing the names of the medications coming from the errant foreign factories, the FDA routinely blacked them out, keeping the information secret from the public. That decision prevented doctors, pharmacists and patients from knowing whether the drugs they counted on were tainted by manufacturing failures — and potentially ineffective or unsafe.

“Is there some quality issue? Is there a greater difference in potency than expected? Is there a contaminant? I don’t know,” said Dr. Donna Kirchoff, a pediatrician in Oregon who has spent hours trying to find out where certain drugs were made for patients reporting unexplained reactions. 

There’s no specific requirement that the FDA block out drug names on inspection reports about foreign facilities. Still, the agency preemptively kept that information hidden, invoking a cautious interpretation of a law that requires the government to protect trade secrets. 

It’s part of a decades-long pattern of discounting the interests of consumers who want to make informed choices about the drugs they take — even as 9 out of 10 prescriptions in the United States are filled with generics, many from India and China. 

ProPublica previously disclosed that the FDA allowed some of the most troubled factories in India to ship drugs to U.S. consumers and kept the practice largely hidden from the public and from Congress. The agency did not proactively track whether people were being harmed as complaints poured in about pills with an abnormal taste or residue, or about patients who had experienced sudden and unexplained health concerns, including stomach pain and breathing problems.

The FDA told ProPublica that divulging drug names on its inspection reports would violate federal law that protects confidential commercial information. The agency said it only releases the information with approval from drug companies or in cases where companies have already made the details public. 

Current and former officials said the restriction was imposed long ago by FDA lawyers who interpreted the law broadly because they feared being sued by drugmakers. No one could recall who made the initial decision to withhold the information or when it was made. The FDA did not respond to a request to make its general counsel available for an interview, and a half dozen former general counsels contacted by ProPublica declined to comment or did not return calls. 

Officials with the generic drug lobbying group told ProPublica they have never weighed in on the redactions. A spokesperson from PhRMA, the trade group for brand-name drugmakers, did not answer a question about whether the organization had advocated for the redactions. She said that while appropriate transparency can promote public health, the FDA must protect sensitive manufacturing information.  

Patient safety advocates said that should not include redacting drug names.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    
            (Myriam Wares for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Just two and a half years ago, FDA inspectors visited a factory in western India and discovered that spore-forming organisms had contaminated the sterile manufacturing area. The plant went on to ship its drugs to the United States anyway.

Because the names of medications were redacted on the inspection report, where they ended up, who used them and whether they caused any harm remains a mystery, at least to the public.

“The whole thing is rendered impotent if you take out the most critical piece of information, which is, ‘What drug is it?’” said former FDA Associate Commissioner Dr. Peter Lurie, who left the agency in 2017. “You’re left with this kind of vague accusation on which nobody can act because nobody has enough information to be able to do anything.”

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the longtime head of drug safety at the FDA, said in an interview with ProPublica that she favors releasing drug names but also shrugged off the usefulness of inspection reports for members of the public.

“You guys think you are like citizen scientists and you can figure out what this means and it’s just not the case,” said Woodcock, who spent nearly four decades at the FDA before retiring early last year.
        
    
                    
Even if the FDA opted to disclose the drug names in its reports, there’s still a significant hurdle that can prevent patients from knowing if their medicine was made in a deficient factory. Labels on pill bottles often don’t list the name of the manufacturer or include a factory address, a crucial detail.

Drug companies often have multiple plants, each with its own track record. If there are no specifics on the labels, pharmacists, patients and their doctors can’t trace a drug back to the factory or to FDA reports about a plant’s safety and quality practices.

For years, the FDA resisted calls from pharmacists, lawmakers and others to require that manufacturers disclose more details on labels. Woodcock said the agency didn’t want to police thousands of companies to ensure they were providing accurate information. 

“What benefit would this give you and is it worth all the effort?” she said. “We didn’t think the juice was worth the squeeze.”

Now the agency has changed course. It has asked Congress to amend the law to clearly require that labels include the names and addresses of manufacturers as well as the companies that produced a drug’s key ingredients. The FDA suggested additional details could be listed on a website.

The FDA could do even more. Current and former officials acknowledge the agency knows where every drug approved for the U.S. market is made, but does not publish that information on its website.

Instead, the agency separates the information into two different lists: one that shows factory addresses without drug names and another that shows drug names without factory addresses. There’s no easy way to connect them.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Last year, ProPublica sued the FDA in federal court to get access to the internal list of drugs and the factories that made them. The agency ultimately provided much of the information but withheld more than 6,000 addresses, saying the companies had hired contractors to make their drugs and that those names and addresses were confidential. ProPublica’s lawsuit is ongoing.

The agency holds back other critical information on drug safety as well.

When a drug is potentially contaminated by bacteria or has other significant quality problems, manufacturers are required to submit a detailed report to the FDA within three days. The reports are meant to provide an early warning about possible safety threats, but the agency doesn’t post them to its website or issue regular alerts. The only way consumers would know about a problem is by requesting a report under the Freedom of Information Act — and getting it could take weeks or longer.

In 2023, the FDA stopped releasing complaints from doctors and others that linked specific cases of harm — including hospitalizations and deaths — to drug quality concerns. The FDA had included those reports in a public database of adverse events used by researchers, doctors and others trying to assess drug safety. The agency did not respond to questions about why it made the change.

“We’ve made it almost impossible for consumers to be their own best advocate,” said Lisa Salberg, founder of a nonprofit for people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes the heart muscles to thicken. “We want our food labels to tell us exactly how much carbohydrates are in them but the things we are taking to combat diseases, we literally know nothing about.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    
            (Myriam Wares for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“Kind of Like a Black Hole”
One of the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States is the generic version of Lipitor, a blockbuster statin that lowers cholesterol and prevents heart attacks and strokes. 

Lipitor generated billions in sales before Pfizer’s patent expired in 2011, opening the door to a patchwork of more than 20 mostly foreign drugmakers that supply their own generic, called atorvastatin.

But the boon to consumers and insurers clamoring for cheaper drugs had a little-known downside. FDA inspectors have found safety and quality violations over the years at about half of the plants that were approved to make atorvastatin, government records show. 

Conditions were so worrisome at one plant in central India last year that the agency banned the factory from shipping its drugs to the United States. The FDA went on to give the plant an exemption that allowed the company to continue shipping atorvastatin here.

The millions of atorvastatin users in the U.S., however, essentially take their pills on faith, trusting the U.S. government to keep bad medicine out of the country.

Manufacturing failures can be life-threatening. Dirty equipment can contaminate drugs with glass, metal or bacteria. Poorly made drugs may not dissolve properly in the body or contain enough key ingredients. In the case of atorvastatin, the wrong dose could leave a patient with uncontrolled blood pressure.

When patients are prescribed generic drugs — typically because they are cheaper than brand names —pharmacies and insurance companies decide which ones they get. Someone taking a cancer drug, for example, could get a bottle of pills from a factory with a record of good inspections and a refill from a factory with mold, dirty water and rusted equipment.

The FDA doesn’t make it easy to know more.

In a statement, the agency said that it is reviewing the redaction process for inspection reports but did not provide specifics. One former FDA manager who dealt with the release of the reports for overseas factories said the redactions were made because revealing both the drug names and the details of what inspectors observed on production lines would give away confidential manufacturing practices.

As a result, the FDA for decades regularly defaulted to taking out all the drug names, said the former official, who did not want to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak about agency policy by their former employer.  

“It’s more important to leave what inspectors saw, so people can understand what was bad at the factory,” they said. “If you left the drug name in, you’d have to take out more of the observations.”

Woodcock and several inspectors, however, said the reports typically don’t include proprietary information about how drugs are made.

“They’re not talking about how much salt they have in there, or which buffer they use in a specific drug,” Woodcock said. “They’re talking about, ‘Did you do the test correctly? … Do you have mold in your dryer?’ That kind of thing.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
Legal experts told ProPublica that the wholesale removal of drug names was improper and that the redactions should have been made on a case-by-case basis.

In interviews, several former FDA officials now say they support releasing drug names. But Woodcock and others acknowledged they did not question the redactions while they held positions of power at the agency. 

“If you’ve got lawyers telling you you can’t do this or this is putting the agency at risk or the agency will get sued and we will have our head handed to us on a platter by the courts, no one is going to say, ‘I’m willing to take that risk,’” said Dr. Mac Lumpkin, former deputy commissioner for international programs who spent more than two decades at the agency.

Meanwhile, the information that people already have ready access to — the labels on their pill bottles — can be misleading. Sometimes what appears to be the manufacturer is actually a repackager or distributor. The actual drugmaker and its factory, which is often not listed on the bottle, could be in India, China or another country. 

For Kirchoff, the pediatrician in Oregon, knowing who actually makes the drugs that she prescribes would have saved five years of painstaking work. She started looking at labels when she grew worried that children with autism, anxiety and other conditions were too often declining after they switched from a brand name drug to a generic, or from one generic to another. 

The labels, however, often directed her to a distributor and not to the drugmaker or factory. To this day, she said, she still doesn’t know where some drugs are coming from or whether the FDA has ever raised concerns about the factories that made them.

She now keeps a list of the drugs that she can trace to a specific manufacturer and relies on it when prescribing medication.

“Kids with neurodevelopmental disabilities can be exquisitely sensitive to little changes in medications,” Kirchoff said. “A different manufacturer can make all the difference.”

It’s not just a matter of knowing more about drug quality and safety. Pharmacists say the lack of information makes it harder for hospitals and pharmacies to keep their shelves stocked when a potential drug shortage looms.

As Hurricane Maria barreled toward Puerto Rico in 2017, ultimately causing widespread flooding and a monthslong blackout, University of Utah Hospital pharmacist Erin Fox raced to figure out which drugs were most at risk of running short. The island was home to dozens of factories that produced generic and brand-name medications.

“We know where the vulnerabilities are and we’re prioritizing,” then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb promised on Twitter at the time.

But the agency, citing confidentiality, wouldn’t release a list of drugs made in Puerto Rico, which meant Fox and others didn’t know which products to try to source from alternative suppliers. 

“Nobody was ever able to get that specific list,” Fox said. “It’s kind of like a black hole.”

Ultimately, about 40 drugs were at risk of shortage after the storm.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    
            (Myriam Wares for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Information Denied
For more than a quarter of a century, as drugs from foreign factories flowed into the U.S. market, the FDA resisted calls for transparency.

In the early 2000s, Lumpkin and others tried to persuade the FDA to provide unredacted inspection reports to regulators in Switzerland. The plan was to share information with a trusted partner under a confidentiality agreement and, working with Swiss inspectors, boost the number of investigations at high-risk factories around the world. 

But agency lawyers shut that effort down, saying the FDA could not release complete inspection reports, even to other governments. 

“They didn’t want to do anything that would make the industry mad,” Lumpkin said. “It was not, ‘What do we need to do for public health?’ It was, ‘What do we need to do to keep the FDA out of court?’ that took precedence.”

The agency would wait until 2017 before launching these international partnerships, which it now has with the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

Woodcock had also pushed for change in the early 2000s, instructing her team to start building a database of factory addresses for every drug approved for use in the United States. In some cases, the information had been languishing on paper records in a storage room and the agency had no way to easily determine which facilities were producing drugs for Americans or whether they had been inspected. 

“There was no information,” Woodcock said. “It was terrible. It was a mess.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
In the two decades since the agency created that database, making it possible to easily share the information with the public, the FDA chose to release drug names and their manufacturers but not specific factory addresses. 

Woodcock called it a “bandwidth issue” and said she believes that releasing the information would be a reasonable step.

Another effort around that time also fell short. As the Obama administration called for transparency in government, the FDA put a searchable database of inspection information online — a move meant to give the public more details about factory practices that could “jeopardize public health.”

But the agency ultimately undermined the gesture of transparency by redacting drug names from the reports. 

In 2022, a committee established by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine called on the FDA to require that manufacturers publicly disclose where drugs are made. Despite that call and the transparency efforts before it, nothing much has changed.

“You can have a medication in your hand and you can literally not know the company that made it and where it was made. That’s the life of a pharmacist,” said Fox, who was on the committee along with academics and industry experts. “It’s like shopping on Amazon and all you have is the price. You really have no other information.”

In July, newly named FDA Commissioner Marty Makary promised “radical transparency” and the agency released more information about why it had denied applications for new drugs and biological products. 

Nearly seven months into his tenure, the agency has yet to release detailed information about where generic drugs are being made.
        
    
                    

    To conduct its research, ProPublica paid for access to Redica Systems, a quality and regulatory intelligence company with a vast collection of FDA inspection documents.



        
             

                                    
        
                        Brandon Roberts of ProPublica contributed data reporting, and Melissa Dai, Isaiah Steinberg and Aidan Johnstone of the Medill Investigative Lab contributed research. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 02:29:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Your, Medication, Made, Contaminated, Factory, The, FDA, Won’t, Tell, You.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Here’s What Happened When ProPublica Reporters Tried to Find Out Where a Popular Prescription Drug Was Made</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/heres-what-happened-when-propublica-reporters-tried-to-find-out-where-a-popular-prescription-drug-was-made</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/heres-what-happened-when-propublica-reporters-tried-to-find-out-where-a-popular-prescription-drug-was-made</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
ProPublica wanted to know something simple: Where a widely used generic drug was made and whether that factory had any quality problems. Instead, we found ourselves navigating a labyrinth of company names and complex databases that few regular consumers would even know exist. 

And even after all that detective work, we hit a dead end.

Atorvastatin is a generic drug that treats high cholesterol and prevents heart attacks and strokes. It’s one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, and many manufacturers make it. 

We started with a label on a patient’s pill bottle. It shows the name of what appears to be the drug’s manufacturer: Quallent. The only addresses on the label are in Ohio and New Jersey and are for Express Scripts, a company that manages prescription benefits for insurers and employers.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    
            (Myriam Wares for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
So we went to DailyMed, an online database with labeling information for drugs. There we found 21 pages of atorvastatin generics. We looked for Quallent and found two listings for the company. 

Both showed that Quallent, based in the Cayman Islands, was just the packager of the drug. So what company manufactured it?

One label noted that Quallent sourced its pills from a drugmaker in India, another said they came from a company headquartered in Canada. Nothing on the pill bottle told us which of the two made the pills. So we looked at the markings on our patient’s atorvastatin tablets and compared them to the pill descriptions in DailyMed. Turns out the ones in our bottle were manufactured by the Canadian company Apotex.
        
    
                    
We were lucky to be able to find even this much. The information on DailyMed included the name of the drug’s manufacturer. That’s often not the case. DailyMed also provided a partial address in Toronto, home to the global headquarters of Apotex as well as several of its plants. But the information didn’t specifically tell us if the drug is actually made at a Toronto factory. 

To learn more, we scrolled to the bottom of the DailyMed page to find what’s known as the ANDA number, which is assigned when a company applies for approval to make a drug. We took that number and went to another database called the Orange Book, where all drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration are listed.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    
            (Myriam Wares for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
We put in our ANDA number and we were able to confirm that Apotex was the manufacturer and also learn that the company received approval to start making atorvastatin in 2012, which would guide our search for FDA inspection reports about the factory.

But alas the Orange Book doesn’t tell us where Apotex makes the drug. The company’s website says it has factories in Canada, Mexico and India, but it doesn’t say which drugs are made where. 

If any consumer got this far, we’d be impressed. But here’s where the search got really complicated.

Even with our ANDA number and the name Apotex, we could not find the specific factory where our atorvastatin was made. The FDA has that information — it’s on the applications that companies turn in when they apply for new drug approvals — but the agency hasn’t made those addresses available to the public.
        
    
                            
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    
            (Myriam Wares for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Last year, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for those locations. Months passed and we eventually sued the FDA in federal court. Finally, the agency gave us some of the addresses, but not a complete list.

In the case of our atorvastatin, no luck. The agency didn’t give us that factory’s details, saying it held back addresses for drugmakers that hired other companies — contract manufacturers — to make their medications. So even though we had information that the public doesn’t have, we were still stuck.
        
    
                            
    
                    
We went to a private firm called Redica Systems and paid to use a database of reports written by FDA inspectors after visits to drug factories. We could see inspections for various Apotex factories in Canada and India that described problems over the years in the way drugs were made. The FDA, however, blacked out the names of the medications on those reports.

That’s where we hit a final dead end. After all that, we still don’t know where our atorvastatin was manufactured and whether the factory had a troubled record.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    
            (Myriam Wares for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
We reached out to Apotex to see if we could learn more but never heard back. On its website, the company says, “Patient safety and regulatory compliance guide every stage of our manufacturing process.”

Though the FDA has held back factory information for decades, agency officials recently asked Congress for the authority to require that manufacturers disclose where drugs are made on the labels of pill bottles.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Brandon Roberts of ProPublica contributed research. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 02:29:19 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Here’s, What, Happened, When, ProPublica, Reporters, Tried, Find, Out, Where, Popular, Prescription, Drug, Was, Made</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>IJM Dirty Money Scandal: Over RM2.5 Billion Offshore Accounts Linked to Seow Lun Hoo and Tan Sri Krishnan Tan Under Regulatory Scrutiny</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ijm-dirty-money-scandal-over-rm25-billion-offshore-accounts-linked-to-seow-lun-hoo-and-tan-sri-krishnan-tan-under-regulatory-scrutiny</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ijm-dirty-money-scandal-over-rm25-billion-offshore-accounts-linked-to-seow-lun-hoo-and-tan-sri-krishnan-tan-under-regulatory-scrutiny</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A web of suspicious transactions involving IJM Corporation Berhad’s chairman, Tan Sri Dato’ Tan Boon Seng @ Krishnan ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2025/10/wang-haram-IJM.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 02:23:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>IJM, Dirty, Money, Scandal:, Over, RM2.5, Billion, Offshore, Accounts, Linked, Seow, Lun, Hoo, and, Tan, Sri, Krishnan, Tan, Under, Regulatory, Scrutiny</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Russia secretly acquired Western technology to protect its nuclear submarine fleet</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/russia-secretly-acquired-western-technology-to-protect-its-nuclear-submarine-fleet</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/russia-secretly-acquired-western-technology-to-protect-its-nuclear-submarine-fleet</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Russian Secrets, a new cross-border investigation, reveals the shadowy procurement network behind Russia’s surveillance program Harmony. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/10/Russia-submarine-GettyImages-2156651460.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 02:22:05 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Russia, secretly, acquired, Western, technology, protect, its, nuclear, submarine, fleet</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Why Did You Leave the Department of Veterans Affairs?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/why-did-you-leave-the-department-of-veterans-affairs</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/why-did-you-leave-the-department-of-veterans-affairs</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Vernal Coleman, Topher Sanders and Maryam Jameel                
                                             
                                                                
					
						ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

					

        	

      

        
	If you are a doctor, nurse or other front-line medical provider who has recently left your position at a VA hospital or clinic, we want to hear from you.
            
	We know many of the issues at the VA are long-standing, but our reporting over the last several months has shown that some recent policy changes are having an impact on working conditions and on patient care. We’ve obtained anonymized exit-survey data about departing VA employees’ decisions to leave the department, but we need your help to understand the full picture.
            
	We want to hear your story about leaving the VA and get your insights about the care the VA provides. It’s important that we hear all sides of an issue, so we’re not just interested in stories about problems — if you’ve had a positive experience with the Trump administration’s changes or want to provide additional context, please share it with us.
            
	We take your privacy seriously. **We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting and we need your name and contact information so that we can be sure that those who respond actually worked at the VA. We will not publish your name or any part of your story unless we contact you and you give us permission to do so.
            
	If you currently work for the VA or another federal agency, we encourage you to contact our reporters directly via the encrypted messaging app Signal rather than fill out this form. You are welcome to use this option if you’ve left the agency too. Here’s how you can reach us on Signal:
            
	
Vernal Coleman: vcoleman91.99 
Topher Sanders: TopherSanders.02 ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2025 02:28:54 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Why, Did, You, Leave, the, Department, Veterans, Affairs</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>This Is Ground Zero in the Conservative Quest for More Patriotic and Christian Public Schools</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/this-is-ground-zero-in-the-conservative-quest-for-more-patriotic-and-christian-public-schools</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/this-is-ground-zero-in-the-conservative-quest-for-more-patriotic-and-christian-public-schools</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Jennifer Smith Richards                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
The future that the Trump administration envisions for public schools is more patriotic, more Christian and less “woke.” Want to know how that might play out? Look to Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has spent the past few years reshaping public schools to integrate lessons about Jesus and encourage pride about America’s history, with political leaders and legislators working their way through the conservative agenda for overhauling education.

Academics, educators and critics alike refer to Oklahoma as ground zero for pushing education to the right. Or, as one teacher put it, “the canary on the prairie.”

By the time the second Trump administration began espousing its “America First” agenda, which includes the expansion of private school vouchers and prohibitions on lessons about race and sex, Oklahoma had been there, done that.
        
    
                    
The Republican supermajority in the state Legislature — where some members identify as Christian nationalists — passed sweeping restrictions on teaching about racism and gender in 2021, prompting districts to review whether teachers’ lessons might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” or other psychological distress about their race. The following year, it adopted one of the country’s first anti-transgender school bathroom bills, requiring students to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with the gender they were assigned at birth or face discipline.

While he was state schools superintendent, Ryan Walters demanded Bibles be placed in every classroom, created a state Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, and encouraged schools to use online “pro-America” content from conservative media nonprofit PragerU. He called teachers unions “terrorist” organizations, railed against “woke” classrooms, threatened to yank the accreditation of school districts that resisted his orders and commissioned a test to measure whether teacher applicants from liberal states had “America First” knowledge.

Many of the changes endorsed by the state’s leaders have elements of Christian nationalism, which holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and often downplays troubling episodes in the country’s history to instead emphasize patriotism and a God-given destiny.

Walters, who declined to comment for this story, resigned at the end of September and became CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, an arm of the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation that aims to “fight the woke liberal union mob.” But much of the transformation in Oklahoma education policy that he helped turbocharge is codified in the state’s rules and laws.

“We are the testing ground. Every single state needs to pay attention,” warned Jena Nelson, a moderate Democrat who lost the state superintendent’s race to Walters in 2022 and is now running for Congress.

ProPublica has reported that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has brought in a team of strategists who are working to radically shift how children will learn in America, even as they carry out the “final mission” to shut down the federal agency. Some of those strategists have spoken of their desire to dismantle public education. Others hope to push it in the same direction as Oklahoma.

Walters tapped the president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that published Project 2025 and the blueprints that preceded it, to help rewrite Oklahoma’s social studies standards. The Legislature did not reject the rewrite, so the standards now include roughly 40 points about the Bible, Jesus and Christianity that students should learn as well as skepticism about the 2020 presidential election results and the origins of COVID-19. If the new standards survive a legal challenge, they could be in place until they’re up for review again in six years.

But while Oklahoma made these shifts, it has consistently ranked near the bottom on national measures of student performance. Scores on eighth grade reading and math in national evaluations are abysmal. Only New Mexico’s proficiency rates rank lower. The high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the country, while spending on education is one of the lowest. Only three other states — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — spend less per pupil. And in the most recent federal data about average teacher pay, Oklahoma tied with Mississippi for dead last. Many school superintendents and parents say state leaders have been fixated on the wrong things if the goal is to improve schools.

“The attention to the culture war thing means that there’s a lot of distraction from the basic needs of kids being met,” said Aysha Prather, a parent who has closely followed changes in state education policy. Her transgender son is a plaintiff in a 2022 lawsuit challenging the state’s bathroom ban. That case remains on appeal.

“The school should be the nicest, happiest, best resourced place in a community,” she added. “That’s how we show that we value kids. And that is obviously not how most of our Legislature or state government feels about it.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the new state superintendent, Lindel Fields, said that he’s sorting through previous rules and edicts that have created “much confusion” for schools, including about the standards and the PragerU teacher certification tests. He said the public rightfully has questions about how the state Education Department changes after Walters’ tenure, but “given all these pressing tasks, we simply don’t have time for looking backward. Whether we are 50th or 46th or 25th in education, we have work to do to move our state forward,” Fields wrote. He said his first tasks are “resolving a number of outstanding issues that are hindering operations” including creating a budget for the agency.

Public school superintendents do not oppose all of the mandates from the past several years. When Walters directed schools last year to place Bibles in every classroom and teach from them, one district superintendent emailed to thank him for offering “cover” to incorporate Bible-focused lessons, according to news reports.

Another superintendent, Tommy Turner of Battiest Public Schools, said students at his schools have always had access to the Bible. The district still puts on a Christmas program and observes a moment of silence to start the day, and the school board prays before meetings.

“Christ never left the school,” he said in an interview in his office.

A lifelong Republican who works in a remote stretch of southeast Oklahoma, Turner said he is concerned about the state’s priorities and doesn’t see Bibles as the most pressing issues.

In his district, the cafeteria needs repairs even after the emergency replacement of a roof that had a gaping hole in it. Many of his teachers work second jobs on weekends because the pay’s so low. Nail heads are poking through the gym’s thin hardwood floors. The district has lost 15% of its students to an online charter school and homeschooling. Voters have rejected three bond issues in a row for building repairs and renovations.

Turner said he’d like to retire, but he loves the students and wants to protect his little district. He put on his cowboy hat, apologized for the pile of dead wasps on his office floor — the infestations barely register anymore — and walked over to the high school. He said he hadn’t even read the new social studies standards.

“I don’t have time to chase every rabbit,” he said. “I’ve got a school to run.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            A road runs through rural Pushmataha County, Oklahoma. The state’s charter and private schools are primarily concentrated in cities and suburbs, despite 76% of the state’s school districts being located in rural communities.
    
            (Nick Oxford for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Patriotism and Jesus
The changes to Oklahoma’s curriculum rules don’t just touch on national issues around race and gender. Here, teachers aren’t supposed to tell students that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — a defining incident of racial violence in Oklahoma history — was perpetrated by racists.

State social studies standards for years have included discussion of how white Tulsans murdered as many as 300 Black people. But once the 2021 state law that restricted teaching about race and gender passed, some teachers avoided the topic.

The law prohibits teachers from singling out specific racial groups as responsible for past racism. It specifies that individuals of a certain race shouldn’t be portrayed as inherently racist, “whether consciously or unconsciously.” In addition to teachers’ licensure being on the line, repeated failure to comply would allow the state to revoke district accreditation, which could result in a state takeover.

When educators questioned how to teach about a race massacre without running afoul of the law, state legislators and the Tulsa County chapter of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty weighed in to say that white people today shouldn’t feel shame and that the massacre’s perpetrators shouldn’t be cast as racists. A Moms for Liberty chapter representative did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

At a speaking engagement at the Norman Public Library in 2023, Walters suggested teachers present the facts about the murders but should not say “the skin color determined it.” Even two years after the law went into effect, news reports said teachers were still treading lightly on the race massacre, wary of the state suspending or revoking their licenses for exposing students to prohibited concepts. Those fears are not hypothetical; the state has revoked at least one teacher’s license and suspended two others’.

Other historic episodes that reveal racism also are getting a new look in Oklahoma through the state’s partnership with PragerU Kids, which creates short-form videos to counter what its founder believes is left-wing ideology in schools.

Teachers in the state aren’t required to use the videos, but some like them and show them in class. The videos align with conservatives’ push to teach a positive view of America’s past and with the state’s rules on teaching about race and gender. For instance, PragerU Kids’ version of Booker T. Washington’s story is a cheery lesson in self-sufficiency and acceptance. Once freed from slavery, Washington toiled in coal mines, worked as a janitor in exchange for formal education and became a great American orator and leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The video does not linger on his being born into “the most miserable, desolate and discouraging surroundings” or, as he wrote in his autobiography, that slavery was “a sin that at some time we shall have to pay for.”

“America was one of the first places on Earth to outlaw slavery,” a cartoon version of Washington tells two time-traveling children in the PragerU video, so “I am proud and thankful.” (The U.S. did ban importing slaves in 1808, but it did not enforce that law and did not outlaw owning people altogether until 1865, after Britain, Denmark, France and Spain had done so.)

The Washington character says in the video that he devoted his life to teaching people “the importance of independence and making themselves as valuable as possible.” And when one child says she’s sorry that he and other Black Americans faced segregation and discrimination, Washington thanks her for her sympathy but assures the child, who is white, that she’s done nothing wrong.

Echoing a conservative talking point, the cartoon Washington says, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.”

Jermaine Thibodeaux, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, said he is familiar with the PragerU videos and considers them an ideological tool of a “reeducation project nationwide” that can be misleading.

“I don’t think that’s something Washington necessarily uttered,” he said of the quote about future generations.

The value Washington placed on independence, Thibodeaux added, was “predicated on the notions of self-sufficiency post-slavery, when there was little help coming from the government.”

A spokesperson for PragerU declined to comment for this story.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            In this PragerU Kids’ cartoon video, Booker T. Washington echoes conservative talking points about slavery.
    
            (PragerU)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Pressure to keep squeezing social justice and LGBTQ+ issues out of classrooms has been intensifying since 2021, when Republican state lawmakers began pushing “dirty book” legislation that would censor school libraries. One bill, which didn’t pass, called for firing school employees and fining offenders $10,000 each time they “promoted positions in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of the student.” That was the backdrop when the state accused Summer Boismier of “moral turpitude” and then revoked her teaching license last year.

The English department at Norman High School near Oklahoma City told Boismier and her colleagues they needed to pull titles that might be considered racially divisive or contain themes about sex and gender. Or they could turn books around on the shelves so students couldn’t see the titles.

“I remember just sitting in my seat shaking. I had colleagues in the room who were in tears,” Boismier said. Given the choice to purge books or hide their covers, Boismier did neither. She wrapped her classroom’s bookshelf in red butcher paper and wrote “books the state doesn’t want you to read” on it in black marker. She added a QR code linking to the Brooklyn Public Library, where students could get a library card and virtual access to books considered inappropriate in Oklahoma, then posted a photo of it all on social media.

Boismier, who resigned in protest of the 2021 law, challenged the license revocation in court, and the case is ongoing. She said she does not regret taking a stand against a law she views as unjust. The state has argued the revocation is valid.

“I am living every teacher in Oklahoma’s worst nightmare right now,” she said. “I am unemployable.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Summer Boismier lost her teaching license after refusing to purge books in her classroom or hide their covers. She keeps a storage unit in Oklahoma City with her books and classroom supplies.
    
            (Nick Oxford for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In the Battiest district, where Turner is superintendent, an elementary reading teacher told ProPublica that just to be safe, she removed books about diversity and including others who are different. She said that was uncomfortable; half of her students are Native American, and so is she.

Adopted this year, the state’s new social studies standards provide even more specifics about what should be taught. They include the expectation that students know “stories from Christianity that influenced the American Founders and culture, including the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (e.g., the ‘Golden Rule,’ the Sermon on the Mount),” to second graders. A state court last month issued a temporary stay on requiring schools to follow the standards while a lawsuit against them plays out.

In addition, the new standards accept Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. They dictate that ninth graders learn about “discrepancies” in election results including “the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters” and other unsupported conservative talking points. The Trump campaign and supporters filed at least 60 lawsuits covering these points; nearly all were dismissed as meritless or were decided against Trump. The election skepticism standard has left the superintendent of a roughly 2,000-student district north of Tulsa confused. He said he and other superintendents are unsure how they would navigate those but are hopeful that “standards rooted in fact prevail.”

“There comes a point where curriculum cannot be opinion,” said the superintendent, who didn’t want to be named because he feared retaliation. “I’m not trying to get involved in conspiracy theories.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Students walk into Norman High School near Oklahoma City this fall.
    
            (Nick Oxford for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Fear and Resistance
The push by state leaders to embed more Christian values in schools isn’t what keeps many superintendents in the rural parts of the state up at night. They say the Bible has never left their classrooms.

“I am smack-dab right in the middle of the Bible Belt,” said the leader of a tiny district on the western side of the state. “We are small, but we have seven churches. You’re talking ‘Footloose’ here.”

While she doesn’t disagree with everything the Legislature and Walters have done, she said she feels like some of their actions undermine public schools and could “shut down rural Oklahoma.”

She and other leaders of public school districts worry that the state’s expanded school choice program, which allows families to get tax credits if they attend private and religious schools, will draw away students from their districts and, ultimately, erode their funding. Congress passed the first federal private school tax credit in July.

It’s just the second year of the statewide tax credit program approved by the Legislature that allows students to use public funds to attend private and religious schools. The credits cost the state nearly $250 million in tax revenue this school year and subsidizes almost 40,000 students. That money, superintendents say, is desperately needed in their districts.
        
    
                            
    
                    
The state also has encouraged the growth of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run and subject to fewer regulations. Last year, the state’s third-largest district, behind the Oklahoma City and Tulsa districts, wasn’t a traditional one. It was EPIC, a statewide online charter school. Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt supported St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in its efforts to become the country’s first religious charter school. The Supreme Court blocked it from opening.

Even communities with few private schools feel threatened by the state’s push toward privatization. At Nashoba Public School, in a rural part of southeast Oklahoma where there’s little else but timber and twisting roads, the roughly 50 kids who make up the elementary and middle grades are taught in split-grade classrooms. Like hundreds of other Oklahoma districts, more than three-quarters of which are rural, it’s not just a school, it’s the school; there are no private schools in Pushmataha County.

When students enroll in charter schools, they often take funding with them while districts have to maintain operations as before.

“You starve your public schools to feed your private schools and charter schools,” said Nashoba Superintendent Charles Caughern Jr. “Our foundation was set up for a free and appropriate education for all kids. All kids!”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Nashoba Public School has a student body of around 50 students and is the only school most children in the area have access to.
    
            (Nick Oxford for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Caughern fears students with disabilities will suffer as public schools are weakened. Private schools don’t have to admit students with disabilities, and many won’t, he said.

Erika Wright, a parent who leads the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, which advocates for public schools, said the state’s deep-red politics might lead outsiders to think Oklahomans support state leaders pushing education far to the right. But that’s not the case, Wright said.

“They don’t understand what’s happening,” Wright said. “They just assume that public schools are always going to be there because they’ve always been there in their lifetime. I think the average Oklahoman does not understand the gravity and complexity of what is taking place.”

That’s not to say there isn’t resistance. A group of about 15 parents and public school advocates that Walters derided as the “woke peanut gallery” goes to State Board of Education meetings — a visual reminder that people care about education policy and public schools. A suburban Oklahoma City district is devising plans to deliver all of the Bible lessons contained in the new social studies standards on the same day, giving parents an easy way to have their children opt out. Court challenges to some of the state’s right-wing policies are pending.

Some are hopeful that Oklahoma will recalibrate the more extreme policies that marked Walters’ tenure. The State Board of Education last week decided not to revoke the licenses of two teachers who Walters wanted punished for their social media posts about Trump. The new superintendent said he would drop Walters’ plan to distribute Bibles to every classroom.

But many of the significant changes in classrooms came out of the Legislature, which has continued this year to propose bills to rid schools of “inappropriate materials” and proclaim that, in Oklahoma, “Christ is King.” A lot of damage already has been done to public schools, said Turner, the Battiest superintendent.

He was only half-joking when he said some parents have been “brainwashed” by right-wing TV news and Oklahoma leaders’ talk of liberal indoctrination to think the district is teaching kids to be gay or converting Christian kids into atheists.

A couple of years ago, one mom stopped him in the parking lot at school to say she was withdrawing her child from the district because its teaching didn’t align with her values. The superintendent was floored.

“That’s the power of the rhetoric,” Turner said.

He said he used to sit a couple of pews behind that mom in church every Sunday.
        
    
                    
    
        
            Help ProPublica Report on Education
        

    
        
             

                                    
        
                        Megan O’Matz and Asia Fields contributed reporting. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2025 02:27:31 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>This, Ground, Zero, the, Conservative, Quest, for, More, Patriotic, and, Christian, Public, Schools</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Skandal Wang Haram IJM: Transaksi mencurigakan, lebih RM2.5 Bilion akaun luar negara Seow Lun Hoo &amp;amp; Tan Sri Krishnan Tan dalam radar penguatkuasa</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/skandal-wang-haram-ijm-transaksi-mencurigakan-lebih-rm25-bilion-akaun-luar-negara-seow-lun-hoo-tan-sri-krishnan-tan-dalam-radar-penguatkuasa</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/skandal-wang-haram-ijm-transaksi-mencurigakan-lebih-rm25-bilion-akaun-luar-negara-seow-lun-hoo-tan-sri-krishnan-tan-dalam-radar-penguatkuasa</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Dalam sebuah  portal antarabangsa dan blog tempatan nama IJM Corporation Berhad didedahkan disiasat oleh Serious Fraud Office (SFO) ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2025 02:23:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Skandal, Wang, Haram, IJM:, Transaksi, mencurigakan, lebih, RM2.5, Bilion, akaun, luar, negara, Seow, Lun, Hoo, Tan, Sri, Krishnan, Tan, dalam, radar, penguatkuasa</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Joint Congressional Investigation Launched in Response to ProPublica’s Revelations on Detained Americans</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/joint-congressional-investigation-launched-in-response-to-propublicas-revelations-on-detained-americans</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/joint-congressional-investigation-launched-in-response-to-propublicas-revelations-on-detained-americans</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Nicole Foy                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Democrats in the House and Senate announced plans for a wide-ranging investigation into immigration agents’ detention of citizens after a ProPublica story found that more than 170 Americans have been held by immigration officials this year.

Minority leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said the joint investigation into the detention of U.S. citizens and other allegations of misconduct by immigration agents would include a hearing in Los Angeles.

“Over 170 U.S. Citizens are being arrested. Why? Because they look like me. Because they are of Latino origin. Or because they are suspected to not be a U.S. citizen, or because they are suspected of crimes they have not committed,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking Democrat on the House committee, said during a Monday press conference in Los Angeles with Mayor Karen Bass.

Garcia said the investigators are demanding all records and documents showing how U.S. citizens are treated by immigration officials in Los Angeles and around the country. “We want to understand what they are doing in our neighborhoods, how it is being funded,” he said.

Our investigation found that at least 50 citizens have been detained based on questions about their citizenship as of Oct. 5. They were almost all Latino. Roughly 130 others have been detained after raids or protests on allegations of assaulting officers or interfering with arrests. Many of those cases have wilted under scrutiny.
        
    
                            
    
                    
We found Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. At least two dozen citizens have reported being held for at least a day without access to a phone or a lawyer.

Bass and Garcia said the mistreatment of citizens has come amid the arrests of immigrants reporting for check-ins and immigration court, and the administration’s repeated blocking of congressional attempts to visit and conduct oversight in federal detention facilities like the one in Los Angeles.

“It’s important that we say today that what is happening to undocumented residents is also happening to U.S. citizens, which means this can happen to anyone, to all of us, at any period of time,” Bass said.

Our article has also prompted members of Congress to write to the Department of Homeland Security.

In one letter sent on Monday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Garcia and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said citizens in cities like Los Angeles have borne the brunt of the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.

“The impact of these arrests has not been evenly distributed across the country, and cities like Chicago, Portland, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have been targeted,” Garcia and Blumenthal wrote. “Troublingly, the pattern of U.S. Citizen arrests coincides with an alarming increase in racial profiling — particularly of Latinos — which has been well documented in Los Angeles.”

DHS has not replied to previous letters.

Asked about the concerns from elected leaders, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected claims that immigration agents have been engaging in racial profiling. She said in a statement to ProPublica that a temporary ruling by the Supreme Court in September had “vindicated” the administration “whether Mayor Bass or Rep. Garcia like it or not.”

“DHS enforces federal immigration law without fear, favor, or prejudice,” McLaughlin wrote. “Claims by the media, agitators, and sanctuary politicians like Mayor Bass and Rep. Garcia that ICE is targeting U.S. citizens, making unconstitutional arrests, and ‘trampling on civil liberties’ are FALSE.”

White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson told ProPublica in an email that “unhinged rhetoric from activists and Democrat politicians” was responsible for an increase in assaults on ICE officers.

On social media, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller derided Bass’ press conference as “abject lies.”

“Violent leftists have been arrested and charged with illegally obstructing federal law enforcement, a felony,” Miller wrote Monday night on X. “Let that sink in: open borders Democrats have incited leftists to violently attack ICE.”

Of the cases we tracked through Oct. 5, we found nearly 50 instances where charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found at least eight citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors, including for failing to follow orders. Others are still facing charges for more serious accusations, including for allegedly ramming an agent’s car. (The driver has pleaded not guilty.) 

Our account did not count citizens arrested later, after some sort of judicial process, or those detained by local law enforcement or the National Guard. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:27:05 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Joint, Congressional, Investigation, Launched, Response, ProPublica’s, Revelations, Detained, Americans</media:keywords>
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<title>Ethics Watchdog Group Seeks Investigation Into Border Czar and Contracts Following ProPublica Report</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ethics-watchdog-group-seeks-investigation-into-border-czar-and-contracts-following-propublica-report</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ethics-watchdog-group-seeks-investigation-into-border-czar-and-contracts-following-propublica-report</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
A Washington-based watchdog is calling for an inspector general investigation into potential conflicts of interest and ethics violations in the office of border czar Tom Homan related to government contracting.

This follows reporting from ProPublica revealing a web of past business relationships involving Homan, his senior adviser Mark Hall, and consultants and firms seeking Department of Homeland Security contracts.

The request by the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit nonpartisan government watchdog, also cites a story by MSNBC that reported that Homan had taken a $50,000 cash payment from undercover FBI agents posing as would-be DHS contractors seeking his help obtaining contracts.

ProPublica revealed that Hall met this August with a company interested in winning contracts for immigrant detention centers. That meeting, at the Texas offices of a firm called Industrial Tent Systems, was also attended by Charlie Sowell, a consultant on ITS’ payroll.

Sowell had paid Hall a $50,000 consulting fee as recently as February — right before Hall entered the border czar’s office working under Homan, government disclosure documents show.

Sowell also had a business relationship with Homan. Before he became border czar, Homan had worked with Sowell’s firm SE&amp;M Solutions to advise clients seeking contracts with DHS, according to government documents and an interview with Sowell. In June, Sowell told ProPublica he and Homan avoided any conflicts of interest. “Tom is an exceptionally ethical person,” said Sowell, who has declined further interview requests.

The August meeting between Hall, ITS and Sowell may have violated federal ethics laws and merits an independent investigation, according to CLC.

“When a senior official is involved in contracting decisions that stand to benefit a recent former employer, it raises serious questions about whether government decision making is impartial,” the CLC wrote in its Oct. 16 letter to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari.

“An IG investigation is needed to determine whether Hall’s actions violate federal ethics laws.”
        
    
                    
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed calls for an inquiry into Homan’s office. “Tom has always operated with the utmost integrity and is working tirelessly to keep all Americans safe,” she said, calling recent reports “debunked left-wing talking points.”

Jackson has said that Homan has “no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract” and that Hall has not been authorized by Homan to represent him.

Homan, Hall and the inspector general’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the letter. Industrial Tent Systems has not responded to a comment request.

Congress recently allocated $45 billion to massively expand immigration detention spaces, including plans to build an unprecedented series of tent camps on military bases across the country. The windfall of government money has drawn intense interest among DHS contractors and consultants, including some with past business relationships with Hall and Homan.

Both men are bound by conflict-of-interest rules barring them from involvement in government discussions that could impact their former business partners, ethics experts have said.

Homan has said repeatedly that he recused himself from all contracting matters. But ProPublica and Bloomberg have reported he has been involved in conversations with industry players about contracts. Neither DHS nor the White House would provide formal recusal documents sought by ProPublica.
        
    
                            
    
                    
In a separate ethics complaint centering on Homan, the CLC asks the IG to “investigate to determine if Homan intentionally excluded information from his financial disclosure statement in violation of federal criminal law.”

The ethics complaint alleges that if Homan received $50,000 from undercover FBI agents, it should have been reported on his financial disclosure forms.

Homan has not only said he did nothing illegal, he recently maintained he never took the $50,000.

“This matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors,” Jackson said this week. “They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.” ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:26:31 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ethics, Watchdog, Group, Seeks, Investigation, Into, Border, Czar, and, Contracts, Following, ProPublica, Report</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>This County Was the “Model” for Local Police Carrying Out Immigration Raids. It Ended in Civil Rights Violations.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/this-county-was-the-model-for-local-police-carrying-out-immigration-raids-it-ended-in-civil-rights-violations</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/this-county-was-the-model-for-local-police-carrying-out-immigration-raids-it-ended-in-civil-rights-violations</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
Manuel Nieto Jr. and his sister had just pulled into a gas station to buy cigarettes and Gatorade when he noticed a sheriff’s deputy standing over two Latino men on the ground.

Their north Phoenix neighborhood was on alert. Sheriff’s deputies had been targeting day-labor centers in the area and making traffic stops — arresting people who couldn’t prove their immigration status. They had one thing in common: They looked Latino.

“No diga nada. Pídale un abogado,” Nieto’s sister, Velia Meraz, yelled to the detained men, according to court testimony. (“Don’t say anything. Ask for an attorney.”)

The deputy warned Nieto and Meraz: “You need to get out of here, now.”

Nieto drove around the corner to his dad’s auto repair shop as another deputy on a motorcycle followed him, siren and lights on, and patrol vehicles swarmed. Deputies approached — guns drawn.

Nieto dialed 911 for help: Officers were harassing him, he would later testify in court. One pulled Nieto from his vehicle. Others pinned him to the ground and handcuffed him.

Nieto’s father came running from his shop.

“Let my children go,” Manuel Nieto Sr. said. “They’re U.S. citizens. What did they do wrong?”

The raid that ensnared Nieto Jr. and Meraz 17 years ago was carried out under a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that grants local police powers to check immigration status during traffic stops and other routine encounters. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was among the first in the nation to test out ICE’s 287(g) task force program.

Since President Donald Trump retook office in January, similar scenes of local officers joining in aggressive immigration arrests have multiplied as ICE has rapidly expanded the 287(g) task force program to deputize local police officers as de facto deportation agents.

Moments after Manuel Nieto Sr. stormed out of his north Phoenix auto shop, the deputies left without arresting or citing his children. But Nieto Jr. and Meraz didn’t move on. They joined three other county residents in suing the sheriff’s office, accusing deputies of targeting them solely because they were Latino.

A federal judge agreed that the task force’s traffic stops and raids on Hispanic neighborhoods, day-labor centers and other businesses had violated Latinos’ civil and constitutional rights. Even after the ruling, the judge found Arpaio continued to detain people based solely on suspected civil immigration violations.

The U.S. Department of Justice also conducted a civil rights investigation into the sheriff’s office’s discriminatory practices, and ICE ended Arpaio’s 287(g) agreement. In 2012, ICE suspended all local police deportation task forces nationwide, only restarting them after Trump began his second term in January. 

Many Arizonans who lived through Arpaio’s 287(g)-fueled immigration-enforcement campaign see parallels between what happened in Maricopa County and what’s now playing out across the country as local officers join forces with ICE. They also foresee costly troubles for local agencies that follow in Maricopa County’s footsteps, including difficulty regaining the trust of Latino residents whose constitutional rights are violated by local officers.

The White House and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions. 

Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he became a target of political persecution for helping enforce immigration laws, which he saw as part of his job.

“I’d do it over again,” Arpaio said. “I tell everybody: I didn’t do anything wrong. I had a federal court who was biased against me. And all they could get me out on was a contempt of court? Think of that.”

Meanwhile, Maricopa County continues to reckon with its time allowing deputies to act as immigration officers.

Under a settlement agreement, the court mandated broad oversight of the sheriff’s office and appointed a monitor to track its compliance. Since then, the law enforcement agency has been required to meticulously document all interactions with the public. In the 12 years since, the department has yet to convince the judge that its deputies don’t racially profile Latino drivers and that it adequately investigates deputies’ alleged misconduct.
        
    
                    
Salvador Reza is a longtime community organizer who advocates for day laborers in Phoenix. He said his work put him in the crosshairs of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, leading to his arrest for obstruction during a protest. (The county declined to pursue charges against him.) Because of what happened in Maricopa County, he believes Latinos, including in the communities whose police departments have joined forces with ICE, are now more likely to be racially profiled.

“At that time, we were a laboratory,” Reza said. “They did the experiment, and basically now they’re implementing it at the national level.”
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            Guadalupe, Arizona, where most residents are Latino or Native American, became one of Arpaio’s targets for immigration enforcement, which escalated under a 287(g) task force agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
    
            (Jesse Rieser for ProPublica)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
368 Paragraphs on Required Reforms
The lawsuit brought by Nieto Jr., Meraz and the other county residents became known as Melendres v. Arpaio — for Manuel de Jesus Melendres Ortega, a legal resident who was arrested in one of Arpaio’s sweeps. 

When U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow certified it as a class-action suit in December 2011, he indicated racial profiling by the sheriff’s office had been so widespread it could have violated the constitutional rights of any Latino in Maricopa County, one-third of the population.

The settlement contains 368 paragraphs outlining reforms. They range from creating a policy that bars racial profiling to developing a system that collects data on traffic stops to identify disparities in the race of motorists who are pulled over.

To end court oversight, the sheriff’s office must be in “full and effective compliance” with the reforms continuously for three years. The department currently complies with more than 90% of the requirements, according to the monitor, but falls short in the two areas that most directly impact Latino drivers: eliminating racial bias in traffic stops and quickly investigating allegations of deputy misconduct.

Snow found that traffic stops involving Latino drivers and passengers dragged on “beyond the time necessary to resolve the issue that initially justified the stop.”

Ricardo Reyes said he repeatedly endured traffic stops as a young Latino growing up in the Maryvale neighborhood of west Phoenix, where three-quarters of the residents identify as Latino. He drove a nice car and believes deputies under Arpaio racially profiled him.

“They would ask me for my license, they take it and then, ‘You’re free to go,’” recalled Reyes, who leads an advocacy group for military veterans. “Why was I stopped? I never got an answer.”

Snow’s order requires deputies to document 13 data points for every traffic interaction, including when a stop began and ended, the reason for the stop, the driver’s perceived race and whether the deputy inquired about immigration status.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            The settlement overseen by U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow includes hundreds of pages of reforms that the sheriff’s office must implement, including developing a policy to bar racial profiling and to create a data collection system for traffic stops.
    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
In a preliminary injunction, Snow wrote that sheriff’s deputies, “including officers associated with the special operations, circulated emails that compared Mexicans to dogs, ridiculed stereotypical Mexican accents, and portrayed Mexicans as drunks.”

He singled out two of the deputies Nieto Jr. and Meraz encountered in north Phoenix for making arrests based on race during 287(g) operations. Roughly 77% of all arrests by the first deputy the siblings saw at the gas station had Hispanic surnames, the judge found. The deputy who pulled over Nieto Jr. arrested only Latinos during the operations he participated in.

Even more concerning to Snow was that Arpaio continued such operations as a matter of policy after ICE pulled its 287(g) agreement in 2009. In other words, deputies continued making immigration arrests without authority from the federal government. The judge said that violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures.

After Arpaio defied the order and refused to implement many of the reforms, Snow issued additional mandates in 2016. He also found Arpaio and three of his aides in civil contempt of court and referred all four to face criminal contempt charges, a misdemeanor. Another federal judge convicted only Arpaio of criminal contempt in 2017 and was set to sentence him to up to six months in jail. Two months before sentencing, Trump pardoned Arpaio. However, voters had already voted Arpaio out of office.

His successors have faced the same oversight and have not fully complied with the court’s orders, according to the monitor’s reports.

Kevin Johnson, an immigration law author and professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law who runs the Immigration Professor’s Blog, said settlements related to discrimination and civil rights violations often take a long time to resolve. He pointed to the 28-year-old Flores settlement, which still dictates the federal government’s treatment of children in border and immigration custody. “There may be complaints about the court monitoring, but the burden is on the leaders and the agencies to show that monitoring is no longer necessary,” he said.

This January, newly elected Sheriff Jerry Sheridan, a Republican who had worked as Arpaio’s second-in-command, inherited the Melendres settlement. He argues the department has made enough progress to end the judge’s oversight.

Snow acknowledged recently in court that Sheridan and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had made significant gains. “But the areas where he’s not in compliance are pretty important areas,” he said.

The sheriff’s office analyzes traffic stop data quarterly to identify deputies with notable disparities in who they stop. An outside auditor evaluates annually any departmentwide disparities.

The latest annual report shows improvements over the past decade, but also that deputies still arrest Latino drivers at higher rates than white drivers. Data from this past year also show that Black drivers, who are not covered by the Melendres settlement, face longer stop times and higher arrest rates. And all drivers of color are more likely to be searched than white drivers.

In addition, the sheriff’s office acknowledged it has not investigated 640 deputy misconduct claims, some dating to 2015, according to the department’s most recent court filing. Snow had ordered that the backlog be cleared to hold the sheriff’s office more accountable after he found that Arpaio refused to implement many reforms.

Raul Piña, a retired educator, witnessed the fear caused by Arpaio’s raids in his Latino-majority school district and surrounding neighborhoods in Maryvale. He has for the past decade served on the court-mandated Community Advisory Board, tasked with relaying to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office any community concerns about policing that may violate the court orders.

Piña says the department hasn’t done enough to regain the trust of Latino residents and its deputies continue targeting Latinos disproportionately. He worries that without court oversight, the department will backslide on policing based on skin color.

“I strongly believe that the only thing holding MCSO back from a very public and enthusiastic participation in workplace raids and other forms of anti-immigrant practices — the only thing holding them back — is Melendres,” he said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            David Redpath, research director for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office’s Court Implementation Division, discusses data on traffic stops during a town hall meeting.
    
            (Jesse Rieser for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“The Model Was Maricopa County”
Nationwide, ICE now has more than a thousand 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement. Half are task force agreements like the one Arpaio deployed.

In May, the Tennessee Highway Patrol was carrying out a task force operation in Nashville when troopers pulled over Edgardo David Campos, who had just left a vigil at his church. Campos pulled into a gas station south of the airport, where a swarm of uniformed and plainclothes immigration officers wearing green vests with the word “police” on the back surrounded his car. One began to pull him out of his vehicle, a video of the incident shows, drawing the attention of people nearby, including Dinora Romero. She grabbed her phone and began to record.

“Si se lo llevan, no diga nada,” Romero yelled. (“If they take you, don’t say anything.”) 

ICE touted the Nashville operation as a success, even though the agency’s data showed more than half the nearly 200 people arrested had no criminal record.

Advocates accused ICE and the Highway Patrol of using race and ethnicity to target drivers in Nashville’s Latino and immigrant neighborhoods. One in four residents of the neighborhood where Campos was stopped is Latino. In August, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition filed a lawsuit against the Highway Patrol seeking access to public records about the May sweeps. 

Attorneys for the state argued in court that releasing those records would endanger officers. The Highway Patrol and state attorney general did not respond to requests for comment.

With enforcement expanding, U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained recently, like Nieto Jr. and Meraz were in 2008. In May, an 18-year-old Latino citizen recorded his arrest during an operation by the Florida Highway Patrol and Border Patrol targeting landscapers in West Palm Beach under a 287(g) agreement. He was released after six hours. 

In a statement, DHS said the teen “was part of a group of illegal aliens that resisted arrest during a traffic stop.” The Florida Highway Patrol said he “interfered” with a lawful investigation and was charged with obstruction. State prosecutors declined to pursue the charge, citing “insufficient evidence.”

The Trump administration is trying to enlist even more local officers to help ICE and is offering financial incentives for departments that participate in the 287(g) program. Starting this month, the federal government will pay the salaries of officers certified under 287(g) agreements and offer “performance awards” of up to $1,000 for helping ICE with arrests and deportations.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has gutted federal offices that investigate police misconduct and civil rights violations.

Advocates say some of the tactics used by local and federal officers to target Latinos in Trump’s deportation effort draw from Arpaio’s playbook.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Raul Piña serves on a court-mandated community advisory board tasked with relaying to the sheriff’s office any residents’ concerns about policing that may violate the court’s orders. He said he is worried that without the oversight required by a settlement order, the department will backslide.
    
            (Jesse Rieser for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“The model was Maricopa County,” said Piña, the advisory board member in the Maricopa County lawsuit.

“The very public, very humiliating, demoralizing approach to the raids, and the cruelty — more than just the images in the television that were humiliating, it was the cruelty — and the violent apprehension of people in front of children,” Piña added. “All of those behaviors. All of those tactics. They stem from Maricopa County.”

Arpaio said he did not want to take credit for the Trump administration’s work but was proud that deputies under his command were among the first local officers to help ICE make immigration arrests.

In Florida, which has more departments with 287(g) agreements than any other state, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent $245 million to set up a temporary detention center nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. There, migrants are housed in chain-link cells inside tents. Some have compared it to Arpaio’s “Tent City,” where prisoners were held outdoors in sweltering desert temperatures. (It closed after Arpaio lost reelection in 2016.)

In California, federal agents have focused on Home Depot stores, arresting people in parking lots — echoing Arpaio’s raids on day laborers. Maricopa County deputies, after getting 287(g) certified in 2007, carried out 11 immigration sweeps within five months outside a former furniture store in Phoenix that was a popular gathering spot for laborers. Snow noted that nearly everyone arrested there was Latino.

“Trump is creating this complete culture of fear and terror in our community. And I think this is exactly what happened under Arpaio, with the workplace raids and the threat of deportation,” said Christine Wee, lead attorney for American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Nieto Jr., Meraz and Melendres.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            First image: The courtyard of then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Tent City Jail.” Some have compared a Florida detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” to Arpaio’s notorious jail, which closed after he left office. Second image: Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies check the shoes of an individual arrested in an immigration sweep under Arpaio.
    
            (First image: Charlie Riedel/AP Photo. Second image: AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin.)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
In July, a group that includes U.S. citizens, detained immigrants and advocacy groups sued the Trump administration, arguing that “indiscriminate” raids in Los Angeles targeted people with brown skin. A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order, barring immigration arrests based on race, speaking Spanish, type of employment or presence at a particular location.

But on Sept. 8, the Supreme Court stayed the order in a 6-3 vote. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the lone conservative justice to explain his decision. He affirmed the government can use a combination of factors like race and language to establish reasonable suspicion that a person is in the country unlawfully during the operations in Los Angeles. “To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor,’” Kavanaugh wrote.

Even though the case continues, immigration advocates and the attorneys who filed the lawsuit said the court’s action essentially legalized racial profiling.

Experts say that approach could filter down to local agencies partnering with ICE under the 287(g) program. “When you have ICE relying on racial profiling and promoting it as an effective immigration enforcement strategy, you can expect state local governments that are working with ICE to use race immigration enforcement,” said Johnson, the UC Davis law professor.

That idea was echoed in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent to the ruling lifting the order in the Los Angeles case. She argued the decision makes all Latinos, including U.S. citizens, targets and “improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely.” Sotomayor added, “The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status.”

Arpaio said he believes that had the Supreme Court rendered such a decision two decades ago, the Melendres lawsuit and the legal troubles that followed would not have happened.

“I was vindicated by the Supreme Court,” Arpaio said. “Everything they went after me is legal.”

Civil rights experts dispute that, noting that Arpaio’s enforcement relied on race alone, which remains illegal.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Sheridan believes the department has made enough progress to end court oversight stemming from a racial profiling lawsuit.
    
            (Jesse Rieser for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“It Seems Like It’s Never-Ending”
As the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office struggles to fully implement the court-mandated reforms, elected officials are losing patience with the requirements and the costs.

By March, spending on the Melendres case and the implementation of its reforms had surpassed $300 million, the bulk of which — nearly $245 million — has gone to the sheriff’s office. 

Sheridan, the new sheriff, attributed those expenses to the creation of two divisions for implementing the settlement and the hiring of investigators to tackle the backlog of complaints against deputies. Thirty million dollars has gone to the monitor team since the monitor was appointed in 2013.

In 2024, the last full fiscal year for which data is available, the county spent more than $39 million on the settlement. “That’s a recurring cost every year in perpetuity,” Sheridan said. Or at least until the settlement ends.

But a report commissioned by Snow last year and published on Oct. 8 found that the sheriff’s office had “consistently overstated” costs attributed to compliance under the Melendres settlement.

Sheridan questioned the report, telling Phoenix talk radio station KTAR that its authors “don’t have the expertise” to audit a large government agency. He said his office will hire an independent accountant to dispute the findings. “There’s no fraud here,” he said.

The Republican majority on the county’s Board of Supervisors is calling for an immediate end to court oversight.

“We just have to figure out a way to end this because it seems like it’s never-ending because the judge, they put on a new order, they change things, they move the goalposts, and so we need to resolve this,” Republican Supervisor Debbie Lesko, who represents communities policed by the sheriff’s office, told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica.

But the decision to end court oversight rests solely with Snow. During a recent hearing, the judge was clearly unhappy with a recent community meeting. The court-mandated meetings provide the plaintiffs — all Latino drivers in Maricopa County — a venue to get updates on progress toward reforms and to voice concerns to the sheriff and the monitor team.

At the July gathering, Sheridan’s supporters packed the room and took control, shouting at speakers and interrupting the interpreter’s translations of the discussion into Spanish. The mostly older, white group of Sheridan supporters demanded an end to court oversight, citing the costs. They outnumbered the Latino community members and activists who want to keep the monitor in place until the sheriff’s office proves to Snow it no longer discriminates against Latinos.

Snow said he would host the next community meeting inside the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Sheridan also wants out of the settlement. He believes the strict mandates hinder deputies’ ability to do their jobs. “There’s no law enforcement agency that I’m aware of in this country under the same level of scrutiny,” Sheridan said.

Latino advocates and community members worry complaints about the court mandates and the price tag will become an excuse, distracting from the root issue — the need to end racial profiling by the sheriff’s office.

“When Sheridan tells us that it’s done, I’m not going to take his word for it,” said Reyes, who endured repeated traffic stops when Arpaio was sheriff. “I’m going to wait on the monitor. I’m going to wait for the judge. And when they say, ‘You know what? They are compliant.’ Then I’ll believe it. And even then, it’s going to be suspicious.”
        
             

                                    
        
                        Chelsea Curtis of Arizona Luminaria contributed reporting. Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20250325-Rieser-MaricopaCountySheriff-55-CROP_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:25:56 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>This, County, Was, the, “Model”, for, Local, Police, Carrying, Out, Immigration, Raids., Ended, Civil, Rights, Violations.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Arizona Police Agencies Were Once at the Forefront of Local Immigration Enforcement. Now Most Are Avoiding It.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/arizona-police-agencies-were-once-at-the-forefront-of-local-immigration-enforcement-now-most-are-avoiding-it</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/arizona-police-agencies-were-once-at-the-forefront-of-local-immigration-enforcement-now-most-are-avoiding-it</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
Arizona law enforcement agencies are largely rejecting a fast-growing ICE program that lets local officers act as deportation agents — citing the experience of the state’s largest sheriff’s office, which was booted from the program in 2009 after a federal judge found deputies racially profiled and violated the constitutional rights of Latinos.

Even in Republican-led communities known for backing immigration measures, law enforcement leaders are steering clear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) task force program, which the Trump administration is using to enlist local officers in its mass deportation efforts.

Of at least 106 municipal police departments, sheriff’s offices and county attorneys in the state, nine currently have agreements to cooperate with ICE in making arrests, as of Oct. 15. And only four Arizona departments have signed on since January, amid a national recruitment campaign that has prompted more than 900 agencies to join.
        
    
                    
The program’s explosive nationwide growth follows President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that, among other things, called for local law enforcement to “perform the functions of immigration officers.”

Local police have three ways of participating in the 287(g) program. The first two are through the Jail Enforcement and Warrant Service Officer models, which restrict local collaboration with ICE to people who’ve already been booked into their jails. The third way is through the Task Force Model, in which local officers “serve as a force multiplier” in federal immigration enforcement “during routine police duties,” according to ICE.

ICE did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions.

Half of the agreements in Arizona are for jail enforcement, including the state’s prison system, the only statewide agency. It signed on in 2020. The Republican sheriffs of two Arizona counties that border Mexico, Yuma and Cochise, signed 287(g) warrant service agreements for their jails this year, along with Navajo County, in the far northeast part of the state.

The only local agency in Arizona to sign a task force agreement since ICE revived them in January is the County Attorney’s Office of Pinal County, a Republican stronghold sandwiched between the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas.

ICE, under the Obama administration, suspended all task force agreements in 2012. The move followed a Department of Justice investigation that found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which had a task force agreement under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, used “discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos.” In 2013, a federal judge ruled that under Arpaio the sheriff’s office had discriminated against Latinos during immigration enforcement operations, violating their Fourth and 14th amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures and to equal protection under the law, respectively.

“I’ve never been guilty of anything,” Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica, despite the judge’s rulings. “They went after me. But that’s OK. And you can tell your audience I’ll do it again.”

Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller, a Republican, said he intends to certify four deputies under the task force agreement he signed in August. Miller said these investigators will process immigration violations involving people they encounter during child abuse and drug investigations, instead of waiting on ICE officers. He said he does not foresee them participating in ICE raids.

Miller prosecuted sex crimes in Maricopa County when Arpaio’s 287(g) task force agreement was in effect. He said he remembers the “chaos that ensued from that” and doesn’t want it repeated in Pinal County. “We have zero intention and we will not be participating in any immigration raids or task forces. I just want to make that clear.”

Miller said he spoke with federal officials his agency works with before signing the task force agreement.

“‘Would we be required to join specifically an immigration task force?’ That was my first question, and the answer came back as no,” he said. “If that were one of the prerequisites, I was not going to do the program.”

Starting in October, ICE began reimbursing local agencies with task force agreements for the salaries of certified officers and paying “performance awards” of up to $1,000 per officer.

Miller said money didn’t influence his decision. None of his four deputies will be assigned full time to the 287(g) agreement, he said, only as needed in the course of their other task force investigations.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, a Democrat, believes the financial incentives are a federal ploy to pull local officers away from their everyday duties and direct them to immigration enforcement.

“I consider the program to be illegal,” said Hathaway, whose county shares a border with Mexico. He bases this view on court rulings on Arizona’s landmark 2010 anti-illegal immigration law. The “show me your papers” law was the toughest state immigration law in the nation at the time. But the Supreme Court struck down most of its provisions, leaving in place only one that allows local police to check immigration status as long as it doesn’t prolong the public’s interaction with officers.

“The Supreme Court said this is not in the realm of local law enforcement,” Hathaway said. “This is entirely a federal issue.”

States including Texas and Florida have since enacted laws to more aggressively curb illegal immigration. Florida was also among the first to require all county law enforcement agencies to sign on to the 287(g) program. Other states, largely in the Southeast, have followed suit.

Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature this year passed a similar requirement for its local law enforcement agencies called the Arizona ICE Act. But the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed it.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, a Democrat who runs southern Arizona’s largest sheriff’s department, has vowed not to involve his deputies in deportation arrests. The county shares a 130-mile border with Mexico. Nanos has said his department is instead focused on preventing crime, and to do that it’s imperative his deputies build trust with communities they protect, including migrant ones.

“The stance we take is: ‘Look, you have a job to do and I have a job to do,’” Nanos says in a video released by his office this year. “But clearly immigration laws, enforcement of those laws, that is the federal government’s job.”

In Maricopa County, home to a majority of Arizona’s population, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan says he’s hesitant to have his deputies certified to patrol with ICE, mainly because his office remains under strict court oversight related to its past experiment with the 287(g) program. But Sheridan has endorsed the ICE program’s work inside local jails and said that’s where Maricopa County got it right on cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.
        
    
                            
    
                    
“They’re focusing on the criminal illegal aliens,” he said of local jail partnerships with ICE. “And that’s really what a law enforcement agency should be concerned with, is people that commit crimes here in Maricopa County. And that’s what I’m concerned with.”

Sheridan is working to rebuild trust with Latinos that was broken by Arpaio’s raids and sweeps, beginning when the sheriff’s office entered a 287(g) agreement.

For Hathaway, the Santa Cruz county sheriff, lost trust is his biggest concern with deputies enforcing immigration laws in a border county that’s 83% Latino.

“I don’t want to have any animosity between the local population and our sheriff’s office,” he said. “I want them to trust us and not think just because they’re Hispanic, we’re chasing them.” ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20250325-Rieser-MaricopaCountySheriff-30_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_quality_95_embedColorProfile_true-1.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:25:26 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Arizona, Police, Agencies, Were, Once, the, Forefront, Local, Immigration, Enforcement., Now, Most, Are, Avoiding, It.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/what-you-should-know-about-russ-vought-trumps-shadow-president</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/what-you-should-know-about-russ-vought-trumps-shadow-president</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Andy Kroll                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                



        
                        Join us Nov. 5 for a virtual discussion about our yearlong investigation into Russell Vought. Register now.

        

    
      
  



                    
On the second day of the federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video set to the classic song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult. The star of that video, which quickly went viral, was Russell Vought, the president’s top budget adviser. More than that, Vought is the architect of Trump’s broader plan to fire civil servants, freeze government programs and dismantle entire agencies, and he’s a big reason the second Trump administration has been more effective at accomplishing its goals than the first. In the video shared by Trump, Vought appeared as the scythe-wielding Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C.

Vought’s title is director of the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB directorship is one of the most powerful jobs in Washington, and Vought has used his position to wage a quiet war to change the shape of the entire U.S. government. In Vought’s hands, OMB has acted as a choke point for the funding that Congress approves and agencies rely on to run the government. While he tends to operate behind the scenes as much as possible, his influence in Trump’s second administration is so pronounced that people have described him as akin to a shadow president.

Here are some of the key things you should know about Vought. Read ProPublica’s full investigation here. (Vought declined to be interviewed for the article. A spokesperson for him at OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)
        
    
                        
    
        1. Vought went from the mail room to becoming the chief antagonist of his own party.
    
        
    
                    
A native of Trumbull, Connecticut, and the son of an electrician father and a mother who spent decades in public education before helping to launch a Christian school, Vought got his first job in D.C. politics working in the mail room for Republican Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, a fierce budget hawk known for criticizing members of his own party for breaking what he viewed as core conservative principles. 

As Vought rose through the GOP ranks, eventually going on to advise then-Rep. Mike Pence, he grew disillusioned with members of his party who claimed to care about balanced budgets and spending cuts yet voted to approve bills loaded with pork-barrel spending and corporate giveaways.   

In 2010, he quit Congress and helped launch an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation think tank called Heritage Action for America, which was tasked with strong-arming congressional Republicans to act more conservatively.  

“I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were,” a former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s said.
        
    
                        
    
        2. OMB’s massive power supercharges Vought’s influence.
    
        
    
                    
While the Office of Management and Budget is part of the White House, Vought is a member of Trump’s cabinet along with the secretary of defense and attorney general. OMB director has little of the cachet of those jobs, but it plays a vital role. Every penny appropriated by Congress first passes through the OMB. It also reviews all significant regulations proposed by federal agencies, vets executive orders before the president signs them and issues workplace policies for more than 2 million federal employees.   

“Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB,” explained Sam Bagenstos, a former OMB official during the Biden administration.
        
    
                        
    
        3. Vought’s early work at OMB helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment.
    
        
    
                    
This isn’t Vought’s first stint as OMB director; he held the same position during the first Trump administration.   

In 2019, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, it asked Vought, then acting director, to freeze $214 million in congressionally approved security assistance for Ukraine. He obliged.  

This impoundment, later deemed illegal by the Government Accountability Office, would trigger congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. During that process, Vought refused to cooperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.”  

After the attempt to freeze the Ukraine funds ultimately failed, Vought and Mark Paoletta, an attorney and close ally of Vought’s, spent the years between Trump’s presidencies developing a legal argument that not only are such impoundments legal, but there is a long history of presidents using the power. (Legal experts have disputed Vought’s version of that history.)
        
    
                    

    
        

    
                                
            
        

    



        
    
                        
    
        4. Vought played a surprising role in popularizing the phrase “woke and weaponized.”
    
        
    
                    
In 2021, Vought launched the Center for Renewing America, a think tank devoted to keeping the MAGA movement alive and preparing for a second Trump presidency. According to previously unreported recordings obtained by ProPublica, Vought accepted an assignment from Trump to come up with a way for conservatives to counter Black Lives Matter. He popularized the concept of “woke and weaponized” government — a phrase embraced by GOP politicians and activists to disparagingly label policies, people and even agencies that didn’t fit with the MAGA agenda.   

“If you’re watching television and the words ‘woke and weaponized’ come out of a politician’s mouth, you can know that this is coming ... from the strategies we’re putting out,” Vought boasted in a recording obtained by ProPublica.  

When Vought’s think tank released a federal budget blueprint in 2022, calling for $9 trillion in cuts over 10 years, the word “woke” appeared 77 times across its 103 pages.
        
    
                        
    
        5. Vought’s vision for what would become Project 2025 began during Trump’s first term.
    
        
    
                    
In 2017, while an adviser at OMB, Vought played a lead role in trying to implement a Trump executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. A former OMB senior staffer said Vought initially wanted to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to fold the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with food stamps programs, into a new Department of Welfare. “They wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,” a former OMB analyst said. “There were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn’t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.”  

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries at the time resisted wholesale cuts, and few of the plans reached fruition. But Vought’s suggestions now read like a guide to the second Trump administration, which has gutted both USAID and the CFPB and is hollowing out the Department of Education.    

“I didn’t realize it then,” the former OMB staffer said, “but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.”
        
    
                        
    
        6. Vought’s role shows Project 2025 has indeed shaped the administration.
    
        
    
                    
Vought was a key figure in the work of Project 2025, the coalition of conservative groups that created a roadmap and recruited future appointees for the next Republican administration. He led Project 2025’s transition portion, which included writing some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral,” Vought said in a private 2024 speech.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed to have nothing to do with Project 2025. His campaign aides criticized the initiative, and news reports suggested that Project 2025 leaders would be blacklisted from working in the Trump White House. 

But Vought deftly navigated the controversy, and Trump brought him back to OMB.  Meanwhile, the administration has moved quickly to fulfill many of Project 2025’s policy objectives. Early on in this month’s government shutdown, when Trump announced that he would soon meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to temporarily or permanently cut, he referred to his budget director as “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”
        
    
                        
    
        7. Elon Musk and DOGE often acted at Vought’s direction, insiders say.
    
        
    
                    
Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s wealthiest person, may have grabbed the headlines as his Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to budgets and staffing. But court records, interviews and other accounts from people close to Vought show that DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than previously known, by the OMB director.   

“I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” a former OMB branch chief told ProPublica.
        
    
                            
    
                    
In May, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a group founded by Vought, credited Vought with steering DOGE’s cuts. “DOGE is underneath the OMB,” the official said, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing … was at the direction of Russ.”  

An administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told ProPublica that DOGE showed Vought that it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official said. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.”
        
    
                        
    
        8. Vought has used OMB to try to pressure Democrats into reaching a deal with Republicans to end the shutdown.
    
        
    
                    
Vought has frozen $26 billion in federal funding for infrastructure and clean energy projects in blue states in the days after the federal government shut down on Oct. 1. The government has also followed through on Vought’s earlier threat to fire a massive number of civil servants if the shutdown were not averted.   

“We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told ProPublica. But right now, he added, “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”
        
             

                                    
        
                        Kirsten Berg contributed research. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2025 03:34:09 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>What, You, Should, Know, About, Russ, Vought, Trump’s, Shadow, President</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Idaho Banned Vaccine Mandates. Activists Want to Make It a Model for the Country.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/idaho-banned-vaccine-mandates-activists-want-to-make-it-a-model-for-the-country</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/idaho-banned-vaccine-mandates-activists-want-to-make-it-a-model-for-the-country</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Audrey Dutton                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.”

With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law.
        
    
                    

    
            Watch Leslie Manookian and Allies Celebrate Idaho Medical Freedom Act
        

    
        
            
            
            

    
            (Health Freedom Idaho via Rumble)
    
    
    

            Watch video ➜
        
    
    
        
    
                    
The act makes it illegal for state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools and daycares to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention.”

Whether the law will actually alter day-to-day life in Idaho is an open question, because Idaho already made it easy to get around the few existing vaccination requirements. 

But it could have a significant effect in other states, where rules aren’t already so relaxed. And it comes at a time when diseases once eradicated from the U.S. through vaccination are making a resurgence.

The law runs against one of the hallmarks of modern public health: that a person’s full participation in society depends on their willingness to follow certain rules. (Want to send your child to public school? They’ll need a measles vaccine. Want to work in a retirement community during flu season? You might have to wear a mask.) 

The new Idaho law flips that on its head. It not only removes the obligation to follow such rules, it makes the rules themselves illegal.
        
    
                    
The new law sets Idaho apart from even conservative-leaning South Carolina, where two schools recently quarantined more than 150 unvaccinated children after measles arrived. 

A person can spread measles for four days before symptoms appear. During the South Carolina schools’ quarantine, five students began to show symptoms, but the quarantine kept them from spreading it, the health department said this month.

That precaution would now be illegal in Idaho.

Idaho’s law caught the attention of people who share Manookian’s belief that — contrary to hundreds of years of public health evidence and rigorous regulation in the U.S. — vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent.

It also caught the attention of people like Jennifer Herricks, a pro-vaccine advocate in Louisiana and advocacy director for American Families for Vaccines.

Herricks and her counterparts in other states say that vaccine requirements have “done so much good for our kids and for our communities.”

An analysis published last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that routine childhood vaccines prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the U.S. over three decades, saving $540 billion in direct costs and saving society about $2.7 trillion. The analysis was limited; it didn’t account for the lives and money saved by vaccines for flu or RSV, which kill and hospitalize babies and children each year.

Idaho’s move was “pretty concerning,” Herricks said, “especially seeing the direction that everything is headed at the federal government.”

The law is the culmination of a decade of anti-vaccine activism that got a boost from the pandemic. 

It’s rooted in a belief system that distrusts institutions — government health agencies, vaccine makers, medical societies and others — on the premise that those institutions seek only money and control.

Manookian said in an interview that she believes one person should never be told to risk their health in “the theoretical” service of another. 

Now, Manookian and her allies have a new goal in their sights: to make Idaho’s legislation a nationwide standard.


Idaho was already more permissive than other states when it came to vaccine rules. Parents since at least the 1990s could send unvaccinated children to school if they signed a form saying vaccination went against their religious or personal beliefs. 

That wasn’t good enough for Idahoans who describe themselves as advocates for health freedom. They worked to shift the paradigm, bit by bit, so that it can be easier now for parents to get a vaccine exemption than to show the school their child is actually vaccinated.

In recent years, lawmakers ordered schools and daycare centers to tell parents about the exemptions allowed in Idaho whenever they communicate about immunizations.

The state also decided to let parents exempt their kids by writing a note, instead of having to fill out a form — one that, in the past, required them to acknowledge the risks of going unvaccinated.

(There is conflicting data on whether these changes truly affected vaccination rates or just led more parents to skip the trouble of handing in vaccine records. Starting in 2021, Idaho schools reported a steady drop in the share of kindergartners with documented vaccinations. Phone surveys of parents, by contrast, showed vaccination rates have been largely unchanged.)

An enduring backlash against Idaho’s short-lived COVID-19 mandates gave Manookian’s movement more momentum, culminating this year in what she considered the ultimate step in Idaho’s evolution.

Manookian had a previous career in finance in New York and London. She transitioned to work as a homeopath and advocate, ultimately returning to her home state of Idaho.

The bill she came up with said that almost nobody can be required to have a vaccine or take any test or medical procedure or treatment in order to go to school, get a job or go about life how they’d like to. In practice, that would mean schools couldn’t send unvaccinated kids home, even during a measles outbreak, and private businesses and daycares couldn’t require people on their property to follow public health guidance.

The state had just passed “the Coronavirus Stop Act” in 2023, which banned nearly all COVID-19 vaccine requirements. If lawmakers did that for COVID-19, Manookian reasoned, they could do the same for all communicable diseases and all medical decisions.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Leslie Manookian
    
            (Courtesy of Leslie Manookian)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Her theory was right, ultimately.

The bill she penned in the summer of 2024 made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate in early 2025.

Manookian took to social media to rally support for the legislation as it sat on the desk of Gov. Brad Little.

But the governor vetoed it. In a letter, he explained that he saw the bill as government intrusion on “parents’ freedom to ensure their children stay healthy.” During an outbreak, he said, schools wouldn’t be able to send home students “with highly contagious conditions” like measles.

Manookian tried again days after the veto. In the next version of the bill, protections during a disease outbreak applied only to “healthy” people.

This time, Little signed it.


Weeks after the signing, Manookian joined like-minded advocates on a stage in Washington, D.C., for a launch event for the MAHA Institute, a group with strong ties to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (MAHA stands for Make America Healthy Again.) The new Health and Human Services secretary had denounced vaccines for years before President Donald Trump appointed him.

At the gathering, Manookian announced her next mission: to make it “a societal norm and to codify it in law” that nobody can dictate any other person’s medical choices. 

“We’re going to roll that out to other states, and we’re going to make America free again,” Manookian told the audience in May.

Manookian’s commitment to bring along the rest of the country has continued ever since.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited an Idaho farm with Leslie Manookian and several of her allies in the “health freedom” movement this past summer.
    
            (Screenshot by ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Her nonprofit, the Health Freedom Defense Fund, is now distributing model legislation and a how-to guide, with talking points to persuade legislators. Manookian said in podcast interviews that she is working with the nonprofit Stand For Health Freedom to mobilize activists in every state.

In an interview with ProPublica, Manookian said her objective is for people to “understand and appreciate that the most basic and fundamental of human rights is the right to direct our own medical treatment — and to codify that in law in every state. Breaking that barrier in Idaho proves that it can be done, that Americans understand the importance of this, and the humanity of it, and that it should be done in other states.”

Her efforts were rewarded over the summer with a visit from none other than Kennedy, who visited Boise and toured a farm with Manookian and state lawmakers in tow.

“This state, more than any other state in the country” aligns with the MAHA campaign, Kennedy told reporters at a news conference where no one was allowed to ask questions. Kennedy called Idaho “the home of medical freedom.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment from Kennedy or his staff on Idaho’s law and his visit to the state. 

Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy built into one of the fiercest foes of childhood vaccines, took interest in the Idaho bill early on.

The group promoted the bill as it sat on the governor’s desk, as he vetoed it, then as Manookian worked successfully to get a revived bill through the statehouse and signed into law.

The organization’s online video programming featured Manookian five times in late March and early April. One show’s host told viewers they could follow Idaho in its “very smart strategy” of taking a law against COVID-related mandates, “crossing out ‘COVID,’ making a few other tweaks, and you have an incredible health freedom bill after that.”

Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said she’s known Manookian for more than 15 years and pushed the national organization to publicize Manookian’s work. Holland introduced her at the Washington, D.C., event.

Whereas most states put the onus on unvaccinated people to show why they should opt out of a mandate, Idaho’s legislation made unvaccinated people the norm — shifting the burden of accommodation onto those who support vaccination.

Now, parents of infants too young for a measles vaccine can’t choose a daycare that requires immunization. Parents of immune-compromised students must decide whether to keep their children home from school during an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases, knowing unvaccinated children won’t be quarantined.

Holland said Idaho parents who want their kids to be in a learning environment with “herd immunity” levels of measles vaccination can start a private “association” — not a school, because schools can’t require vaccines — just as parents who don’t like vaccines have done in order to dodge requirements imposed by states like California and New York.

“I think you could certainly do that in Idaho.” Holland said. “It wouldn’t be a public school. It might be the Church of Vaccinia school.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            The Idaho Capitol building, before Gov. Brad Little’s press conference with Kennedy this past July.
    
            (Otto Kitsinger for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    

The day Idaho’s Medical Freedom Act was signed, a legislator in Louisiana brought forward the Louisiana Medical Freedom Act. In a hearing later, she pointed to Idaho as a model.

Louisiana followed Idaho once before in 2024, when it passed a law that requires schools to describe the exemptions available to parents whenever they communicate about immunizations. Idaho had passed an almost identical law three years earlier.

Herricks, the Louisiana pro-vaccine advocate, said she watched the Idaho Medical Freedom Act’s progress with “a lot of concern, seeing how much progress it was making.” Now it’s set a precedent, Herricks said.

Holland, the Children’s Health Defense CEO, said she looks forward to Idaho’s approach spreading.

She pointed to a September announcement by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo that he intends to rid his state of all vaccine mandates. Holland said she expects other Republican-controlled states to take a serious look at the Idaho law. (Ladapo’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It’s a big change,” Holland said. “It’s not just related to vaccines. It’s a blow against the notion that there can be compulsory medicine.”

Some people support the more-than-century-old notion that compelling people to be vaccinated or masked will provide such enormous collective benefits that it outweighs any inconvenience or small incursion on personal liberty. 

Others, like Holland and Manookian, do not.

At the heart of laws like Idaho’s is a sense of, “‘I’m going to do what I want to do for myself, and I don’t want anybody telling me what to do,’ which is in direct contrast to public health,” said Paul Offit, pediatrician and vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. 

Offit, who co-invented a vaccine against rotavirus, is a critic of Kennedy and was removed from a federal vaccine panel in September.

A more fundamental conflict is that some people believe vaccines and other tools to prevent the spread of illness, like masks, are harmful. That belief is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of scientists and health experts, including Kennedy’s own Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC. 

Both tensions are at play in Idaho.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            In April, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed into law the Idaho Medical Freedom Act, which prohibits state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools and daycares to require anyone to take a vaccine.
    
            (Otto Kitsinger for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
As is the case nationally, Idaho’s “health freedom” movement has long pushed back against being labeled “anti-vaccine.” Idaho lawmakers and advocates have stressed that their goals are bodily autonomy and informed choice.

They do not take a stance on the bodily autonomy principle when it comes to abortion, however. Almost all state legislators who voted for the Idaho Medical Freedom Act also voted to ban abortion, if they were in office at both times.

“Every action has to be evaluated on its individual morality,” not on whether it does the most good for the most people, Manookian said.

But Manookian’s rejection of vaccine mandates goes beyond a libertarian philosophy. 

Manookian has said publicly that she thinks vaccines are “poison for profit,” that continuing to let daycares require vaccination would “put our children on the chopping block,” that measles is “positive for the body,” that the virus protects against cancer, and that it can send people “into total remission&quot; — an assertion she made on an Idaho wellness center’s podcast in April.

Manookian told ProPublica she believes infectious diseases have been made “the bogeyman.”

Against those claims, research has shown that having the measles suppresses immunity to other diseases, a phenomenon dubbed “immune amnesia” that can make children who have recovered from measles more susceptible to pneumonia and other bacterial and viral infections. About 20% of unvaccinated people who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who are infected will die from complications of the disease, according to the CDC.

And while researchers have studied using engineered measles viruses in a cancer treatment, those same researchers have written that they were “dismayed to learn” their research has been misconstrued by some who oppose vaccination. They said they “very strongly advise” giving children the measles vaccine, that there “is no evidence that measles infection can protect against cancer” and that measles is “a dangerous pathogen, not suitable for use as a cancer therapy.”

(Manookian said she believes she has evidence for her cancer remission claim but couldn’t readily produce it, adding that she may have been mistaken.)

The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, meanwhile, is safe and highly effective, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others. The CDC says the most common negative reactions are a sore arm, fever or mild rash. Two doses of the vaccine provide near total protection, according to the CDC.

Manookian said she doesn’t believe the research on vaccines has been adequate.

She will have another chance to spread her views from a prominent platform in November, when she’s scheduled to speak at the Children’s Health Defense 2025 conference in Austin, Texas.

She’ll share the stage with celebrities in the anti-vaccine movement: Del Bigtree, communications director for Kennedy’s past presidential campaign; actor Russell Brand; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson; and Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who made headlines for his push to end vaccine mandates in Florida, months after Idaho wrote that concept into law. ]]></description>
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<title>Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force</title>
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<description><![CDATA[ by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.

Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.

“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”

One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”

And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”

During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents — even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no. Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere because the office that once handled them had been dismantled. There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles, there was no way to reliably learn their identities.

Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality: There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere. “It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Santa Ana residents chant about ICE raids during a City Council meeting in June.
    
            (Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.

And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.

One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”
        
    
                    
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”

The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”

Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance. Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department.

The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.

The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.

The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement.

Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000.

“Supercharging this law enforcement agency and at the same time you have oversight being eliminated?” said the former DHS official. “This is very scary.”

Michelle Brané, a longtime human rights attorney who directed DHS’ ombudsman office during the Biden administration, said Trump’s adherence to “the authoritarian playbook is not even subtle.”

“ICE, their secret police, is their tool,” Brané said. “Once they have that power, which they have now, there’s nothing stopping them from using it against citizens.”

Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, refuted descriptions of ICE as a secret police force. She called such comparisons the kind of “smears and demonization” that led to the recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas, in which a gunman targeted an ICE transport van and shot three detained migrants, two of them fatally, before killing himself.

In a written response to ProPublica, McLaughlin dismissed the current and former national security officials and scholars interviewed by ProPublica as “far-left champagne socialists” who haven’t seen ICE enforcement up close.

“If they had,” she wrote, “they would know when our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs” and other criminals.

McLaughlin said the recruiting blitz is not compromising standards. She wrote that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is ready for 11,000 new hires by the beginning of next year and that training has been streamlined and boosted by technology. “Our workforce never stops learning,” McLaughlin wrote.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also praised ICE conduct and accused Democrats of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”

“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Trump pick who fired nearly the entire civil rights oversight staff, said the move was in response to CRCL functioning “as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” according to a DHS spokesperson.

Trump also eliminated the department’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with flagging inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of the apprehended immigrants are held. The office was resurrected after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s sparsely staffed.

The hobbling of the office comes as the White House embarks on an aggressive expansion of detention sites with an eye toward repurposing old jails or building new ones with names that telegraph harsh conditions: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.

“It is a shocking situation to be in that I don’t think anybody anticipated a year ago,” said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. “We might’ve thought that we were going to see a slide, but I don’t think anybody anticipated how quickly it would transpire, and now people at all levels are scrambling to figure out how to push back.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Scenes from the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building’s U.S. Immigration Court in New York City, where federal agents working for ICE detain immigrants and asylum-seekers reporting for court proceedings
    
            (Charly Triballeau, Michael M. Santiago and Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“Authoritarian Playbook”
Frantz and other scholars who study anti-democratic political systems in other countries said there are numerous examples in which ICE’s activities appear cut from an authoritarian playbook. Among them was the detention of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was apprehended after co-writing an op-ed for the campus paper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza. ICE held her incommunicado for 24 hours and then shuffled her through three states before jailing her in Louisiana.

“The thing that got me into the topic of ‘maybe ICE is a secret police force’?” said Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian political science professor who studies authoritarianism. “It was that daylight snatching of the Tufts student.”

Morgenbesser was also struck by the high-profile instances of ICE detaining elected officials who attempted to stand in their way. Among them, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained for demanding a judicial warrant from ICE, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference.

And David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor who researches policing and democracy, said it appears that ICE’s agents are allowed to operate with complete anonymity. “It’s not just that people can’t see faces of the officers,” Sklansky said. “The officers aren’t wearing shoulder insignia or name tags.”

U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, recently pointed out that use of masked law enforcement officers had long been considered anathema to American ideals. In a blistering ruling against the administration’s arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, he wrote, “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.” The Trump administration has said it will appeal that ruling.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Federal agents stand guard outside an ICE detention facility in Newark, N.J. The Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard units at immigration facilities, escalating its use of the military as part of the president’s immigration crackdown.
    
            (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times/Redux)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Where the Fallout is Felt
The fallout is being felt in places like Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where ICE apprehended 47 people, including nine children, during a birthday celebration in the early morning of April 1.

The agency’s only disclosure about the raid in Dripping Springs describes the operation as part of a yearlong investigation targeting “members and associates believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.”

Six months later, the county’s top elected official told ProPublica the federal government has ignored his attempts to get answers.

“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat. “By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”

In the raid, a Texas trooper secured a search warrant that allowed law enforcement officers to breach the home, an Airbnb rental on a vast stretch of land in the Hill Country. Becerra told ProPublica he believes the suspicion of drugs at the party was a pretense to pull people out of the house so ICE officers who lacked a warrant could take them into custody. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has yet to produce evidence supporting claims of gang involvement, said Karen Muñoz, a civil rights attorney helping families track down their relatives who were jailed or deported. While some court documents are sealed, nothing in the public record verifies the gang affiliation DHS cited as the cause for the birthday party raid.

“There’s no evidence released at all that any person kidnapped at that party was a member of any organized criminal group,” Muñoz said.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, did not respond to questions about Hays County and other raids where families and attorneys allege a lack of transparency and due process.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            ICE agents knock on the door of a residence during a multiagency enforcement operation in Chicago in January.
    
            (Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In Plain Sight
Months after ICE’s widely publicized raids, fear continues to envelop Santa Ana, a majority-Hispanic city with a large immigrant population. Amezcua, the mayor, said the raids have complicated local policing and rendered parents afraid to pick up their children from school. The city manager, a California-born citizen and Latino, carries with him three government IDs, including a passport.

Raids of car washes and apartment buildings continue, but the community has started to “push back,” Amezcua said. “Like many other communities, the neighbors come out. People stop in the middle of traffic.”

With so few institutional checks on ICE’s powers, citizens are increasingly relying on themselves. On at least one occasion in nearby Downey, a citizen’s intervention had some effect.

On June 12, Melyssa Rivas had just started her workday when a colleague burst into her office with urgent news: “ICE is here.”

The commotion was around the corner in Rivas’ hometown, a Los Angeles suburb locals call “Mexican Beverly Hills” for its stately houses and affluent Hispanic families. Rivas, 31, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, belongs to Facebook groups where residents share updates about cultural festivals, church programs and, these days, the presence of Trump’s deportation foot soldiers.

Rivas had seen posts about ICE officers sweeping through LA and figured Downey’s turn had come. She and her co-worker rushed toward the sound of screaming at a nearby intersection. Rivas hit “record” on her phone as a semicircle of trucks and vans came into view. She filmed at least half a dozen masked men in camouflage vests encircling a Hispanic man on his knees.

Her unease deepened as she registered details that “didn’t seem right,” Rivas recalled in an interview. She said the parked vans had out-of-state plates or no tags. The armed men wore only generic “police” patches, and most were in street clothes. No visible insignia identified them as state or federal — or even legal authorities at all.

“When is it that we just decided to do things a different way? There’s due process, there’s a legal way, and it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore,” Rivas said. “Where are human rights?”
        
    
                            
    
                    
Video footage shows Rivas and others berating the officers for complicity in what they called a “kidnapping.” Local news channels later reported that the vehicles had chased the man after a raid at a nearby car wash.

“I know half of you guys know this is fucked up,” Rivas was recorded telling the officers.

Moments later, the scene took a turn. As suddenly as they’d arrived, the officers returned to their vehicles and left, with no apology and no explanation to the distraught man they left on the sidewalk.

Through a mask, one of them said, “Have a good day.” ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/h_31.RC29OCADCT05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 18 Oct 2025 10:35:52 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Unfettered, and, Unaccountable:, How, Trump, Building, Violent, Shadowy, Federal, Police, Force</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Fresh video casts doubt on March for Australia NSN claims</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/fresh-video-casts-doubt-on-march-for-australia-nsn-claims</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/fresh-video-casts-doubt-on-march-for-australia-nsn-claims</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A previously unreported video has emerged, appearing to show a key March for Australia organiser coordinating with a Neo-Nazi at the first rally in Sydney in August.The video shows national organiser Bec Walker, who also goes by Bec Freedom online, appearing to confer with a prominent member of Neo-Nazi group National Socialist Network (NSN) about who should hold the rally&#039;s main banner. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/2e7a5f6fb530483e7d9de972f50c9fec" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 18 Oct 2025 07:21:27 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Fresh, video, casts, doubt, March, for, Australia, NSN, claims</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>House Rep Demands Answers About Delayed EPA Report on PFNA, a Toxic Forever Chemical</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/house-rep-demands-answers-about-delayed-epa-report-on-pfna-a-toxic-forever-chemical</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/house-rep-demands-answers-about-delayed-epa-report-on-pfna-a-toxic-forever-chemical</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Sharon Lerner                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
What Happened: The ranking member of a key House subcommittee demanded answers this week from the Environmental Protection Agency about why it has yet to make public a report documenting the health risks posed by a forever chemical found in the water of millions of Americans.

In a letter sent to the EPA on Thursday, Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, cited a ProPublica story from last week that quoted government scientists saying the report had been ready for publishing in April but had yet to be released. Pingree — the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies — asked EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for “clear answers” about why the report had not been made public, who directed its delay and when Zeldin would commit to releasing it.  

What They Said: Pingree referred to the delay in publishing the report as part of “a growing pattern of interference with the Agency’s scientific work” and pointed to the Integrated Risk Information System, the EPA program that wrote it. IRIS, which was created during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, analyzes the health harm chemicals can cause. “The Trump Administration, Republicans in Congress, and industry have been hostile to the IRIS program,” she wrote, asking whether scientists had been removed or reassigned from the program and, if so, why.

Her letter also noted that the “delay in issuing the PFNA report coincided with EPA’s decision, in May of this year, to rescind” drinking water limits for PFNA and several other forever chemicals, also known as PFAS. “This seems to be more than coincidence given that there has been strong industry pushback on regulating PFAS,” Pingree wrote.

Pingree noted that the delay appears to contradict Zeldin’s repeated public statements about protecting the public from PFAS compounds, which contaminate soil and water in Maine and throughout the country. “Our state is really hoping for help from the federal government. And when you see the federal government turn their back on you and decide to withhold the data … that’s really discouraging,” she told ProPublica. “Reading that piece made my blood boil.”

Background: PFNA is in drinking water systems serving some 26 million people. The report in question found that the chemical interferes with human development by causing lower birth weights and, based on animal evidence, likely causes damage to the liver and to male reproductive systems, including reductions in testosterone levels, sperm production and the size of reproductive organs.

PFNA was a component of firefighting foam and a processing aid to make a kind of plastic used in circuit boards, valves and pipes. Although it was subject to a voluntary phaseout almost two decades ago, the chemical is now widespread in the environment.

ProPublica’s reporting found that IRIS has been drastically reduced under the Trump administration. The program, which calculates values that can be used to set limits for pollutants in drinking water and cleanup levels for toxic sites, has been a frequent target of industry. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has set the direction for President Donald Trump’s second administration, called for IRIS to be eliminated. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress introduced legislation called the “No IRIS Act.” Of 55 EPA scientists Publica identified as having worked on recent IRIS assessments, only eight remain in the office, according to a source familiar with the program.
        
    
                    
Why It Matters: The report calculated the amount of PFNA that people can be exposed to without being harmed — a critical measurement that can be used to set limits for cleaning up PFNA in contaminated areas called Superfund sites and for removing the chemical from drinking water. This calculation will prove critical to communities around the country as they battle polluters over who will pay to remove PFNA and other forever chemicals from the environment.

Response: Last week, an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica that the report on PFNA would be published when it was finalized but did not answer questions about what still needed to be done or when that would likely happen. The agency’s press office did not respond to questions about Pingree’s letter. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:23:57 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>House, Rep, Demands, Answers, About, Delayed, EPA, Report, PFNA, Toxic, Forever, Chemical</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Shadow President</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-shadow-president</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-shadow-president</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Andy Kroll                
                                             

        
                        This story is exempt from ProPublica’s Creative Commons license until Dec. 19, 2025.

        

    


                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                



        
                        Join us Nov. 5 for a virtual discussion about our yearlong investigation into Russell Vought. Register now.

        

    
      
  



                    
On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-­wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.” 

The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.”

After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the ­aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            “The President loved Russ because he could count on him,” said OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta of Vought, seen at the microphone in the White House in 2019.
    
            (Evan Vucci/AP Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-­funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the USIP was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the OMB to dismantle the organization.)

The OMB staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than $7 billion that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, ­including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused USAID of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of 50%.
        
    
                    
Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: Less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the ­meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the OMB staff. ­Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-­energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-­making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”
        
    
                    

At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the president’s blessing, purging people and programs seen as “woke” or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire’s plan to bring the federal government to heel.

But, according to court records, interviews and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the OMB director. Musk bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” but the details of the agency’s downsizing were ironed out by Vought’s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, OMB veterans saw Vought’s influence at work. “I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” the former OMB branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump’s first term. “DOGE is underneath the OMB,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing ... was at the direction of Russ.”

Vought, who declined to be interviewed for this story, voiced concerns about some of DOGE’s tactics — canceling budget items that the OMB had wanted to keep, for instance — but he mostly saw the department as a useful battering ram. An administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told me that DOGE showed Vought it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official told me. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.” 

Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. ... I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”
        
    
                        

        
            Listen to Vought Talk About Christian Nationalism
        

        
        
        

    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    


    
        
    
                    
The central struggle of our time, he says, pits the defenders of this “post-­constitutional” order — what he calls the “cartel” or the “regime,” which in his telling includes Democrats and Republicans — against a group of “radical constitutionalists” fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the presidency and, ultimately, the people. Vought counts himself as a member of the latter group, which, in his view, also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
        
    
                    
The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump. In Vought’s view, Trump, the subject of four indictments during his time out of office, is a singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state. “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said in his 2024 speech. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.” As Bannon put it, sitting onstage with Vought at a closed-door conference in 2023, Trump is “a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.” 

In Vought’s vision for the U.S. government, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections and civil rights. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. All of this puts Vought at the center of what Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described to me as the Trump administration’s “complete disregard” for the law. “The president has no authority to not spend money Congress has appropriated — that’s not a debate,” he told me. “The president has no authority to fire civil servants who are protected by statute — that’s not a debate.” He added, “We are seeing exertions of executive power the likes of which we have never seen in this country.”


Vought, who is 49, has spent his entire adult life in Washington. He met his wife, Mary, on Capitol Hill, where they both eventually worked for Mike Pence, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana. (The Voughts divorced in 2023.) Yet, after nearly 30 years in the nation’s capital, he still views himself as an outsider. He once described his upbringing, in Trumbull, Connecticut, as “blue collar” and his parents as part of America’s “forgotten men and women.” 

Vought’s father, Thurlow, served in the Marines and worked as an electrician. His mother, Margaret, spent more than 20 years as a schoolteacher and administrator. Before they married each other, Vought’s parents had both been widowed in their 30s and left to raise families on their own; Russ was their only child together. In 1981, when Russ was 4, one of Thurlow’s daughters died in a car crash. Not long after the accident, Thurlow had a religious awakening. “That completely changed the direction of our immediate family,” one of Vought’s half sisters later wrote on social media.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Vought as a senior in the 1998 yearbook of Wheaton College
    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Vought’s mother helped launch a Christian school, where the curriculum relied heavily on the Bible. One history book the school considered using included the instruction to “Defend the statement that all governmental power and authority come from God.” America was built on Judeo-­Christian values, she told a local newspaper, and if the American people gave up on those values “then they’re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.”

Vought attended a private Christian high school, then went to Illinois to study at Wheaton College, which is known as the “evangelical Harvard.” He moved to Washington after graduation and, in 1999, landed a job in the office of Phil Gramm, a Republican senator from Texas. Vought, who started in the mailroom, would later say that working for Gramm laid the “conservative foundation” for the rest of his life.

Gramm was an uncompromising budget hawk. He was famous for the “Dickey Flatt test,” named after a printer Gramm knew in Texas. For every dollar of federal spending, Gramm said, lawmakers must ask themselves: Did it improve the lives of people like Dickey Flatt? (In Gramm’s estimation, the answer was often no; every year, he introduced legislation designed to ruthlessly slash the budget.) Years later, when Vought testified before Congress, he said that people like his parents “have always been my test for federal spending. Did a particular program or spending increase help the nameless wagon pullers across our country, working hard at their job, trying to provide for their family and future?”

Under Gramm’s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late 2000s, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, “I would say, ‘If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, I’m telling you it’s 95% wrong.’” A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s told me, “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.” 

In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous “Mandate for Leadership” governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose — to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.

Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action’s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought’s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear ­weapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action’s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that ­Sen. Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grassroots, and poured millions of dollars
into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the “suicide caucus,” and their protest led to a 16-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.

Heritage Action saw the 2016 presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group’s CEO, Michael Needham, openly supported Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race.”

Vought and Trump couldn’t have been more different: One was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-­divorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the OMB, where he’d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm’s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the OMB’s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, “God had other plans.”


In March 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman, served as Trump’s first budget director, but, inside the OMB, Vought took the lead. According to a former senior staffer at the agency, Vought initially pushed for the president’s plan to eliminate USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also wanted to fold the Department of Health and Human Services, along with food stamps programs, into a new Department of Health and Public Welfare. “They wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,” a former OMB analyst told me. In one meeting, according to a person in the room, Vought asked, “Why do we do economic assistance abroad at all?” The former OMB analyst said, “There were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn’t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.” 

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries resisted wholesale cuts. The former senior staffer recalled, “The general counsels at these agencies are calling the White House counsel and saying, ‘We’re not trying to introduce legislation to delete ourselves, are we?’” Few of the recommendations in Vought’s final reorganization plan, which was released in 2018, were implemented. But the document now reads like a guide to the second Trump administration. “I didn’t realize it then,” the former OMB senior staffer told me, “but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.” 

Vought increasingly clashed with the OMB’s staff over proposed cuts to popular programs. Meals on Wheels, the food delivery program, was a topic of intense debate. Even after OMB staff explained how the program, which received more than $900 million in funding from Congress, acted as a lifeline for homebound seniors, Vought and Mulvaney pushed for major cuts that would have hobbled its operations, according to the former OMB senior staffer. The staffer added that it was often hard to reconcile Vought’s deeply held Christian faith — he hosted a prayer session for select colleagues — with his eagerness to cut programs that helped the vulnerable. “It always struck me as a strange thing,” the person said. “There’s compassion, but it only extends to certain people.”

In 2018, Mark Paoletta, a former attorney in the George H.W. Bush White House, joined the OMB as general counsel. Paoletta was best known for publicly defending Clarence Thomas, who, during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in 1991, was accused of sexual harassment by his former colleague Anita Hill. Paoletta had worked on Capitol Hill, then entered private practice, where he advised politicians under scrutiny by Congress. Paoletta and Vought quickly forged an alliance. The former OMB branch chief told me that the office’s culture changed after Paoletta arrived. “There was a shift that we were all deep state,” he said. “They thought we were pushing back because we had our own leftist-leaning agenda.” (Paoletta declined to comment.)

It was Vought’s idea to use an obscure budgetary maneuver called a rescission to claw back funds that Congress had already appropriated, according to Paoletta’s remarks at the conservative policy summit. In 2018, at Vought’s urging, Trump sent Congress the largest rescission request in decades, asking lawmakers to roll back more than $15 billion, including money for USAID’s Ebola response, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and an Energy Department loan program for auto manufacturing. OMB employees “looked at us like we were crazy,” Paoletta said. “They just thought it was something they didn’t do.” Once again, Vought’s own party thwarted him: The measure failed by a single vote in the Republican-held Senate.

Vought also encountered resistance inside the White House. When Congress refused to give Trump billions in funding to construct new border fencing, Vought and Paoletta devised a novel strategy. Trump could declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him the authority to seize money from other parts of the government. According to Paoletta, John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff, kept the plan from Trump. Paoletta said that Kelly’s message to the OMB was “We don’t want to tell the president he has that authority, because God knows what he’ll do.” 

Eventually, Trump ­badgered Mulvaney, the OMB director, to find him the money for his wall. Mulvaney told the president that he’d been trying to meet with him about the issue, but that Kelly had blocked him. Within days, Trump replaced Kelly with Mulvaney. Vought took over as the acting director of the OMB, and money from the Defense Department was tapped to fund the wall. (Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.)

Under Vought, the OMB produced budgets that called for more cuts than any in modern history. Congress all but ignored them. A former staffer in the OMB’s legislative affairs office recalled that Republicans didn’t believe Trump cared about the sweeping reductions included in his own annual budgets. “They kept saying, ‘The president’s not really pushing this or that cut — that’s a Russ Vought thing, isn’t it?’” the legislative affairs staffer said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Vought in 2019, a few months before he agreed to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to Ukraine, a step that helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment
    
            (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In July 2019, Trump asked the OMB to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to the government of Ukraine. The request coincided with a phone call Trump had with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump pressured him to investigate Biden and Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The money for Ukraine had already been approved by Congress, but Vought agreed to hold back the funds. Paoletta signed off on a memo authorizing the freeze. Under the law, the move was known as an impoundment. (The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, later deemed it illegal.)

Any fan of “Schoolhouse Rock!” knows that the first job assigned to Congress in the Constitution is the power of the purse. The president, meanwhile, must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully ­executed,” according to Article 2 of the Constitution. Most legal scholars interpret this to mean that the president’s duty is to spend the money Congress appropriates, and that the president does not have the power to withhold funds. In 1969, William Rehnquist, the conservative future Supreme Court chief justice, wrote that the impoundment power was “supported by neither reason nor precedent.”

The question of impoundment’s legality came to a head in the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon withheld billions in congressio­nally approved funds for environmental ­cleanup efforts. Courts undid Nixon’s actions, and Congress eventually passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which outlawed the maneuver, leaving only narrow exceptions — rescissions — that required congressional sign-off. (Democrats are calling for restrictions on the rescission process as part of the current shutdown negotiations.) Over the years, the Impoundment Control Act would come to be viewed as sacrosanct at the OMB. That didn’t stop Vought. “I had been personally told, ‘Look, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going,’” Vought later said of the Ukraine funding in an interview with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “It was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”

The impoundment triggered congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. (Ukraine eventually received the money.) Vought refused to cooperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.” One of the impeachment articles named Vought, saying that the president had pressured him and others not to respond to subpoenas. Trump, for his part, continued to express support for impoundment, calling it the “secret weapon” that could tame the “bloated federal bureaucracy.”


In early 2021, on one of the final days of Trump’s first term, Vought visited him in the Oval Office. Both men felt a sense of unfinished business, Vought would later recall. Only a few months earlier, when Vought was sworn in as the OMB director, Trump had told him that, after 3 1/2 years as president, he had finally got the hang of the job. “Russ, we’ve got to get another term,” Trump said. “We finally figured out how to do this.”

Vought, frustrated by what he saw as years of obstruction by civil servants, had recently pushed through a new policy to vastly expand the number of at-will employees in the government, making them easier to fire. But the COVID-19 pandemic had dashed any chance of leaving the government smaller than he’d found it. Trump had signed trillion-­dollar stimulus bills to prop up the American economy; by the time he left office, the national debt had swelled by $7.8 trillion. After the violence on Jan. 6, a second Trump term looked less likely than ever. Vought, however, had not given up hope.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Before Vought, second from left, departed at the end of Trump’s first term, the president asked him to find a way to counter the Black Lives Matter movement. As Vought would later say, “I’m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.”
    
            (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In the Oval Office, he told Trump that he would soon launch a new political operation that would keep the MAGA movement alive while attacking the policies of the incoming Biden administration. Trump blessed the venture, with one request. That summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, national protests had forced a racial reckoning in the country. Trump wanted Vought, who as OMB director had scrubbed training materials for federal employees of any references to “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” to find a way for conservatives to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. “This was an assignment I was given from President Trump,” Vought later recalled. “I’m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.”
        
    
                        

        
            Listen to Vought: “If I Can Talk About Race, You Can Talk About Race”
        

        
        
        

    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    


    
        
    
                    
A few days after Trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank that aspired to act as an incubator for future Republican administrations. Its activist arm, Citizens for Renewing America, would mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure elected officials to embrace the think tank’s agenda. The overarching goal, Vought wrote in an op-ed for The Federalist, was to “restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.” 

At the Center for Renewing America, Vought surrounded himself with other radical constitutionalists from the first Trump administration. He brought on Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who had tried to use his agency to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. (A D.C. disciplinary board recently recommended that Clark, who now works at the OMB, lose his law license as punishment for those efforts, an outcome that Clark is appealing and that his lawyer called a “travesty of justice.”) Kash Patel, Trump’s current FBI director, and Ken Cuccinelli, a top immigration official in the first Trump administration, joined as senior fellows. Working at the center, Cuccinelli explained at the conservative policy summit, allowed him to “stake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.” 

The Center for Renewing America’s ideas included how the president could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests, how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress, and how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers en masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the OMB and of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and counter internal pushback. In his 2024 address, Vought explained, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.” 

Vought and his colleagues at the center also worked closely with the House Freedom Caucus to urge other congressional Republicans to use government shutdowns as a way of forcing through major policy changes. One of their first targets was critical race theory, a once obscure academic concept that had become a flashpoint during the 2020 racial ­justice protests.

According to previously unreported recordings of briefings held by Citizens for Renewing America, Vought said that he had pressured members of the Freedom Caucus to yoke a ban on critical race theory to must-pass bills on raising the debt limit and funding the government. “We have to have a speaker that goes into these funding fights with a love for the shutdowns,” Vought said during a November 2022 briefing call, “because they create an opportunity to save the country.” 

But Republicans never shut down the government during the Biden presidency, and Vought grew increasingly frustrated with them for not using more aggressive tactics. On one briefing call, he praised Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat from Missouri, after she camped out for several days on the Capitol steps to protest the end of a pandemic-­era moratorium on evictions. Vought called her politics “very, very bad,” but he admired her methods: “We need this from Republicans.” 

The centerpiece of Vought’s work during the Biden years was his campaign to popularize the concept of “woke and weaponized” government. The tagline brought together two of Vought’s rallying cries: “woke” policies, like diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and transgender rights, and a “weaponized” FBI and Justice Department that had allegedly been wielded against the Democrats’ political enemies, including, most notably, Trump. When the Center for Renewing America released a federal budget blueprint in late 2022, calling for nearly $9 trillion in cuts in the course of 10 years, the word “woke” appeared 77 times across 103 pages.

Jessica Riedl, a budget expert who works for the conservative Manhattan Institute, told me that it was “just silly” to claim, as the Center for Renewing America’s budget did, that Veterans Affairs, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and farm subsidies required enormous cuts for being too woke. “It’s a way to dress up spending cuts that aren’t popular on their own merits,” Riedl said. Vought described his framing as an attempt to “change paradigms.” “We have to be able to defund agencies,” he said in the private speech in 2023. “That is why these things have to be indelibly linked, and that is why we are focussing so much on ‘woke and weaponized.’”
        
    
                        

        
            Listen to Vought Talk About Using the Phrase “Woke and Weaponized”
        

        
        
        

    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    


    
        
    
                    

Any hope that Vought had of implementing his ideas in a second Trump administration nearly ran aground last summer. He had written a chapter of Project 2025’s 887-page report, arguing for an expansion of executive power that would put the Justice Department and other traditionally independent agencies fully under presidential control. Center for Renewing America fellows had written two more chapters in the report. But, as Election Day neared, Project 2025 became a liability for the Trump campaign. Polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed its most aggressive proposals, including removing the abortion drug mifepristone from the market, eliminating the Department of Education and implementing Vought’s plan to more easily fire nonpolitical federal workers. As criticism of Project 2025 grew, Trump insisted that he knew “nothing” about it, while also claiming that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” 

The month before the election, Politico reported that Donald Trump Jr., had compiled a list of people who would not be allowed to serve in a second Trump administration, including a number of leading contributors to Project 2025. But, according to a former Trump campaign official with close ties to the White House, Vought deftly navigated the controversy. “Russ is a consummate team player,” the official told me. “He was the one person at Project 2025 that we could have a conversation with during the course of the campaign.”

A week after Trump’s victory, the president-­elect announced his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said in a statement. He tapped two of his biggest backers to run it: Elon Musk, who had donated nearly $300 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly ran for president on an anti-woke platform. Two days after the announcement, Vought met with Musk and Ramaswamy at Mar-a-Lago. Vought and Musk “hit it off,” according to The New York Times; both were “on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible.” Soon after the meeting, Trump nominated Vought to run the OMB.

One of DOGE’s first targets was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB had first been proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who, as a law professor, argued for the creation of a regulator that could protect Americans from predatory mortgages and hidden fees. Created by law in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the bureau developed a reputation as an aggressive enforcer of fair lending and consumer ­protection laws. The bureau’s work has led to nearly $20 billion in direct relief to consumers and $5 billion in civil penalties for alleged wrongdoing. For Vought, the bureau embodied the gross regulatory overreach that he loathed; outside of government, the agency’s biggest foes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, were major funders of Trump’s second campaign.

On Feb. 7, Trump named Vought the bureau’s acting director, a role he would perform on top of his duties at the OMB. That morning, a small team of DOGE staffers arrived at the CFPB’s headquarters. According to previously unreported emails and depositions, the members of DOGE took orders from Vought as they disabled the CFPB’s website and decided which of the agency’s employees to fire. Musk weighed in on X: “CFPB RIP.”

Trump had targeted the CFPB during his first term. “There were days in Trump One where it felt like we were getting punched in the face,” one longtime employee told me. Over time, however, the president seemed to lose interest, and the CFPB’s last ­director under Trump, a political appointee named Kathy Kranin­ger, supported the bureau’s mission. In 2020, under Kraninger, the CFPB filed the second-­highest number of enforcement actions in its nearly 10-year existence.

Current and former CFPB staff told me that they assumed a second Trump administration would look like the first one. “Generally, we thought there would be a conservative agenda we’d be handed, and we’d figure out how to enact it,” the veteran employee said. Soon after taking over, Vought informed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, which funds the CFPB, that the agency would not need any more money. He barred CFPB employees from doing most types of work and told them not to go to the office. When confusion arose over what duties, if any, remained for the staff to do, Vought clarified the matter in a Feb. 10 email, telling employees to “stand down from performing any work task.”

In the following weeks, Vought and Paoletta stopped oversight activities, quashed ongoing investigations and froze active enforcement cases, which included matters involving some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Capital One. Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under Biden, said that Vought’s actions had put the CFPB “in a coma.” The bureau’s top enforcement officer resigned in June, writing in a letter to colleagues that the CFPB’s leadership “has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way.”

The final blow came when Vought announced a plan to lay off more than 80% of the CFPB’s employees. A federal appeals court ruled in August that the mass-firing plan could proceed. It took Vought four months to accomplish what the previous Trump administration had been unable to do in four years. 

The unwinding of the CFPB, however, was quickly overshadowed by another Vought victory. That same month, he completed his assault on foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been running what was left of USAID, announced that, with Trump’s approval, he had empowered Vought to officially eliminate the agency. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Rubio announced. “Congrats, Russ.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Vought’s agency is “like a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,” a former OMB employee said. “You can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.”
    
            (Kenny Holston/The New York Times/Redux)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    

Four months before the 2024 election, the Center for Renewing America had welcomed a small group of congressional staffers to its headquarters, a few blocks from the Capitol. Some of them worked for the House and Senate budget committees, which every year help set spending levels for the federal government. The purpose of the meeting was to brief the staffers on the center’s latest policy fight — an attempt to build the case for the use of impoundment.

At the briefing, Paoletta argued that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. Spending laws passed by Congress were a ceiling, not a floor, Paoletta argued, according to a person in the room. In that view — which most legal experts dismiss as a fringe position — the White House is not permitted to spend more than a law calls for, but it has the power to spend far less. “Congress passes statutes episodically, and often with conflicting purposes and demands,” Paoletta later wrote in an essay for the Center for Renewing America. “It is left to the President and his subordinates to harmonize their execution in a coherent manner.”

According to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, the Trump administration has since frozen or canceled more than $410 billion in funding on everything from energy subsidies for low-income households and Head Start after-school programs to President George W. Bush’s HIV-reduction initiative, PEPFAR, and artists’ grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vought directed the National Institutes of Health to withhold — illegally, according to the Government Accountability Office — an estimated $15 billion in grants for outside research projects. The NIH also moved to cap funding for so-called indirect costs, which research universities rely on to pay for their buildings, utilities and administrative staff. Scientists I interviewed said that these cuts would inevitably lead to less medical research, including into a drug that Vought’s ex-wife credited with improving the life of their 11-year-old daughter, who was born with cystic fibrosis. A scientist who receives government funding to study cystic ­fibrosis treatment told me that, without sufficient money for indirect costs, “we probably won’t be able to do the research and will have to relinquish the grants.” 

The OMB claims that it is vetting federal spending to ensure that the money does not fund “woke” programs. “We can confirm that President Trump and Director Vought are carefully scrutinizing spending that has previously run on autopilot or worse — toward transing our kids, the Green New Scam, and funding our own country’s invasion — just as the president promised,” an OMB spokesperson told the Times in August. But blocking funds is also a way to pressure officials and agencies to comply with the administration’s demands. “OMB is like a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,” Lester Cash, a former OMB employee, told me. “You can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.”

In March, the OMB took down a legally mandated public website that made it possible to track the funding freezes. The move elicited a rare show of bipartisanship. In a letter to Vought, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees urged him to “restore public access to apportionment data in accordance with statute.” Vought said the information listed on the site was “predecisional” and a risk to national security. The OMB restored the site only when a judge ruled that taking it down was illegal, saying that the government’s position relied “on an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power.”

The OMB’s funding freezes have wreaked havoc. On June 30, the Department of Education told state agencies that congressional appropriations for after-school activities and English-as-a-second-language instruction would not arrive the next day, as planned. The unexpected shortfall affected thousands of school districts, which served millions of students, in all 50 states. The administration only backed down after both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move. “When something’s been appropriated, signed into law, and people are writing contracts based on the commitment of the federal government, and then they don’t know if they’re going to get it or not, it creates such chaos,” Don Bacon, a Republican House member from Nebraska, told me. “I’m not sure what the OMB director thought he was doing.” (A spokesperson for Vought at the OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Vought faces senators this summer during an Appropriations Committee hearing on the administration’s proposed $9 billion rescission, which was later voted into law, of foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
    
            (Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Reuters)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In June, Trump sent a rescission request to Congress, seeking to cancel roughly $9 billion in funding for foreign aid and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS, and other public radio and TV stations nationwide. The programs were viewed, the senior agency official told me, as “soft targets,” a test to see if Vought could persuade Republicans to put aside their concerns about undermining Congress’ power of the purse. Unlike in Trump’s first term, Vought’s rescission plan succeeded. The measure, which faced opposition from Democrats and a few Republicans, passed after Vice President JD Vance cast two tie-­breaking procedural votes. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, told me, “You’ve basically said to Congress, ‘Hey, compromise all you want, but we’re going to undo that in the way we want as soon as you’ve signed the bill.’” 

On the Friday before Labor Day, Vought made his most audacious move yet. The White House sent Congress a new rescissions package, targeting nearly $5 billion in foreign aid. But this time Vought informed lawmakers that he didn’t need their approval. He asserted that the president could make the request, putting a temporary freeze on the funds, then simply wait for the fiscal year to expire, on Sept. 30, at which point the money would be canceled out. Vought called it a “pocket rescission,” but it was impoundment by another name. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it was a “clear violation of the law.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
The Government Accountability Office can sue the OMB over an impoundment or pocket rescission to get the money released. In April, Gene Dodaro, who leads the Government Accountability Office, testified that his office had opened 39 investigations into potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act by the Trump administration. The OMB has responded by attacking Dodaro’s agency. In one letter, Paoletta said that the OMB would cooperate with the Government Accountability Office only if its demands didn’t get in the way
of Trump’s agenda. In another letter, Paoletta told the Department of Transportation to ignore a Government Accountability Office ruling that found that the OMB had illegally impounded money for electric car development. Vought, for his part, has flatly declared that the Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist.” 

Vought’s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to lifesaving breakthroughs, the nation’s lost standing as an international leader, the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. “They’ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,” Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the OMB, said of Vought and Paoletta. They’re “just going to use brute force and dominance.” As the former OMB analyst told me, “They’ve dropped a grenade into the system.”

The government shutdown has illustrated, in the starkest terms, Vought’s expansive theory of executive power and his willingness to ignore Congress. On Oct. 2, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to cut on a temporary or permanent basis. A few days later, the OMB released a memo claiming that, seemingly in defiance of a 2019 law, furloughed federal employees were not guaranteed back pay following a shutdown. Then, on Oct. 10, Vought announced that his campaign of mass firings across the bureaucracy had begun. So far, more than 4,000 employees have been laid off, disrupting government services devoted to, among other things, cybersecurity efforts, special education programs, substance abuse treatment and loans for small businesses. A federal judge put a temporary stop to the cuts, but that same day Vought predicted that the total number of firings would be “north of 10,000.” As one official texted me, “Trauma achieved.”
        
             

                                    
        
                        Kirsten Berg contributed research. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:23:19 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Shadow, President</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Who Is Russell Vought? How a Little&#45;Known D.C. Insider Became Trump’s Dismantler&#45;in&#45;Chief</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/who-is-russell-vought-how-a-little-known-dc-insider-became-trumps-dismantler-in-chief</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/who-is-russell-vought-how-a-little-known-dc-insider-became-trumps-dismantler-in-chief</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Lisa Riordan Seville, Andy Kroll, Katie Campbell and Mauricio Rodríguez Pons                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Days into the 2025 shutdown that brought the federal government to a halt, President Donald Trump reposted an AI-generated music video set to the tune of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” Trump plays the cowbell. Vice President J.D. Vance mans the drums. Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, wields the scythe. “Russ Vought is the reaper,” goes one lyric.

For most of Vought’s nearly three decades in Washington, D.C., he operated largely behind the scenes. He spent a dozen years as a congressional staffer before going to Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank. In 2017, he returned to government, bringing his exhaustive knowledge of the budgetary process to the first Trump administration and becoming one of the president’s most loyal functionaries. 

Over the past decade, this unassuming budget wonk and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist has quietly injected his ideas into the bloodstream of American politics. He was one of the chief architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and said he spent much of 2024 drafting the executive orders, regulations and other plans to use in a second Trump presidency. Since returning as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in January, he has led the president’s effort to dismantle large swaths of the federal government. 

ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll spent almost a year chronicling Vought’s rise from the mailroom of the U.S. Senate to his perch as one of the two or three most influential players in the current administration behind only Trump and, arguably, Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff. In his second term as the president’s budget guru, Vought has tried to make good on his desire to put federal workers “in trauma.”
        
    
                    
This video is based on scores of interviews, thousands of pages of emails obtained through records requests and dozens of hours of videos and recordings of private briefings given by Vought, most of which have not been previously reported. 

Vought declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokesperson at OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions. 

The portrait that emerges from Kroll’s reporting is that of a man who is equal parts government technocrat, political operator and zealous iconoclast. Kroll reveals how the seeds of Trump’s presidency in 2025 were planted early in Vought’s career, while uncovering how much Vought has shaped the trajectory of the Trump-era Republican Party from behind the scenes. He also raises questions of what’s to come as Vought leverages his encyclopedic knowledge of the federal government’s inner workings to achieve his goal of remaking the executive branch. As Vought told his supporters in a 2024 speech, “God put us here for such a time as this.”
        
    
                            
             

                                    
        
                        Kirsten Berg contributed research. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:22:49 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Who, Russell, Vought, How, Little-Known, D.C., Insider, Became, Trump’s, Dismantler-in-Chief</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/we-found-that-more-than-170-us-citizens-have-been-held-by-immigration-agents-theyve-been-kicked-dragged-and-detained-for-days</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/we-found-that-more-than-170-us-citizens-have-been-held-by-immigration-agents-theyve-been-kicked-dragged-and-detained-for-days</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Nicole Foy, photography by Sarahbeth Maney                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.” 

But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.  

About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones. 

Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans. 

So ProPublica created its own count.
        
    
                            
    
                    
We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.
        
    
                    
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino. 

Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers. 

These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors. 

Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            George Retes, an American combat veteran, at the site of his arrest by immigration agents on California’s Central Coast. Retes was detained for three days without access to a lawyer and missed his daughter’s third birthday.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.  

A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago. 

The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.” 

A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.
        
    
                    

    
        

    
        
            
            
            

            An immigration raid on 79-year-old Rafie Ollah Shouhed’s car wash left him with broken ribs.
    
            (Courtesy of Rafie Ollah Shouhed. Compiled by ProPublica.)
    
    
    

            Watch video ➜
        
    
    
        
    
                    
Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term. 

We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.

Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.
        
    
                            
    
                    
In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.  

When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.” 

Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”
        
    
                    

    
        

    
        
            
            
            

            The video Garcia Venegas made of an immigration raid on a construction site shows him walking away from the officer while trying to film and then stating that he’s a citizen before being detained.
    
            (Courtesy of Garcia Venega)
    
    
    

            Watch video ➜
        
    
    
        
    
                    

When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.” 

Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers. 

Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground. 

Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!” 

Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Leonardo Garcia Venegas told agents he was a citizen both times he was detained. His REAL ID was dismissed as a fake.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.

This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status. 

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.

Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him. 

“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Men building a home in rural Baldwin County, Alabama. Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents twice while working on homes in the area.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    

George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside. 

The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.

Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers. 

Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.
        
    
                    

    
        

    
        
            
            
            

            George Retes’ family noticed his car in a compiled video posted to TikTok. This clip from that longer video shows his white vehicle surrounded by tear gas. Immigration agents later pinned him on the ground.
    
            (nota.sra/TikTok)
    
    
    

            Watch video ➜
        
    
    
        
    
                    
Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones. 

“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.” 

Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands.He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water. 

Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.” 

DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            Retes said that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.”
    
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twice ordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.

But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out. 

Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.

Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles. 

“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)

The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen. 

Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days. 

DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges. 

Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend. 


The prospects for any significant reckoning over agents’ conduct, even against citizens, are dim. The paths for suing federal agents are even more limited than they are for local police. And that’s if agents can even be identified. What’s more, the administration has gutted the office that investigates allegations of abuse by agents. 

“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”



        
    
                    

    How We Did This
Americans have reported a wide range of troubling encounters with immigration agents. To get a wider sense of agents’ conduct, we cataloged all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers. 
Critically, there is no way to know the complete scope of these stops since the government itself does not track them. But we were still able to fill in the picture a bit more. 
We reviewed more than 170 cases overall, which we sorted into two categories. 
The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. We found more than 50 such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied about 130 Americans, including more than a dozen elected officials. In many of these cases, the government never charged these individuals or the cases were dismissed. 
We also tracked another nine citizens who reported being concerned about racial profiling after being extensively questioned by immigration officials. This includes a Mescalero Apache tribal member who was pulled out of a store and asked for his passport, and a California man who was previously deported by mistake and got another deportation order in the mail.
We did all this by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We compiled cases from the beginning of the current Trump administration through Oct. 5. Our accounting of arrests in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago is particularly limited, since the events there are still unfolding. 
We did not review cases of Americans detained in airports or at the border, where even citizens are more likely to encounter increased questioning. We also did not review cases of Americans arrested at some point after alleged encounters with immigration agents since those involved a judicial process. We similarly excluded arrests of immigration protestors by local police who, unlike many of the federal agencies, booked protesters into a local jail where they could access the legal process and their families could find them.



        
             

                                    
        
                        Do you have information or videos to share about the administration’s immigration crackdown? Contact Nicole Foy via email at nicole.foy@propublica.org or on Signal at nicolefoy.27. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20250919-Maney-Detained-Citizens-157_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95_2025-10-15-162844_pnje.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:22:09 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Found, That, More, Than, 170, U.S., Citizens, Have, Been, Held, Immigration, Agents., They’ve, Been, Kicked, Dragged, and, Detained, for, Days.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>New UN report highlights China’s alleged targeting of human rights activists </title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/new-un-report-highlights-chinas-alleged-targeting-of-human-rights-activists</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/new-un-report-highlights-chinas-alleged-targeting-of-human-rights-activists</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The report, which recounts recent reprisals from two dozen countries, underscores ICIJ’s reporting on how Beijing abuses international institutions in its campaign to silence critics abroad. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/10/China-embassy-protest-shutterstock_2599281725.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2025 07:20:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>New, report, highlights, China’s, alleged, targeting, human, rights, activists </media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Graphic footage shows Hamas executing people in the streets of Gaza</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/graphic-footage-shows-hamas-executing-people-in-the-streets-of-gaza</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/graphic-footage-shows-hamas-executing-people-in-the-streets-of-gaza</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Extremely graphic video has emerged of what appears to be Hamas fighters carrying out public executions in Gaza — as the terror group tries to reassert dominance over local clans and gangs that oppose it.The verified clip, which ABC NEWS Verify has located as having taken place in the Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza City, shows several men being forced to kneel in the middle of a gathered crowd. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/1dff8809edd48661451d8c8d01c1b925" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2025 01:37:15 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Graphic, footage, shows, Hamas, executing, people, the, streets, Gaza</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Disabled Idaho Students Lack Access to Playgrounds and Lunchrooms. Historic $2 Billion Funding Will Do Little to Help.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/disabled-idaho-students-lack-access-to-playgrounds-and-lunchrooms-historic-2-billion-funding-will-do-little-to-help</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/disabled-idaho-students-lack-access-to-playgrounds-and-lunchrooms-historic-2-billion-funding-will-do-little-to-help</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Idaho Statesman. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
At an elementary school in southwest Boise, Idaho, in the fall of 2020, children in pre-K went to their recess on the playground, laughing and climbing ladders to reach the slide. One 3-year-old boy sat on the sidelines.

The loose woodchips prevented the boy, who uses a wheelchair, from joining his classmates. There were no swings he could use or textured panels or blocks he could play with. The only student in the class who used a medical stroller, he was relegated to watching his classmates play as a staff member stood with him. 

Another year, he often spent recess inside his classroom. 

“It was heartbreaking,” said his dad, Grant Schlink, at a neighborhood park where he pushed his son laying back on a swing made of a large circular disk that curved up on the sides. The boy, now 8, sported sunglasses and Converse shoes. The Schlinks requested that their child’s name not be used to protect his privacy.

The playgrounds at Silver Sage Elementary excluded children like Schlink’s son, even though they had been updated by the West Ada School District in 2016 — decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act required new construction to be fully accessible to all students.
        
    
                            
    
                    
The Schlinks reached out to the school asking for help. The district told them in 2022 that improvements were in the pipeline, the boy’s mom, Stephanie Schlink, said. But at some point, communication stalled, she said. Another year passed.  

“I finally was just like, ‘OK, they’re not going to do anything,’” Stephanie Schlink told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “‘F this, I’m going hard.’” In 2023, she filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education, the agency that investigates complaints over discrimination against people with disabilities in schools. The West Ada School District said in an email it is committed to “safe and equitable access” and that it is making progress toward that goal. 

Like Silver Sage Elementary, many schools in Idaho struggle to meet the standards laid out under the law. In 2023, nearly 70 superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that accessibility for people with disabilities was a concern in at least one of their buildings. In many cases, school leaders said, they would need major renovations to make those schools inclusive to students with disabilities.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Silver Sage Elementary updated its playgrounds in 2016, but still had elements, like wood chips, that excluded some children who use wheelchairs or walkers.
    
            (Sarah Miller/Idaho Statesman)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Over a year after the state approved $2 billion to help schools repair and replace their aging buildings, around three dozen superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that their buildings are still not fully accessible, while others said they had workarounds that were not ideal. Many pointed to funding as a continued challenge. Lawmakers cited the Statesman and ProPublica’s previous reporting last year when they approved the $2 billion investment, while acknowledging the funds still wouldn’t solve all of the issues.

Many of the problems the Statesman and ProPublica heard from superintendents had disproportionate impacts on students with disabilities. One of the most common was broken or outdated HVAC systems, often an expensive upgrade; freezing or overheated classrooms can be especially hard on students who can’t regulate their body temperatures, such as children with Down syndrome. 

“Unfortunately there is not nearly enough for us to do any type of major construction that would make our building more ADA compliant particularly in such a rural part of North Idaho where construction is very expensive,” Megan Sindt, the superintendent of the Avery School District, a K-8 district of just about 10 students, said in an email. The North Idaho school, built in 1918, has stairs to the second floor, where most classes are held.  

It’s far from the only district trying to navigate these challenges. Despite a historic funding push by the state, that’s not likely to change.
        
    
                    
        
    
                    
Why $2 Billion Isn’t Enough
In January 2024, in his State of the State address, Gov. Brad Little pulled up photos from deteriorating school buildings that had appeared in a Statesman and ProPublica investigation. He highlighted the reporting that showed how school districts’ limited ability to fund facility upgrades left students learning in schools with leaky ceilings, failing plumbing and freezing classrooms. Months later, lawmakers approved the $2 billion and celebrated it as the largest investment in school buildings in state history. 

In reality, that money will do little to help schools address the needs of students with disabilities. As it is, many districts received only enough to make a few repairs; the smallest ones, which often have significant needs, got less than $1 million to upgrade schools.

Before the state investment, we surveyed superintendents in all districts and heard back from 91%, more than half of whom cited ADA issues in their schools, including multifloor buildings with no elevators or elevators that often don’t work, inaccessible playgrounds and restrooms, plus uneven sidewalks that were difficult to navigate with wheelchairs. We followed up with them again this year. Some superintendents said they planned to use money they received to make accessibility improvements. A handful said they have since been able to fully address such issues but many others said the money wouldn’t be enough to do so. 

Small, rural districts didn’t get enough money from the bill to retrofit older buildings “without completely exhausting the funds,” Superintendent Brian Lee of the Nezperce School District in North Idaho said.
        
    
                            
    
                    
“If we don’t have a functional roof, heat, and functional classrooms, electrical, and plumbing, ADA compliance is a non-issue because we can’t have school,” he said in an email. “Most older buildings are not architecturally capable of making small changes to meet ADA compliance.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which was updated in 2010, requires schools to provide equal access to programs for students with disabilities and to eliminate barriers to their learning. But schools have some leeway in physical alterations if their buildings were constructed before certain standards were in effect. Schools can still comply with the law without altering their buildings by providing reasonable modifications for students and ensuring equal access. For example, if a library is on the second floor, a school can bring books to a floor that students with disabilities can access.   

In struggling to make their schools fully accessible, Idaho is not alone. A 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found most schools had some kind of physical barrier, like steep ramps or door handles that were difficult to use, and noted that schools needed more guidance in interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act. There’s little enforcement by the federal government or the state to ensure districts follow the law, and little recourse for families when their children are excluded.

Districts have contingency plans for when they can’t make a school accessible. In larger districts, students can be bused to different schools. In other cases, districts will move classrooms to the main floor if a student enrolled in those courses can’t use stairs. 

But in some cases, the infrastructure simply prevents students from being able to participate in school in the same way as their peers. At least 10 districts in Idaho said in 2023 that their bathrooms, gyms and cafeterias weren’t all accessible. Students in those schools have been unable to get their meals at lunch, to make it to classes on different floors or even to attend their neighborhood school. Administrators in three districts, like West Ada, said they don’t have playgrounds that all students are able to use.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            At an elementary school in Salmon in remote Central Idaho, a narrow stairway with no wheelchair ramp is the only access to the school cafeteria line. Students who are unable to navigate the stairs must rely on others to get their food for them. The district passed a bond last year after about a dozen failed attempts to build a new school.
    
            (Sarah Miller/Idaho Statesman)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“When you have old buildings, it’s sometimes difficult to do what is required to meet all of those expectations because they just weren’t built with some of those things in mind,” said Anthony Butler, the superintendent of the Cambridge School District, two hours north of Boise. Butler said the district has an old gym with inaccessible restrooms, and seating can be challenging, but it has made a number of other updates to make its other buildings more inclusive for students with disabilities. 

State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield said the state doesn’t track whether buildings are accessible. But she said the state does care about students with disabilities.

“It’s certainly not a lack of desire or commitment to serve students,” she said. “We don’t want the system to exclude a student from enjoying the same experience of any other students because they can’t be with friends at lunch, or for no other reason than, there isn’t a way for them to get to that cafeteria in the basement.” Her office said she encourages districts to make a plan that “prioritizes facilities needs.” 

Jeremy Maxand, executive director of LINC Idaho, an organization that helps people with disabilities live independently, said these kinds of issues that can seem less important, like having accessible playgrounds, can affect how students with disabilities are viewed by others and how they see themselves. Students with disabilities “are at a distinct disadvantage when you’re supposed to be getting the playing field level so you have an equal opportunity, like everybody else, to succeed or fail,” Maxand said.
        
    
                            
    
                    
No Way Down
In the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District, Mariah Larkins, a sophomore at the time, approached the doors leading to the elevator on the second floor of her high school in September 2022, according to an account laid out in a 2024 lawsuit. There, she saw a sign that read: “closed for lunch.” The girl has a disorder that causes debilitating bone spurs throughout her body, requiring frequent operations and forcing her to use crutches or wheelchairs at times. She called the front office, but no one answered, according to the lawsuit, which is ongoing. She called her mom, who said she’d come to the school right away.

Trapped upstairs and embarrassed, she tried to traverse the stairs with her crutches in hand. Larkins’ mom met her daughter outside the school, “alone, in pain” and crying, the lawsuit read. The family alleged that from Larkins’ first day of school, she was met with an elevator that didn’t yet work, excluded from classes and physically and emotionally harmed.

It was one of several times the student, who has since graduated, risked injury or was separated from her peers during her years at the school, according to the complaint. The district had installed an elevator in the building before the girl started high school, but it didn’t go to the basement, where the cafeteria and some classes were located. The lawsuit said the district did not move those classes to an accessible location.

Larkins couldn’t get to the cafeteria and on one day couldn’t get lunch at all. She also fell behind in classes and struggled with her mental health, her family said in the lawsuit. Her anxiety and depression worsened as she sat in rooms alone while her classmates were educated downstairs. 

Aaron Bergman, Larkins’ attorney, said Larkins, who is now 18, cares about improving access for other children in school now.

“This was a very difficult time in her life that did not need to be as difficult,” he told the publications. “We expect Domino’s to do it for people in their restrooms. I think we can expect school districts to do it for schools, for kids in their schools.”

Pocatello High School was first built over a century ago, long before the ADA was enacted. In 2021, the district completed major construction at the school. Part of that, as required by law, included making the school accessible.

But even at the time, officials acknowledged students still wouldn’t be able to navigate the whole building. In an email earlier this month, Pocatello spokesperson Courtney Fisher said extending the elevator to the basement would have required “significant structural changes,” since storm water drains and sewage pipes run directly underneath the new elevator.

Larkins’ mom asked the district to do more, but little changed, the lawsuit said. Just before her daughter’s senior year, she took it to the courts. 

“Because M.L. is disabled, and for no other reason, she received much less than her peers,” the family’s attorney said in the lawsuit, which identifies Larkins only by her initials.

The Pocatello school district declined to comment on pending litigation, but in court filings, denied many of the allegations in the lawsuit. On its accessibility issues in general, the district said it’s addressing some of those problems but, with the lack of funding, can’t make every building fully compliant with current standards.
        
    
                            
    
                    
“The cost of retrofitting our current buildings to full compliance is prohibitive, if not impossible, and that reality does limit our ability to provide every service in every building,” Fisher said in an email. “School districts across Idaho — and across the nation — are grappling with the same issue: aging facilities that were built long before ADA requirements, limited resources to modernize them, and the significant costs associated with comprehensive retrofits.”

Interviews with superintendents across the state revealed similar problems. In 2017, parents sued the Oneida School District, in southeast Idaho, after their children struggled for years to navigate an old building with no elevator and at times had to crawl up stairs and got injured. In 2019, a judge ruled against the district, requiring it to pay two families $1.2 million. It wasn’t until 2023 that the district passed a bond to build a new school.

In West Ada, the Schlinks’ son spent years on the sidelines before the district agreed to address their concerns. 

On a warm day in September, Schlink’s son crawled on the squishy, rubber surface of the large playground near their house. The playground was built to be inclusive of children with mobility challenges, according to the city of Boise, describing it as one of the “most unique playgrounds” in the system.

On the side sat his wheelchair with wheels featuring Lilo and Stitch decals. 

At his school down the road, the playground was renovated earlier this year. Before the Office for Civil Rights had completed its investigation, the district agreed to a voluntary resolution to make its playgrounds more accessible. It was the second time in as many years that the agency responded to a complaint about playgrounds at West Ada schools and forced change, according to resolutions posted on the federal government’s website. West Ada said the district has “met OCR standards” at Silver Sage. In addition to updating the playground, it said it brought the parking lot and sidewalks into compliance. Next summer, the district plans to update the second playground at the school. The district said it couldn’t comment on why the playgrounds weren’t made accessible in 2016 because it was a decision made by previous district leadership.

President Donald Trump’s administration has pushed to largely gut the civil rights office, creating uncertainty around whether it will remain an effective resource for families. The administration has argued that cuts to the department will give “parents and states control over their children’s education” and relieve taxpayers from “progressive social experiments and obsolete programs.” 

But for the Schlinks’ son, it made a big difference. This is the first year he can participate in recess.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            A playground at Silver Sage Elementary School was recently renovated (first image). The school upgraded from woodchips on one of its playgrounds (second image) to artificial grass (third image). While the Schlinks’ son can use a wheelchair on this surface, it gets too hot in the sun for him to crawl on, according to his mother. The city of Boise used a squishy, rubber surface at a playground it built to be inclusive of all kids (fourth image).
    
            (Sarah Miller/Idaho Statesman)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
The updates aren’t perfect. The ground is now a material he can use a wheelchair on, but it gets too hot in the sun for him to crawl around, his mother, Stephanie Schlink, said. The structures don’t include accessible swings or merry-go-rounds, or any kind of enrichment such as textured panels or chimes for kids with disabilities. 

Still, after years of watching their son be relegated to the side at recess, “there’s a clear indicator that he is really enjoying himself and happy at school now,” she said. When she picked her son up from school last month, his classmates ran up to her to share how they played with him. He’s social and loves outings and being around people, Stephanie Schlink said. 

Finally, she said, he&#039;s part of the class.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Asia Fields contributed reporting. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2025 01:37:12 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Disabled, Idaho, Students, Lack, Access, Playgrounds, and, Lunchrooms., Historic, Billion, Funding, Will, Little, Help.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>A Year Before Trump’s Crime Rhetoric, Dallas Voted to Increase Police. The City Is Wrestling With the Consequences.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-year-before-trumps-crime-rhetoric-dallas-voted-to-increase-police-the-city-is-wrestling-with-the-consequences</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-year-before-trumps-crime-rhetoric-dallas-voted-to-increase-police-the-city-is-wrestling-with-the-consequences</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Rebecca Lopez and Jason Trahan, WFAA                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                



        
                        This article is co-published with WFAA and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

        

    
      
  



                    
The year before President Donald Trump announced he was sending National Guard troops and federal agents into major cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago, declaring crime out of control, a Dallas nonprofit made a similar case for putting more police on the streets.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at an Aug. 11 press conference, announcing the unprecedented federal takeover of the Washington police force and the deployment of the National Guard to the city. 

A year earlier, a man named Pete Marocco told Dallas City Council members that Dallas was descending into comparable anarchy. 

“We cannot wait until Dallas looks like other degenerate cities that have made irreversible mistakes, devaluing their police force and destroying their city center,” said Marocco, who would go on to briefly lead the U.S. Agency for International Development under Trump.

At that time, Marocco was speaking as the executive director of a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, whose leaders wanted voters to pass propositions that would radically overhaul the city’s charter. One of them, a ballot measure known as Proposition U, would force Dallas to grow its police force to 4,000 officers, and significantly raise their starting pay, in order to address the kind of lawlessness Marocco claimed the city was experiencing.

Voters went on to narrowly pass the proposition in the same November election that put Trump back in the Oval Office. They also approved another “citizen enforcement” measure Dallas HERO got onto the ballot, Proposition S, which gave residents the right to more easily sue the city to block policies and have them declared unlawful by stripping Dallas of its immunity from litigation. The measure makes Dallas the first city in the country to lose its governmental immunity, legal experts said.

Few people in Dallas dispute that more police are needed; 911 call response times have increased in recent years, and growing the department’s size has been a goal of mayors, City Council members and police chiefs for decades. But violent crime here, as elsewhere nationally, is trending downward despite the growing claims by Trump and other leaders that certain cities are incapable of governing or policing themselves.

“We’re seeing the national government going into Washington and making noises about going into other cities — we’re talking about blue cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, maybe New York,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who studies outside influences on city governments. 

But what happened in Dallas last fall, he said, follows a different pattern from these federal or state government takeovers.

“It’s coming up from within the city,” he said. “The state isn’t imposing this; local voters have.”

Now, almost a year after voters approved these measures in Dallas, WFAA set out to understand how the Dallas HERO measures came to pass, look into the often misleading statements about violent crime that the group made to voters and explore the long-term effects of these changes. 

Already, the city is feeling the effects of the two Dallas HERO-backed propositions voters passed on that November ballot. 

In June, the Dallas City Council voted to change its police-hiring standards, eliminating its college credit requirement in an effort to hire more officers. Critics say lowering standards to boost hiring can lead to less-qualified officers patrolling the streets.

In September, the City Council approved a new budget for next fiscal year. It includes cuts to popular libraries and city pools and eliminates some city jobs, but adds money for 350 new police officers — still far short of the nearly 800 needed to reach the 4,000-officer minimum mandated by Proposition U, which had no timeline for compliance. 

And earlier this year, a Dallas couple became the first known litigants against the city to cite Proposition S, the measure that eliminated the city’s governmental immunity, in a lawsuit over construction of a church game court. The couple initiated the lawsuit before Proposition S was passed but filed motions citing the city’s lack of immunity in March. The city of Dallas said in court that the proposition is unconstitutional but declined to comment about the lawsuit. The lawsuit, which is still pending, has not been previously reported.

All of this has locals, including local law enforcement, concerned.

One of the most vocal critics of the HERO initiative is Frederick Frazier, a Trump-endorsed former state lawmaker who spent nearly 30 years as a Dallas police officer. He asked a question many others have had in the course of WFAA’s reporting: Are Dallas HERO’s local efforts a precursor to similar changes in other cities?

“Are you trying to build a better department? Or are you trying to destroy a city?” Frazier said. “I want to know: Are we the experiment?”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Pete Marocco stands beside boxes of signatures used to get the Dallas HERO propositions, aimed at changing the Dallas city charter, on the November 2024 ballot.
    
            (WFAA)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Dallas Violent Crime Down
This summer, Dallas-area hotelier and GOP megadonor Monty Bennett joined a conversation on X Spaces to discuss Dallas HERO’s efforts.

“Every American city in this country of any size is a disaster,” Bennett said in that recorded audio discussion, “and it’s terrible.”

Last year, Bennett confirmed to WFAA that he helped fund the group, formed in 2023. But because it is a nonprofit organization, it’s not required to disclose its donor lists, so it’s unclear how much of its $3 million in donations in 2023 and 2024 came from him. Bennett declined to answer WFAA’s questions about how much he contributed to the group, but his office did provide a copy of the organization’s 2024 990 tax form. 

Both before the November election and after, Bennett — who has contributed money to Trump’s presidential campaign and to local conservative political action committees advocating for school vouchers — pushed HERO’s message that Dallas, in particular downtown Dallas, is a dangerous place, frequently via his conservative online news site The Dallas Express.

Bennett lives in Highland Park, an affluent community that’s surrounded by Dallas but boasts its own city government and police force. But the headquarters of his hotel company, Ashford Inc., is within the city limits, on Dallas’ north side, which historically has much lower crime than other parts of the city.

His messaging fits an idea that conservatives have increasingly pushed. Trump, in announcing his 2024 campaign for president, referred to the “blood-soaked streets of our once great cities,” calling them “cesspools of violent crimes.”

A group called Save Austin Now tried unsuccessfully in 2021 to convince voters in that city to pass an ordinance forcing it to hire hundreds more police officers.

Bennett later met with Matt Mackowiak, a longtime Austin-based Republican strategist who co-founded Save Austin Now. Mackowiak said he spoke to Bennett about Dallas HERO’s messaging and how to collect enough signatures to get its propositions on the November 2024 ballot.

A spokesperson for Bennett told WFAA that Dallas HERO’s efforts were not modeled after Save Austin Now and that Bennett is not affiliated with the Austin group.

According to city police statistics during the 2021 Austin campaign, violent crime rates in that city were up by 5% compared with 2020, although property crime overall was down in 2021 compared with 2020. 

In Dallas, however, violent crime is on track to go down for a fifth year in a row. Last year, Dallas had one of its lowest homicide rates in decades, 14 per 100,000 residents, down from 2023’s rate of 19 per 100,000.

Jay Coons, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, said Dallas voters in November responded strongly to perceptions about crime — regardless of whether it’s actually declining or on the rise.

“Let’s face it: Fear sells,” Coons said. “If you want people to do something, if you can instill fear, that’s a very powerful motivator.”

But that fear isn’t justified in Dallas, said former interim police Chief Mike Igo.

“To the point of crime is out of control?” Igo said. “It’s not.”

Igo and Frazier are among the unusual collection of voices who opposed the Dallas HERO propositions. The Dallas Police Association, which represents thousands of officers, spoke out against the measures, calling them “contrived by a small group of people who do not live in Dallas, with no open dialogue.” The association’s leaders argued the propositions would affect its ability to negotiate pay raises for all of its officers and had questions about the department’s ability to train so many new officers while retaining current ones. Former police chiefs, all 14 of Dallas’ City Council members at the time, nearly all of the city’s prominent civic and business groups, and at least four former Dallas mayors publicly opposed the measures as well.

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in 2023, lauded HERO’s efforts but still urged voters to reject the propositions.

“Their policy language is deeply flawed, and they would create more problems for the city than they would solve,” Johnson and Cara Mendelsohn, one of the more conservative Dallas City Council members, wrote in an October 2024 op-ed in The Dallas Morning News.

Bennett, who declined an interview request for this story but answered a few questions via email, said he was disappointed in their positions on the measures. 

Opponents to the propositions Dallas HERO pushed warned that shackling the city’s budget to such a huge public safety commitment, while at the same time making Dallas vulnerable to lawsuits, could mean cuts to other critical services. 

Bennett, in his recent X Spaces conversation, said hiring hundreds of police is simple, though experts have told WFAA it is not.

He also argued that building a new Dallas police academy, which has been in the planning stages for years, is not necessary. He suggested the department instead raise its pay rates in order to hire back officers it had trained but lost to other departments.

Hiring back officers who’ve left for other departments, or recruiting from other departments in general (a practice called lateral hiring that’s regularly employed among police recruiters in Fort Worth, Dallas and other cities across Texas), can indeed be an effective hiring tool, said a police official who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak for the department. But those hires account for only a fraction of the new officers brought on every year. And, after serving in smaller departments, some officers may learn they prefer the slower pace afforded by those jobs, the official said.

Bennett said in an email that the city could hire more officers if it raised their salaries. “The solution to hiring more police officers is to pay them better,” Bennett wrote. “It’s no more complicated than that. Pay them what they’re worth.&quot; He didn’t explain how he thought the city would budget for those increases.

Hiring more police officers has been a goal of the Dallas Police Department for more than two decades, Frazier said. But, he argued, the city doesn’t have enough field trainers, cars or physical spaces to accommodate so many new officers joining its ranks in such a short period of time.

“I would say that would be very difficult,” Frazier said. “I’ve heard a lot of folks say that — ‘We could fix you in a minute.’ No one’s done it.”   

The new city budget, which took effect Oct. 1, increased the police department’s minimum starting pay, raising it from about $75,000 to more than $81,000 annually. But that still falls thousands of dollars short of several smaller suburban departments in the area.

According to city reports, DPD had 3,215 officers as of June. The city manager’s goal is to gradually increase that number — but at the current rate, she said, the department won’t reach HERO’s 4,000-officer demand until around 2029.

“It’s a balancing act,” City Manager Kim Tolbert told WFAA during a recent extended sitdown when asked about the impact of the HERO amendments on the budget. “We’re listening, we’re being responsive, but we’re also being good stewards of the public dollar.”

In an email, Bennett wrote, “Government will always blame imposed outside requirements when it has to curb its profligate spending.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Frederick Frazier, a Republican former state lawmaker and Dallas police veteran, is a vocal critic of the HERO initiative.
    
            (WFAA)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Who Leads Dallas HERO?
WFAA has tried to better understand not just why Dallas HERO’s efforts were successful in the city, but also the motivations of the people behind the initiative. The group bills itself as bipartisan, but at least some of its current and former leaders and associates, like Bennett and Marocco, have championed conservative interests.

HERO’s founding president, Stefani Carter, is a Republican former state representative who is now the lead director on the board of Braemar Hotels &amp; Resorts, a real estate investment trust focused on investing in luxury hotels and resorts. Bennett is Braemar’s founder and chair of its board. (Braemar is for sale, and Carter’s fate on its board is unclear; she did not respond to questions about her status or about the Dallas HERO initiative.)

HERO’s attorney, Art Martinez de Vara, is a municipal lawyer, a historian and the mayor of a small town near San Antonio called Von Ormy, which he helped to incorporate almost 20 years ago as a so-called “liberty city,” operating with minimal levels of government oversight but facing myriad issues including lack of a sewer system. He declined to speak to WFAA about the propositions, citing anticipated litigation. 

During the fall campaign to pass the propositions, Marocco led Dallas HERO as its executive director while living in University Park, a self-governed suburban enclave nestled inside Dallas similar to where Bennett calls home. Dallas HERO told WFAA Marocco is no longer with the organization. Trump later tapped Marocco to run USAID, where he wrote the cable ordering a freeze on all U.S. foreign and humanitarian aid, resulting in furloughs and layoffs across the agency.

Marocco did not respond to the news organization’s efforts to reach him. 

The man who replaced Marocco in early February as HERO’s executive director, Damien LeVeck, is a horror film director whose social media account Dallas En Fuego trolls city officials with what he refers to as “spicy videos &amp; memes.” He also sells branded merchandise, including a T-shirt with a picture of a Dallas City Council member he often criticizes. 

“Show your support for combatting Dallas municipal tyranny (and stupidity) with our great merchandise,” the language on his merch site reads.

All refused to speak with WFAA on camera.

LeVeck provided a statement, on behalf of HERO, that read, in part: “The HERO amendments … decisively passed by voters last November, will boost public safety by expanding the police force and strengthening government accountability. Residents deserve to feel safe where they live and work, and we are committed to ensuring city leadership upholds the will of the voters.&quot;

Coons, who spent nearly four decades with the Harris County sheriff’s office as a patrol commander before entering academia, said even in a city like Dallas with declining violent crime, people can still be scared into making political decisions.

“Whether crime is rampant and people are being murdered in the streets, or whether it’s an extraordinarily safe place to be, the truth probably is going to be a little bit separate than the individual Dallasite’s perception of what’s going on,” he said.

Voters in the city’s more affluent northern side narrowly voted against the measure, with 49.3% voting in favor, an analysis by ProPublica and WFAA found. But in the south, where crime rates are higher and police response times are longer, 52.9% of voters cast ballots in favor.

Dallas City Council member Carolyn King Arnold, who represents part of southern Dallas and was an outspoken opponent of the HERO amendments, said the organization’s backers exploited her constituents’ frustrations over crime in order to get their measures passed.

“In talking to some who actually voted in the southern sector for this, they told me basically, ‘I just want to see one officer ride through, that’s why I voted for it,’ not understanding the full impact of that amendment,” Arnold said. “It&#039;s always about fear.”

It’s not clear what’s next for the Dallas HERO team. 

Since its win in November, the group has taken to social media and spoken at City Council meetings to demand more money be devoted to the police department. 

“Crime, homelessness, and property destruction is rampant throughout Dallas,” HERO posted on X on Aug. 19.

Within hours of the City Council passing the coming year’s budget, HERO publicly took issue with it. According to a Sept. 18 statement, the organization said the budget “fails to comply with Proposition U.” 

Asked about the city’s argument that the budget meets the proposition requirements, Bennett wrote in an email, “With respect, it just doesn’t seem like this is true.”

LeVeck swore in the organization’s Sept. 18 statement that Dallas HERO will “hold city leaders accountable.”

“Sue them into submission!” one X user wrote in response to that promise.

The organization has already threatened to do so.

In December, HERO, citing Proposition S, the immunity measure, argued that the city isn’t enforcing state laws banning people from sleeping in encampments on public property. In March, the group’s attorney sent a letter to the city threatening to sue it for not hiring police fast enough. The city declined to comment about both incidents. 

Frazier said he and other local law enforcement stakeholders remain concerned about Dallas HERO’s efforts. While their actions are abundant, their ultimate goals are murky.

“When you ask that question around,” Frazier said, “no one really knows what the end game is.”
        
             

                                    
        
                        Tanya Eiserer of WFAA contributed reporting, and ProPublica Deputy Data Editor Ryan Little contributed data analysis.

        

    


                                    
        
                        Rebecca Lopez is the senior crime and justice reporter, and Jason Trahan is managing editor of investigations at WFAA-TV in Dallas. Reach them at investigates@wfaa.com. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/DallasCopsV3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:13:36 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Year, Before, Trump’s, Crime, Rhetoric, Dallas, Voted, Increase, Police., The, City, Wrestling, With, the, Consequences.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Genting Bhd tawar RM6.74 bilion ambil alih Genting Malaysia&#45; Penganalisis pasaran saran pemegang saham terima tawaran</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/genting-bhd-tawar-rm674-bilion-ambil-alih-genting-malaysia-penganalisis-pasaran-saran-pemegang-saham-terima-tawaran</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/genting-bhd-tawar-rm674-bilion-ambil-alih-genting-malaysia-penganalisis-pasaran-saran-pemegang-saham-terima-tawaran</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 13 Oktober lalu Genting Bhd mengemukakan tawaran pengambilalihan sukarela bersyarat bernilai RM6.74 bilion untuk mengambil alih sepenuhnya Genting ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2025/10/genting-.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:13:33 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Genting, Bhd, tawar, RM6.74, bilion, ambil, alih, Genting, Malaysia-, Penganalisis, pasaran, saran, pemegang, saham, terima, tawaran</media:keywords>
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<title>Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Get Funding Back Despite Trump’s Anti&#45;DEI Campaign</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/students-with-hearing-and-vision-loss-get-funding-back-despite-trumps-anti-dei-campaign</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/students-with-hearing-and-vision-loss-get-funding-back-despite-trumps-anti-dei-campaign</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Following public outcry, the U.S. Department of Education has restored funding for students who have both hearing and vision loss, about a month after cutting it. 

But rather than sending the money directly to the four programs that are part of a national network helping students who are deaf and blind, a condition known as deafblindness, the department has instead rerouted the grants to a different organization that will provide funding for those vulnerable students. 

The Trump administration targeted the programs in its attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion; a department spokesperson had cited concerns about “divisive concepts” and “fairness” in explaining the decision to withhold the funding.  

ProPublica and other news organizations reported last month on the canceled grants to agencies that serve these students in Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as in five states that are part of a New England consortium. 

Programs then appealed to the Education Department to retain their funding, but the appeals were denied. Last week, the National Center on Deafblindness, the parent organization of the agencies that were denied, told the four programs that the Education Department had provided it with additional grant money and the center was passing it on to them.

“This will enable families, schools, and early intervention programs to continue to … meet the unique needs of children who are deafblind,” according to the letter from the organization to the agencies, which was provided to ProPublica. Education Department officials did not respond to questions from ProPublica; automatic email replies cited the government shutdown.

When the funding was canceled, the programs were in the middle of a five-year grant that was expected to continue through September 2028. The funding from the center is only for one year. 

“We don’t know what will happen” in future years, said Lisa McConachie of the Oregon DeafBlind Project, which serves 114 students in the state. McConachie said that with uncertain funding, her agency had to cancel a retreat this fall that had been organized for parents to swap medical equipment, share resources and learn about services to help students when they get older. She hopes to reschedule it for the spring.
        
    
                    
“It is still a disruption to families,’’ she said. “It creates this mistrust, that you are gone and back and gone and back.”

Oregon’s grant application for its deafblind program, submitted in 2023, included a statement about its commitment to address “inequities, racism, bias” and the marginalization of disability groups, language that was encouraged by the Biden administration. It also attached the strategic plan for Portland Public Schools, where the Oregon DeafBlind Project is headquartered, that mentioned the establishment of a Center for Black Student Excellence — which is unrelated to the deafblind project. The Education Department’s letter said that those initiatives were “in conflict with agency policy and priorities.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
An advocate for deafblind students said he was happy to see the funding restored but called the department’s decision-making “amateurish” and disruptive to students and families. “It is mean-spirited to do this to families and kids and school systems at the beginning of the year when all of these things should be so smooth,” said Maurice Belote, co-chair of the National DeafBlind Coalition, which advocates for legislation that supports deafblind children and young adults. 

Grants to the four agencies total about $1 million a year. The department started funding state-level programs to help deafblind students more than 40 years ago in response to the rubella epidemic in the late 1960s. Nationally, there are about 10,000 children and young adults, from infants to 21-year-olds, who are deafblind and more than 1,000 in the eight affected states, according to the National Center on Deafblindness. 

While the population is small, it is among the most complex to serve; educators rely on the deafblindness programs for support and training. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/OGGettyImages-2206185094_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_quality_95_embedColorProfile_true-copy.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:37:31 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Students, With, Hearing, and, Vision, Loss, Get, Funding, Back, Despite, Trump’s, Anti-DEI, Campaign</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>On the Front Line of the Fluoride Wars, Debate Over Drinking Water Treatment Turns Raucous</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/on-the-front-line-of-the-fluoride-wars-debate-over-drinking-water-treatment-turns-raucous</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/on-the-front-line-of-the-fluoride-wars-debate-over-drinking-water-treatment-turns-raucous</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Anna Clark                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
On the far east side of Michigan, the future of fluoride in drinking water — long an ordinary practice for preventing tooth decay — has suddenly provoked passionate debate.

Public meetings in St. Clair County, about an hour northeast of Detroit, have filled with people weighing in. One man waved his Fixodent denture cream before the county commissioners, suggesting that his own experience showed what would happen if local communities stopped treatment.

“I am an unfluoridated child,” he declared, “with a set of uppers and lowers.”

Another man, speaking to the county’s Advisory Board of Health, said that personal responsibility should be factored into the conversation. “I think there are some 3 Musketeer bars, Snicker bars that should be accounted for. Some Coca-Colas.”

And a young man used his time in the public comments to address not just fluoridation, but the county medical director who’s trying to get rid of it. He accused him of grandstanding to land a job with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health and human services secretary, by making moves that “lowered the quality of life for underserved people.”

The raucous arguments were spurred by a three-page memo sent in June to the Advisory Health Board by Dr. Remington Nevin, the medical director of St. Clair County’s Health Department. It urges the department to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems because, he wrote in bold print, the additive is “a plausible developmental neurotoxicant” — a claim that runs counter to the assessment of many leading experts and health agencies, which have long celebrated fluoridation as a public health triumph.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Nevin recommended fluoride restrictions that would apply to any system located in the county and serving county residents. Potentially, that could include the Great Lakes Water Authority, which provides water to nearly 40% of the state’s population.

Drinking water fluoridation, which was pioneered in Michigan in 1945, led to a massive drop in tooth decay. Even with the rise of fluoride in toothpaste and other products, it’s credited with a 25% decrease in cavities. But skeptics increasingly hold sway in government, as ProPublica recently reported. Those opponents include Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, who has called fluoride “industrial waste.”

Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their approaches to fluoride in drinking water, and Utah and Florida became the first states to ban fluoridation.

Local communities, though, are on the front lines of the fluoride wars in most states, typically deciding whether or not to continue fluoridating their drinking water by council vote or community referendum. The public conversation in St. Clair County offers a vivid example of how contentious the issue can become. Advocates from well beyond its borders are getting involved, saying that what happens in the county has implications for the entire state.

Home to about 160,000 residents at the base of Michigan’s Thumb, St. Clair County shares a watery border with Canada. Some 67% of its voters chose President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. (Kennedy got under 1% of the vote.) About 110,000 residents receive fluoridated drinking water, according to the state’s environmental agency, while an additional 6,510 are served by water supplies with naturally occurring fluoride.
        
    
                            
    
                    
In his memo this summer, Nevin, who is a physician epidemiologist, cited a state-of-the-science report from the National Toxicology Program last year that described an association between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQs in children. (The NTP is an interagency program within the Department of Health and Human Services that’s focused on toxicology research.)

Nevin also referenced a court decision in a case filed against the EPA by groups opposed to fluoridation, where a district judge relied, in part, on the NTP report in ruling that fluoride presented an “unreasonable risk.” Even as it appeals the decision, the EPA said its review of new science on fluoride in drinking water “is being done in coordination with Secretary Kennedy and HHS.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Dr. Remington Nevin, medical director of St. Clair County’s Health Department, issued a three-page memo urging the county to take steps to prohibit the addition of fluoride to public water systems.
    
            (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The NTP report, though, is contested and based on limited studies involving fluoride levels that are more than twice the amount recommended by the federal government. Its own abstract says there isn’t enough information to link lower fluoride exposure with children’s IQ.

Nevin’s memo said that the EPA may take months or years to act on fluoride, but that didn’t mean local officials had to wait. “Across the Michigan Thumb, several townships have expressed a desire for similar measures,” he wrote, “and within St. Clair County, I have received a number of resident concerns related to this issue.” He recommended new regulations that would prohibit the addition of “any form of fluoride” to public water systems in the county that serve residents.

In Michigan, each community decides for itself if it will maintain fluoride in its drinking water system. But in an email to ProPublica, Nevin laid out a process where the St. Clair County Board of Commissioners could approve regulations that, in the name of public health, restrict the ability of suppliers to use the additive — in effect, enacting sweeping change throughout the region.

“Just as items manufactured in California are often subject to more stringent California environmental and health regulations, even if the majority are sold outside the state; so too could drinking water produced in St. Clair County be subject to more stringent county regulations, even if the majority is exported to other counties,” he wrote.

Whether or not this applies to any future fluoride regulations depends on the language that is adopted and approved, he added. 

The state Department of Health and Human Services says it knows of no local health departments that have attempted such restrictions. In response to ProPublica’s queries, the Great Lakes Water Authority shared a May statement about fluoride, which says that the agency is required by its owner, the city of Detroit, to fluoridate its water supply. The current dosage is well below the maximum established by the Safe Drinking Water Act and the EPA, the statement said, and is in line with the recommended target for oral health benefits.

The water authority, which serves southeast Michigan, didn’t address the St. Clair County proposal. And it’s unclear whether the push for broad county regulations will gain traction.

As medical director, Nevin has an influential voice with county officials and shares guidance with Liz King, the county’s health officer-director. King, however, expressed reservations about Nevin’s proposal at a July meeting of the Advisory Health Board, according to the minutes. 

In a statement to ProPublica, King said: “I do not support county-wide mandates to remove fluoride or actions that override the authority of local jurisdictions, unless there is an emergent or urgent public health need.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
Nevin was new to Michigan when he joined the Health Department in his part-time position about two years ago. He soon established that he would be an active force. He describes it in an email to ProPublica as “counter-activism,” adding: “I am largely working to counter the radical agendas of many past and current state public health officials.”

At the January meeting of the Advisory Health Board, Nevin provided members with a 2022 book by Kennedy — “A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals” — that’s critical of the Democratic Party and government restrictions enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic. (To the notion that he wants to work for Kennedy, Nevin told ProPublica that it’s “baseless conjecture” and that he’s happy in St. Clair County.)

Less than a year into his tenure as HHS secretary, Kennedy’s approach was challenged by six former surgeons general who served under both Republicans and Democrats. In a recent op-ed, they said that Kennedy is “endangering the health of the nation.” His agency criticized their track records in office when contacted by ProPublica about the op-ed, saying they failed to improve public health.

Nevin has moved to make vaccine exemptions easier to get, saying in an April memo that it would “improve the public’s trust in public health.” Those efforts helped earn him a tribute signed by 10 Republican state legislators, which also highlights his fluoride recommendations. Nevin also successfully pushed for the department to wind down services at school health clinics, arguing, in part, that providing direct primary care isn’t a core function of public health.

Supporters point to his training in the military and at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to a medical degree, his CV lists a master’s degree and doctorate in public health. On his website, Nevin also highlights his ability to serve as an expert witness and consultant in legal cases that involve adverse effects from certain antimalarial drugs.

Nevin told ProPublica that past experience taught him that it can take years for neurotoxic effects of certain substances to be recognized. “I have every confidence that, in due course, fluoride will also be looked upon as a neurotoxicant that has no place being ingested,” he wrote in an email.

He added that the response he’s received to his proposal from the community “has been overwhelmingly positive.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Dr. Randa Jundi-Samman, a recently retired dentist who worked in Port Huron, Michigan, for 30 years, has been a vocal opponent of removing fluoride from St. Clair County’s drinking water.
    
            (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
But there’s been strong pushback. Dr. Randa Jundi-Samman, a recently retired dentist in St. Clair County, was one of the health professionals speaking in support of fluoridation at public meetings. She told ProPublica that dropping fluoridation would be a serious hit to community health.

“You’d 100% get more decay, especially in children in low-income communities that don’t get the chance to go to the dentist every six months,” Jundi-Samman said. “We certainly will see that. We already see it in people who don’t have fluoride in their water.”

Dr. Mert Aksu, president of the Michigan Oral Health Coalition’s board and dean of the University of Detroit Mercy’s dental school, said he’s hustling up to the public meetings in St. Clair County because it’s the duty of professionals “to make sure that the decisions that are being made within our communities are being made based upon scientific merit.”

Speaking broadly about the influence now wielded by fluoride skeptics, Aksu said, “We have opened ourselves up to opportunities from misinformed people who want to use this issue for political purposes.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Dr. Mert Aksu, dean of the University of Detroit Mercy’s dental school, believes people are leveraging fluoride as an issue for political benefit.
    
            (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
At an August meeting of the county commissioners, Kimberly Raleigh, interim executive director of the Michigan Oral Health Coalition, read a letter in support of fluoridation that was signed by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, the Michigan Dental Association, the Indiana Dental Association, the Pennsylvania Coalition for Oral Health and dozens of others.

Nevin said in an email that the dental community “must recognize that community water fluoridation can no longer be relied upon to mask the dental problems created by our neglect of poor dietary choices.”

He argues that he has science on his side. “Scientific merit favors a recommendation to prohibit fluoride,” he wrote to ProPublica. “I have every confidence this will become much clearer in the coming months, as further federal guidance is inevitably released.”

Nevin’s recommendation is before the Advisory Health Board, which also was provided a fact sheet on fluoridation from the Health Department, submitted with Nevin’s approval. If the board endorses his proposal, King may then decide whether to propose regulations, which the Board of Commissioners would then weigh, according to the Health Department. Nevin estimated that the process could take six to 12 months.

Fluoride was on the agenda for the Advisory Health Board’s September meeting, which ended early because the members failed to reach a quorum. Nevin told ProPublica that he expects it to be discussed at this week’s meeting, and that he will present additional information then.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Meanwhile, Nevin has already influenced one of the county’s townships, Kimball, which receives treated water from Port Huron, the seat of St. Clair County.

At an August meeting, where Nevin spoke to the Board of Trustees, Kimball Township unanimously passed a resolution calling for Port Huron to discontinue fluoridation and direct any funds saved to support access to topical dental fluoride treatments.

Port Huron’s city manager declined to comment for this story, saying the township has not presented the city with any resolution or request. Nevin said in an email to ProPublica that he is “attempting to address every municipality in the county” with similar testimony.
        
    
                            
    
                    
After voting on the measure, one Kimball trustee made a point to show support for Nevin, saying “we’re blessed to have him making decisions.”

Nevin, he said, has had to overcome resistance from staff “pushing hard to make his life rather uncomfortable.”

“They’re not used to leadership,” the trustee said. “They’re not used to boldness. They’re not used to maybe some male energy that’s necessary to get things done.” ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:37:28 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>the, Front, Line, the, Fluoride, Wars, Debate, Over, Drinking, Water, Treatment, Turns, Raucous</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>ProPublica Names Kenneth Morales as David Burnham&#45;TRAC Data Fellow</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/propublica-names-kenneth-morales-as-david-burnham-trac-data-fellow</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/propublica-names-kenneth-morales-as-david-burnham-trac-data-fellow</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ ProPublica                
                                          

        
	ProPublica has selected Kenneth Morales as the inaugural David Burnham-TRAC data fellow. In this two-year fellowship, Morales will work with our data and news applications team to shed light on both the inner workings of the government and the impacts of federal policy.
            
	The fellowship is named in honor of David Burnham, an investigative journalist who reported on local, state and federal enforcement corruption for 50 years, and it was made possible through funding from David Sobel and Beth Critchley.
            
	“David Burnham was a pioneering investigative journalist who believed in speaking truth to power. As an early and skilled proponent of rigorous data collection and analysis, he did cutting edge reporting on law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” said Sobel. “Those skills and techniques are critical today, and ProPublica is the obvious home for work that will continue his legacy.”
            
	Morales was most recently a senior data scientist at the office of the New York state attorney general. His casework there involved a wide range of matters before the office, including investigations of the firearms industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers and lead exposure in public schools, along with civil rights investigations of law enforcement agencies and antitrust litigation. He also served as the primary data analyst for the office’s report into fake comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed “net neutrality” rulemaking. Prior to this role, Morales conducted research at Johns Hopkins University, studying opioid use during the advent of the fentanyl crisis.
            
	“Kenneth brings a passion for public interest work and extensive experience doing rigorous analysis that needs to stand up in the court of law,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “Federal data is becoming more scarce as the importance of the government’s actions only grow, and we’re grateful to be able to bring on more people to cover it.”
            
	“For years I have been an admirer of ProPublica’s investigative reportage, their independence and their drive to hold power to account,” said Morales. “I am passionate about the intersections of data science and social justice, and I am thrilled to have been selected to use those skills during this critical American moment.” ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://assets.propublica.org/2017-pp-open-graph-1200x630.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 10:46:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>ProPublica, Names, Kenneth, Morales, David, Burnham-TRAC, Data, Fellow</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>THE ULTIMATE LEGAL TRAVESTY: BPMB&amp;apos;S WEAPONIZED LITIGATION AND THE SILENT SURRENDER IN SUIT 264 – A SYSTEM RIGGED TO SHIELD CRIMINALS WHILE CRUSHING THE INNOCENT</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-ultimate-legal-fiasco-defendants-lawyers-in-bank-pembangunan-suit-264-inept-cowards-who-sold-out-their-clients-to-a-media-lynch-mob</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-ultimate-legal-fiasco-defendants-lawyers-in-bank-pembangunan-suit-264-inept-cowards-who-sold-out-their-clients-to-a-media-lynch-mob</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://icijnews.online/uploads/images/202510/image_870x580_68ea993cdd3d0.jpg" length="69307" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:02:30 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>From occupation to destruction: How Israel made so much of Gaza unliveable</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/from-occupation-to-destruction-how-israel-made-so-much-of-gaza-unliveable</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/from-occupation-to-destruction-how-israel-made-so-much-of-gaza-unliveable</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Gaza lies in ruin. Bombing and demolitions by Israel have completely erased neighbourhoods from the map.  ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/68cc267f284de78658adf08d21c4e6f0" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2025 12:47:42 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>From, occupation, destruction:, How, Israel, made, much, Gaza, unliveable</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Arab states deepened military ties with Israel while denouncing Gaza war, leak reveals</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/arab-states-deepened-military-ties-with-israel-while-denouncing-gaza-war-leak-reveals</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/arab-states-deepened-military-ties-with-israel-while-denouncing-gaza-war-leak-reveals</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Israeli and Arab military officials have come together for meetings and trainings, facilitated by U.S. Central Command, on regional threats, Iran and underground tunnels. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/10/CENTCOM-Giza-1-760x427.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2025 12:47:38 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Arab, states, deepened, military, ties, with, Israel, while, denouncing, Gaza, war, leak, reveals</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore”: They Tried to Self&#45;Deport, Then Got Stranded in Trump’s America</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/i-dont-want-to-be-here-anymore-they-tried-to-self-deport-then-got-stranded-in-trumps-america</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/i-dont-want-to-be-here-anymore-they-tried-to-self-deport-then-got-stranded-in-trumps-america</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Melissa Sanchez and Mariam Elba                
                                             

        
                        Leer en español.

        

    


                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
She desperately wanted to get out of the country.

It was mid-May and Pérez, a Venezuelan mother of two, couldn’t survive on her own in Chicago anymore. She’d been relying on charity for food and shelter ever since her partner had been detained by immigration authorities after a traffic stop earlier in the year.

Pérez, 25, thought it’d be safer to return to Venezuela with her children than to stay in the U.S. Her request for asylum was still open and she had a permit to work legally, but so did a lot of other Venezuelans getting picked up on the streets and taken into custody. Authorities were detaining immigrants regardless of whether they’d followed the rules.

She had also seen how President Donald Trump singled out her countrymen, calling them gang members and terrorists, even sending hundreds to a foreign prison. She was terrified of getting detained, deported and, worst of all, separated from her young daughter and son. They were the reason the family had come to the U.S.

Then she heard about Trump’s offer of a safe and dignified way out.
        
    
                    
“We are making it as easy as possible for illegal aliens to leave America,” the president said in a video on social media in May announcing the launch of Project Homecoming.

He spoke about a phone app where “illegals can book a free flight to any foreign country.” And he dangled other incentives: Eligible immigrants wouldn’t be barred from returning legally to the U.S. someday, and they’d even get a $1,000 “exit bonus.” Believing the president’s words, Pérez downloaded the CBP Home app and registered to return to Venezuela with her children.

Months passed. Her partner was deported. In July, Pérez said, she got a call from someone in the CBP Home program telling her she’d be on a flight out of the country in mid-August. She began packing.

But as the departure date neared and the plane tickets hadn’t arrived, Pérez got nervous. Again and again, she called the toll-free number she’d been given. Finally, somebody called back to say there might be a delay obtaining the documents she’d need to travel to Venezuela.

Then there was silence. No further information, no plane tickets. Pérez registered on the app again in August, then a third time in September, as immigration arrests ramped up in Chicago.

Today, Pérez feels trapped in a country that doesn’t want her. She’s afraid of leaving her apartment, afraid that she will be detained and that her children will be taken away from her. “I feel so scared, always looking around in every direction,” she said. “I was trying to leave voluntarily, like the president said.”

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is having the intended effect of terrifying people into trying to leave. There have been some 25,000 departures of immigrants from all countries via CBP Home, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data obtained by ProPublica.

The data indicates that of those 25,000 people, a little more than half of them returned home with DHS assistance; nearly all the others who left the U.S. ended up returning on their own.

And it’s not just CBP Home. Applications for voluntary departures — an alternative to deportation granted to some immigrants who leave at their own expense — have skyrocketed to levels not seen since at least 2000, reaching more than 34,000 since Trump’s second administration began, immigration court data shows. (The number is higher than in years past, but nowhere near the number of immigrants the administration has deported this year.)

But for many recent arrivals from Venezuela — arguably the community most targeted by the Trump administration, and whose country is now bracing for the possibility of a U.S. invasion — leaving has not been as simple as the president has made it sound.

ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen Venezuelans who said they wanted to take the U.S. government’s offer of a safe and easy return. They signed up months ago on the CBP Home app and were given departure dates. But after those dates came and went, these immigrants said they feel betrayed by what the president told them.

Part of the problem is tied to the lack of diplomatic relations between Washington and Caracas. There are no consular services for Venezuelans in the U.S. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S. in recent years seeking asylum or other humanitarian relief entered without valid passports, as Pérez did. But to get on a plane for Venezuela, they’re being told they’ll need a special travel document known as a “salvoconducto,” or “safe passage,” from their government.

And relations between the two countries are getting worse. The Trump administration has pushed for regime change in Venezuela, sent warships to the Caribbean and, in recent weeks, blew up four Venezuelan boats it claimed were transporting drugs to the U.S. Bracing for an invasion, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has said he’s ready to declare a state of emergency to protect his country, which could make it harder for Venezuelans abroad to return home.

The Venezuelans who want to leave the U.S. described how CBP Home representatives told them that their lack of passports wouldn’t be a problem and that the U.S. government would help them obtain the travel documents they needed. Now they are being told that they’re on their own — if they get any response at all.

The Trump administration was aware of the potential challenges from the start. In his May proclamation, the president directed the State and Homeland Security departments to “take all appropriate actions to enable the rapid departure of illegal aliens from the United States who currently lack a valid travel document from their countries of citizenship or nationality.”

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said the agency is working with the State Department “to acquire travel documents for those who lack safe passage. So far thousands of Venezuelans have already self-departed using CBP Home.” The State Department referred questions to DHS.

The internal DHS records obtained by ProPublica show nearly 3,700 departures of Venezuelans via CBP Home through late September. It’s unclear how many Venezuelans have applied. The DHS spokesperson said the agency could not confirm the numbers and would not say whether the program is meeting projections. (A congressional committee has directed DHS to include information about CBP Home departures in monthly reports the agency previously published, but has not published in this administration.)

An estimated 10,200 Venezuelans were deported between February and early October, according to deportation flight data tracked by the nonprofit Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor.

Many of the Venezuelans interviewed by ProPublica are mothers of young children who say they decided to take the president’s offer after their work permits expired, their temporary protected status was canceled or their spouses were deported. Few are willing to return by land because of the dangers posed by cartel violence and kidnappings in Mexico — dangers many of them experienced when they migrated here.

Nearly all of them, like Pérez, asked not to be identified by their full names because they’re afraid of bringing unwanted attention to themselves and of the potential consequences of such attention. Interviews with Venezuelan immigrants were conducted in Spanish.

Before their departure dates came and went, they had made preparations to leave — turning over the keys to their apartments, pulling their children from school, shipping their belongings to Venezuela. And they have sunk deeper into poverty as the weeks and months pass.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            Pérez applied for her family to return to Venezuela through the CBP Home app months ago but has been stuck in limbo in Chicago without a clear path forward.
    
            (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
In Los Angeles, a family of four slept in their tiny Toyota Echo for weeks to save on rent as they waited for their departure date. They sold the car and other belongings to pay for bus tickets back the way they’d come. Nearly two months after their return to Venezuela, they said they’re still waiting for the exit bonuses they’d hoped would help them start over.

In Youngstown, Pennsylvania, a mother of two said she didn’t enroll her 8-year-old son in school this fall because she assumed they would be gone by now. She recently moved into a friend’s apartment in New York City and plans to turn herself in to immigration authorities and ask to be deported.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” the woman said, between sobs. “What am I supposed to do?”

Several immigration attorneys and advocates told ProPublica that they don’t trust the CBP Home app or the Trump administration’s promises to help immigrants self-deport. The National Immigration Law Center recently published a guide explaining some of the potential risks of using the app, such as leaving the country without closing an immigration court case and becoming ineligible for a future visa. Some lawyers said they discourage clients from using the app at all.

Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit in El Paso that supports migrants and refugees, said in the current climate, he understands why some people might consider the administration’s offer to leave. But, he said, the offer has to be backed by action.

“If you’re going to say you’re going to do this,” Garcia added, “then you damn well better make sure that it’s truthful and that it works.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Emily, a Venezuelan immigrant in Columbus, Ohio, holds her phone showing an email from the CBP Home program.
    
            (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    

CBP Home replaced an earlier app that the Biden administration had promoted to try to bring order to the soaring numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country. Pérez and other asylum-seekers used that earlier version, CBP One, to make appointments to approach the border. Trump, who campaigned on the promise of mass deportations, ended that option on his first day back in the White House.

In March, he reintroduced the app with the new name and function, allowing immigrants to alert the government of their intention to self-deport. It was part of a $200 million advertising blitz meant to encourage immigrants to “Stay Out and Leave Now.” Two months later, Trump unveiled Project Homecoming and the added incentives of free flights and exit payments. The administration moved State Department funds meant to aid refugees resettling in the U.S. to DHS to help pay for the flights and stipends, according to federal records and news reports.

DHS officials have mentioned the app in dozens of press releases about policy changes and enforcement operations. For example, in the September announcement that DHS was ending temporary protected status for Venezuelans, officials also encouraged Venezuelans to leave via CBP Home. And immigrants who show up for their hearings at immigration court see posters taped on the walls about the benefits they could get if they “self-deport using CBP Home instead of being deported by ICE.”

Emily and Deybis downloaded the app in June, when it seemed as if their life in the U.S. was collapsing. They said they used the earlier CBP One app to approach the border with their two children in January 2024 and were allowed into the country with protections that were supposed to last two years. They settled in Dallas, applied for asylum and got work permits; Deybis found a job in a hotel laundry and Emily at a Chick-fil-A. Then, this spring, the Trump administration ended protections for immigrants like them and canceled their work permits.

They lost their jobs and could no longer afford their rent. On the app’s sky-blue home screen, they saw a drawing of a smiling man and woman holding hands with a child. “Let us help you easily leave the country,” another screen told them in Spanish. They agreed to share their phone’s geolocation, entered personal information and uploaded selfies.

They received an automated email from “Project Homecoming Support” explaining that they would be contacted soon by someone from a toll-free number who would help coordinate their travel. Within weeks, they got a call from an operator at that number who said she worked on behalf of DHS.

Emily said she made clear the family didn’t have Venezuelan passports but was told that wouldn’t be a problem; the U.S. government would procure any necessary documents for them. They said the operator gave them an Aug. 1 departure date and told them to expect their plane tickets by email.

Emily and Deybis sold their car and moved with their children to Columbus, Ohio, where Deybis’ nephew let them stay in his unfinished basement apartment until their departure. The plane tickets never came.

Then the nephew was detained in a traffic stop and deported. Panicked, Emily and Deybis said they called the toll-free number again and again, leaving messages that went unanswered. Emily submitted a new application and sent more emails.

In mid-September, they got an email from the “CBP Home team” telling them to contact the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico to get travel documents on their own.

“We are working very hard on your case,” the email assured.

When they called the embassy, though, the number was busy. They found travel agencies that offer to procure travel documents at a cost but said they were told the Venezuelan government requires an arrival date and proof that plane tickets have been purchased. Emily and Deybis can’t afford them.

“Thank you so much for your patience and we understand your frustration,” they heard back in another email. “Wait for new instructions from DHS.”

As they wait, they worry about how they’ll survive when winter comes. Most days, Deybis visits local food pantries and looks for discarded items in alleys and on street corners that they can resell. A few weeks ago, they sold their daughter’s bed to help pay the rent.

“We’d rather be in Venezuela with our family than suffer here,” he said.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            Emily and Deybis share a basement apartment in Columbus, Ohio with their two children. They’re unable to work and have resorted to selling the few possessions they have to feed the family.
    
            (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    

Pérez said her daughter was the family’s main motivation to come; the girl had been born with a heart defect and needed surgery they could not find in Venezuela, where hospitals operate through power outages and have limited capacity for advanced surgeries, not to mention supplies.

“We didn’t come for the American dream, or for a house, or for some life of luxury,” said Pérez. “What we wanted is for our daughter to live.”

She and her partner made the trek to the U.S. in 2023, with her daughter, then 6, and their 4-year-old son. Pérez thought they did it “the right away” by waiting in Mexico for weeks until they got an appointment to approach the border via CBP One. After they were processed, the family headed to Chicago, a city they had heard was a sanctuary for immigrants. At first they took shelter inside a police station, as hundreds of new immigrant families were doing at the time. Pérez said medical workers who visited the station learned about her daughter’s condition and connected the family to a hospital charity care program. The following spring, the frail little girl with dark brown eyes got the operation she needed.

In late 2024, the family moved to South Florida, where Pérez’s partner found work rebuilding homes damaged by hurricanes. Then in February, he was arrested for driving without a license or registration. He spent about two months in jail before he was transferred into immigration custody.

Pérez didn’t feel safe in Florida anymore. She returned to Chicago with her children.

But as the months pass without an answer from the CBP Home program, Chicago doesn’t feel safe, either. This fall, the Trump administration zeroed in on the city for immigration enforcement, sending in the U.S. Border Patrol. Pérez recently downloaded another app that tells her whether there’ve been sightings of federal immigration agents nearby, and she watches videos of other immigrants getting arrested. One day in September, a federal agent shot and killed an immigrant in a nearby suburb. Pérez wonders if she might die, too.

On a sunny September afternoon, Pérez peered down the street outside her children’s school, scanning for suspicious vehicles. Her daughter, who is now 8, bounded down the steps first, wearing a pink bow and a broad smile. Her son, now 6, in a Spiderman shirt and a blue cast from a playground accident, appeared next.

They share their mother’s anxiety. On their walk home, Pérez’s daughter leaned over her brother and chided him for speaking Spanish in public. The girl said her teacher had warned her that federal agents might be listening.

It reminded Perez that she now needs to leave the U.S. for the same reason she came: her children. She plans to register yet again on the CBP Home app.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Pérez plays with her two children in Chicago. Her partner was deported earlier this summer, leaving her unable to support the family alone.
    
            (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
             

                                    
        
                        Jeff Ernsthausen contributed data analysis. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:30:29 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“I, Don’t, Want, Here, Anymore”:, They, Tried, Self-Deport, Then, Got, Stranded, Trump’s, America</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Elon Musk’s Boring Co. Accused of Nearly 800 Environmental Violations on Las Vegas Project</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/elon-musks-boring-co-accused-of-nearly-800-environmental-violations-on-las-vegas-project</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/elon-musks-boring-co-accused-of-nearly-800-environmental-violations-on-las-vegas-project</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Dayvid Figler, City Cast Las Vegas                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
Nevada state regulators have accused Elon Musk’s Boring Co. of violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times in the last two years as it digs a sprawling tunnel network beneath Las Vegas for its Tesla-powered “people mover.” The company’s alleged violations include starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water onto city streets and spilling muck from its trucks, according to a new document obtained by City Cast Las Vegas and ProPublica.

The Sept. 22 cease-and-desist letter from the state Bureau of Water Pollution Control alleged repeated violations of a settlement agreement that the company had entered into after being fined five years ago for discharging groundwater into storm drains without a permit. That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws.

Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.

The Boring Co. is disputing the violation letter, a state spokesperson said.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection could have fined the company more than $3 million under the 2022 agreement, which allowed for daily penalties to be assessed. But regulators knocked down the total penalty to $242,800. For example, the bulk of the total possible fine was linked to the alleged missed inspections, but the agency chose to levy just a $10,000 penalty for each of the company’s 11 permits.

“Given the extraordinary number of violations, NDEP has decided to exercise its discretion to reduce the penalty to two $5,000 violations per permit, which it believes offers a reasonable penalty that will still serve to deter future non-compliance conduct,” regulators wrote in the letter.

Payment of the penalty isn’t required until after the dispute resolution process is complete, a state spokesperson said. In the letter, the agency reminded the company that it “reserves the right to direct TBC to cease and desist construction activities” under the agreement.
        
    
                    
In the past, Musk has espoused paying penalties rather than waiting for approvals as a way of doing business. 

​​“Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute last year. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective.”

Neither Musk nor Boring responded to requests for comment for this story.

The Sept. 22 letter documents the latest in a string of alleged violations of state and local regulations by The Boring Co. since it began construction in 2019 of the Loop project, which uses driver-operated Teslas to move people through the tunnels. The project, initially a 0.8-mile underground route connecting the sections of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority campus to each other, has grown to a planned 68 miles of tunnels and 104 stations across the Las Vegas Valley. It’s carried out in partnership with the LVCVA, the tourism board best known for the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” slogan.

Boring uses a machine known as Prufrock to dig the 12-foot-diameter tunnels, applying chemical accelerants as part of the process. For each foot the company bores, it removes about 6 cubic yards of soil along with any groundwater, according to a company document prepared for state environmental officials. 

Because it is privately funded and receives no federal money, the project is exempt from many exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analysis requirements. But it is required to obtain state permits to ensure the waste does not contaminate the environment or local water sources.

A January story by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas documented how the company worked to escape county and state oversight requirements by arguing its project didn’t fit under existing regulations and promising to hold itself accountable through independent audits — all while being cited for permitting and water pollution violations in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Last year, the company successfully lobbied to be exempted from holding a county “amusement and transportation system” permit, arguing instead for an oversight plan that removed multiple layers of inspection.

Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a “crush injury” after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening.

After ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas published their January story, both the CEO and the chairman of the LVCVA board criticized the reporting, arguing the project is well-regulated. As an example, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill cited the delayed opening of a Loop station by local officials who were concerned that fire safety requirements weren’t adequate. Board chair Jim Gibson, who is also a Clark County commissioner, agreed the project is appropriately regulated.

“We wouldn’t have given approvals if we determined things weren’t the way they ought to be and what it needs to be for public safety reasons,” Gibson said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Our sense is we’ve done what we need to do to protect the public.” 

Asked for a response to the new proposed fines, an LVCVA spokesperson said, “We won’t be participating in this story.”

The repeated allegations that the company is violating regulations — including the bespoke regulatory arrangement agreed to by the company — indicates that officials aren’t keeping the public safe, said Ben Leffel, an assistant public policy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Not if they’re recommitting almost the exact violation,” Leffel said. 

Leffel questioned whether a $250,000 penalty would be significant enough to change operations at The Boring Co., which was valued at $7 billion in 2023. Studies show that fines that don’t put a significant dent in a company’s profit don’t deter companies from future violations, Leffel said.

A state spokesperson disagreed that regulators aren’t keeping the public safe and said the agency believes its penalties will deter “future non-compliance.”

“NDEP is actively monitoring and inspecting the projects,” the spokesperson said. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:30:29 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Elon, Musk’s, Boring, Co., Accused, Nearly, 800, Environmental, Violations, Las, Vegas, Project</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Five Ways the Department of Education Is Upending Public Schools</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/five-ways-the-department-of-education-is-upending-public-schools</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/five-ways-the-department-of-education-is-upending-public-schools</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
In just over eight months, the second Trump administration has made a rapid succession of political hires and policy decisions at the U.S. Department of Education that could spur profound changes in the way schools are operated and children learn. 

After years of advocating to expand private and religious education and homeschooling, using tax dollars, a cadre of conservative activists is in a position to push forward its agenda. Some of its policies are already undermining public schools, which it has denigrated as unsuccessful and out of step with Christian values, a ProPublica investigation found.

In many communities, public schools are valued hubs for community life and services, including meals, socializing and counseling. More than 80% of students are enrolled in traditional public schools, which must serve all children, including those with disabilities. The administration, however, views public schools as a monopoly that should be broken up. 

“Millions of young Americans are trapped in failing schools, subjected to radical anti-American ideology,” Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon claimed immediately after taking office. She and others in the administration believe that progressive activists have led schools to focus too much on “woke” policies rather than on rigorous academic standards.

Agency officials and spokespeople declined to speak to ProPublica. 

Here are five ways the Education Department under McMahon is creating profound change in public schools.
        
    
                            
    
                        
    
        1. Encouraging an exodus
    
        
    
                    
McMahon and President Donald Trump want to expand tax-funded school choice options, giving more families the financial means to leave public schools. Trump pushed Congress to pass, and signed into law, a new federal tax credit to finance the first national school voucher program, set to open to families on Jan. 1, 2027. The Education Department has also encouraged school districts to spend some federal money meant for disadvantaged students on services from private providers and on children from low-income families who live within district boundaries but attend private schools.

Public school leaders say they’ve already watched students transfer out to private and charter schools in recent years — and with them, they’ve lost essential per-pupil funding. They worry that voucher expansion will cause further damage to their budgets and threaten their survival.

Occasionally, McMahon has spoken positively of public schools — for example, praising some for literacy gains. But more often, and more emphatically, she portrays them as unsuccessful, as do her advisers.

Education Department adviser Lindsey Burke came from The Heritage Foundation, where she co-authored the education chapter of Project 2025, the policy playbook for the Trump administration. It calls for tax-funded education accounts so parents can customize their children’s schooling. Years ago, Burke said she hoped that one day “we will marvel at the fact that we once assigned children to government-run schools consigning the poorest to schools that were often failing and sometimes unsafe.”
        
    
                        
    
        2. Cutting federal funding
    
        
    
                    
In a move that affects public school students across the country, the department has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding for a variety of programs, including for mental health professionals and for training and supporting new teachers. More cuts are likely.

The administration’s proposed education budget for fiscal 2026 calls for combining 18 existing grant programs — including funds for rural schools and homeless students — into a single $2 billion block grant to be allocated to states. That is about $4.5 billion less than if the grants survived alone. Overall, the Trump administration has proposed reducing federal spending on education by 15% in the 2026 budget. Congress has not passed a budget yet, and the government is shut down.
        
    
                        
    
        3. Injecting God into the classroom
    
        
    
                    
Department officials have decried what they view as liberal indoctrination in public schools — what one top leader describes as a “Marxist and anti-God and anti-family agenda.” They now are pursuing policies that align with conservative Christian values, including opposing protections for transgender students and restricting materials about sexuality. Early this year, the department notified schools it would follow Trump’s executive order stipulating that there are “two sexes, male and female.”

McMahon has made Meg Kilgannon, who advocates for more Christian leadership in school districts, a top adviser. Kilgannon has decried the removal of spirituality as a topic from classrooms, arguing that “if we’re not going to discuss our identity as Christians,” schools will push “racial identities” and “sexual identities” on students instead.

In a speech on Sept. 8 at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., Trump announced that the Education Department “will soon issue new guidance protecting the right to prayer in our public schools.” He said that the Bible is “an important part of the American story” and that he intends to “protect the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding, and we will protect them with vigor.”
        
    
                        
    
        4. Promoting curriculum choices
    
        
    
                    
The federal government historically has not dictated curriculum choices, and McMahon has stressed that she thinks what is taught in schools is best left to local communities. Yet the Education Department is prioritizing patriotic education, promoting civics lessons that present American history and the nation’s founding principles in an “inspiring” manner. History should portray an “ennobling characterization” of the country’s past, the department said. Critics contend that the administration’s aim is to present a sanitized version of history, downplaying bitter episodes, including racial oppression and sexism.

The department has directed states and districts to avoid material that could make white students feel “intrinsic guilt” based on the oppressive acts of past generations. McMahon also supported the rights of parents to pull their children out of classes they find objectionable, such as those involving books with gay characters or themes.
        
    
                        
    
        5. Weakening civil rights protections
    
        
    
                    
The department is using its Office for Civil Rights to press public schools to drop programs and policies designed to help Black or Hispanic students. The office has launched investigations against school districts for teaching lessons on systemic racism, hosting empowerment gatherings for students of color and providing remedial help for Black youth, all of which the administration says discriminates against white students.

In addition, the department has repeatedly targeted school districts for allowing students who were born male but identify as female to play on girls sports teams and use bathrooms and locker rooms reserved for girls. In some instances, the department has issued or threatened sanctions, including the potential loss of federal funding and referral to the U.S. Department of Justice for further action.
        
    
                    
    
        
            Help ProPublica Report on Education
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<pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:30:29 +0200</pubDate>
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<item>
<title>The Complicated Case of Jorge Ruiz</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-complicated-case-of-jorge-ruiz</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-complicated-case-of-jorge-ruiz</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Amy Yurkanin                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
When 19-year-old Jorge Ruiz walked into the Autauga County Jail in handcuffs on Oct. 28, 2018, he wasn’t a typical suspect. He was out of place and in big trouble in a deeply conservative part of Alabama.

That morning, he’d been driving about 70 miles per hour in a 55 zone when he crossed the center line of a two-lane rural highway. His Ford pickup collided head-on with a Honda Civic, killing the woman behind the wheel. Paramedics took Ruiz to the hospital, where a blood test found a trace amount of alcohol. At just 0.016, it was below the legal threshold for intoxication. 

But rather than charging him with manslaughter, which typically would be the most extreme charge brought under the circumstances, police went further. They arrested him for murder.

To support such a murder charge, prosecutors are supposed to show that a defendant’s conduct displays “extreme indifference” — behavior so reckless that someone is likely to die, as when a person fires a gun into a crowd or steers a boat into a group of swimmers. Suspects charged with murder after car crashes often are documented to have blood alcohol levels more than twice the legal limit and 10 times the level found in Ruiz’s blood, according to a review of Alabama cases from the last 20 years by ProPublica. Many others had prior DUIs or were driving 100 miles per hour or more. In this case, the suspect had a clean criminal history and wasn’t even going fast enough to be ticketed for aggravated speeding.

Ruiz’s trial attorney said that as soon as he started talking to the district attorney’s office, the case felt different. Across the three counties in Alabama’s 19th Circuit Court, only a handful of people have been charged with murder for a car accident in the span of a decade — and most wound up taking a plea deal for a lesser charge.

But this time around, the prosecutor’s offer could hardly be considered a deal at all: The teenager would have to plead guilty to murder, and it would be blind plea, meaning he would have to hope for mercy from the court in his sentencing. “In my 30 years of practicing law, I have never been offered a deal like that,” Ruiz’s court-appointed lawyer, Richard Lively, said.

The lead prosecutor eventually budged, but only a little. He wouldn’t reduce the charge, but he would recommend that the teenager spend 30 years in prison.

That’s longer than any other sentence handed down since at least 2004 for a car crash fatality in Alabama’s 19th Circuit Court, which includes Autauga, Chilton and Elmore counties. A man who fled the scene of a fatal crash — and had a 0.09 blood alcohol level nine hours later — received a 15-year sentence in 2017. A woman who had three times the legal limit of alcohol in her system received 23 years in 2007 after she killed a University of Alabama student.

For defendants who were teenagers when they caused fatal car accidents, the courts can be even more lenient. In 2012, a Madison County judge granted youthful offender status to a man who was 19 when he was charged with murder for a drunk driving crash that killed a high school sophomore in Huntsville. The driver, who had a blood alcohol level of 0.15, was sentenced to a year in jail and two on probation. 

Lively had a hard time squaring his client’s charges with the results of his blood test and recorded speed. Alabama’s murder statute does not require a driver to be legally intoxicated, and people have faced murder charges for killing someone by racing or fleeing police. But neither applied here. Lively reasoned that for murder to fit, the teenager would have had to be intentionally driving into oncoming traffic.

He thought his client could beat the charge and told him not to plead guilty. Years later, attorneys involved in the case would attempt to shed light on what was so different about it — and on one fact in particular that they believed eclipsed all the others. 

He was a Mexican immigrant.



        
    
                    
The case against Ruiz was, as one legal expert put it, “a perfect storm of horrible facts.”

The night before the accident, he stayed up late after drinking at a music festival in Birmingham. At the scene of the crash, police found beer cans in his truck. He was in the country on a temporary work visa and did not have a driver’s license. He spoke little English, relying on his 17-year-old cousin to translate his Miranda rights and the string of questions from police.

The only reason Ruiz was in Autauga County was to visit his extended family after finishing a monthslong job in Georgia and South Carolina clearing brush from power lines. He was days away from returning to Mexico.

The woman he killed was named Marlena Hayes. She was a 29-year-old nurse who’d just finished the night shift at Prattville Baptist Hospital. She wasn’t even supposed to be working at that time. She’d planned to see her brother perform that weekend with the marching band at the University of West Alabama. In the end, though, she took the shift as a favor to a colleague.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Marlena Hayes was killed in a car crash in 2018.
    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Newspapers and TV stations in central Alabama quickly picked up the story. Some referred to Ruiz as an illegal immigrant even though he’d been in the U.S. on a six-month H-2B visa, which are approved when employers can’t find enough American workers. One of those articles appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser, the largest newspaper in the area.

When Lively was assigned to the case, he felt compelled to show that his client had been in the U.S. legally. Ruiz’s visa had only lapsed when he was in jail. Lively tracked down the Montgomery Advertiser reporter at the Autauga County courthouse to show him that Ruiz’s visa had been valid when he was arrested. But even after that, the newspaper failed to acknowledge that he was in the country legally at the time of the crash. “The Montgomery Advertiser stands behind our reporting,” the newspaper said in a statement released through its parent company, Gannett. 

In the years leading up to Ruiz’s arrest, Alabama had established itself as a particularly unwelcoming place for foreigners. In 2011, then-Gov. Robert Bentley signed a bill that criminalized everyday activities like transporting, employing and renting homes to undocumented immigrants.

At the time, historians and legal experts worried the law could usher in a new era of racial injustice similar to Jim Crow that would be enforced by the police and courts. But the impact of the immigration law remains largely unknown because Alabama prisons don’t collect ethnicity data and therefore don’t know how many inmates are Hispanic. In 2013, the state agreed not to enforce most of the provisions as part of a lawsuit.

“The HB 56 legislation brought nativism and xenophobia into the political mainstream in Alabama” wrote historian Raymond Mohl. At the height of the debate over the law, a congressman from north Alabama said that to prevent illegal immigration to the state, he would do “anything short of shooting them.”

Back then, those harsh policies made Alabama an outlier. But with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the state’s positions started going mainstream. Alabama even supplied one of the foremost architects of Trump’s first-term immigration policy: U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, a fierce champion of border crackdowns, was tapped to be Trump’s attorney general.

Ruiz was arrested nearly two years into Trump’s first term. At the time, Alabama was growing more red even as a blue wave nationally elected dozens of Democrats to Congress. In Alabama, Republicans swept statewide office that year and expanded their majority in the Legislature. 

Some members of Ruiz’s extended family had started moving to Alabama from Mexico nearly 15 years earlier and stayed in the area even after the political winds turned against them. Sandra Ruiz, his 17-year-old cousin, moved from Texas to Autauga County at age 2 and had lived near Prattville, a suburb of Montgomery, nearly all her life. She knew that some of her neighbors could be ignorant of, or even hostile to, people from Mexico. She and her family were afraid for Jorge Ruiz when he was arrested and followed the police to the station. Investigators allowed the high school senior to translate their questions and Ruiz’s responses.

A judge granted Ruiz bond in March 2019, four months after he was jailed. Ruiz’s family members in Alabama sold tamales and organized a raffle of an ornate belt buckle to raise funds for bail. They posted the money to free him.

And they began to wait.


In the weeks and months leading up to Ruiz’s trial, Judge Bill Lewis made several decisions that, according to Ruiz’s lawyer, put his client at a disadvantage. 

One of the first things Lewis did was revoke Ruiz’s bond. Because of a technicality, Ruiz’s family never recovered the $5,000 they’d paid to get him out of jail. The news coverage that followed the decision sparked intense, and often misinformed, debate online about the case, and Lively worried that bias would affect potential jurors. Not long after Ruiz’s bond was revoked, the judge got a letter in the mail from a local resident. The writer thanked him and asked Lewis to “do everything in your power to get justice for Marlena.” The letter went on to describe Ruiz as “in this country illegally” and “operating his vehicle under the influence of alcohol.” 

About a week later, Lewis denied Ruiz’s application for youthful offender status. That meant he would not be eligible for a sentence capped at three years. Lewis did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica, including one about not granting Ruiz youthful offender status.

But as the trial neared, Lewis took several steps to attempt to keep bias out of the courtroom. He gave special instructions to the prosecution and the defense, barring any mention of Ruiz’s immigration status and directing attorneys involved in the case to call him “George.”

The judge’s efforts couldn’t erase the obvious difference between Ruiz and almost everyone else in the courtroom: the language barrier. “Longtime courthouse observers don’t recall a case in Prattville where an interpreter was used at trial,” the Montgomery Advertiser reported.

The district attorney had charged Ruiz under the reckless murder section of the statute, reserved for offenders who unintentionally cause a death. Courts have found that driving without a license, a misdemeanor that in Alabama carries a fine of $10 to $100, doesn’t constitute underlying recklessness for charges like manslaughter or murder. Prosecutors only briefly brought up at Ruiz’s trial that he did not have a license. What made the case amount to murder, the prosecutor said throughout the case, was that Ruiz was both speeding and had crossed the center line.

Ruiz’s use of alcohol also played a central role in the trial, even though he hadn’t been charged with DUI — and even though the prosecutors conceded that the evidence didn’t support that charge. A toxicologist testified that almost four hours had passed between the crash and the blood test at the hospital. He said the average elimination rate for alcohol is 0.015 percentage points an hour. That testimony suggested Ruiz’s blood alcohol level would have been higher than 0.07 at the time of the accident. 

If the prosecutors could scientifically confirm that figure, it would have been enough to charge Ruiz with DUI because the legal intoxication threshold is lower for underage drivers. But such estimates have been described as unreliable by some scientists and legal experts, with one calling them no better than a “wild guess.” Some states have imposed higher bars than Alabama for the admission of such evidence, and at least one, Massachusetts, doesn’t allow it at all if the blood alcohol reading was, like Ruiz’s, below 0.03. 

Lively produced no expert to dispute the toxicologist. In fact, he called only one witness, Ruiz’s date the night of the festival, who testified that Ruiz rode with her to her apartment after the festival, at around 1:30 a.m., and slept on the couch until he left at around 5 a.m.

Lively said in his closing argument that the evidence failed to show that Ruiz’s behavior was so brazenly dangerous that it amounted to murder.

“This was a person who was driving home and fell asleep behind the wheel,” Lively said.

Then-Chief Assistant District Attorney C.J. Robinson said there was no evidence Ruiz fell asleep. “In Alabama, we recognize that you can do something so dangerous that it could kill somebody, and you should realize what you’re doing is that dangerous,” he said during closing arguments. “I submit to you that anyone’s life was in danger, and therefore it was reckless murder.”

Jurors were instructed that, as an alternative to murder, they also could consider the lesser charges of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide. They deliberated for less than an hour.

The foreman announced guilty verdicts on three counts: minor in possession of alcohol, driving without a license and murder.

Three weeks later, everyone gathered again for the sentencing. Robinson invited members of Hayes’ family to speak about their loss.

The family, along with friends, had come to every hearing. Hayes’ mother, Laura Liveoak, had spoken out on social media about her grief, describing how her daughter had texted her right before she left work that morning, asking what the weather was like. Liveoak said in a Facebook video: “It’s hard to be the parent of a victim, knowing that she’ll never be a mother. I’ll never be a grandmother to the sweet little redheaded kids that she probably would have had.” She declined to comment for this story.

Liveoak told the judge how much her daughter loved being a nurse: so much that she spent some of her days off visiting patients. She’d recently bought a house in a nearby town, Deatsville, and adopted two German shepherds who became the center of her world. She’d texted her mom right before she left work that morning. Her last message was about her dogs.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Hayes’ grave
    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Then it was Ruiz’s turn. He spoke for the first time in court.

“I want to say that I am sorry to the family,” Ruiz said. “I wouldn’t have wished for this to happen. I wish that this would have only been a dream.”

Lewis peered down from the bench at Ruiz.

“This is America,” Lewis said. “It’s the greatest country in the world and we have the right to trial in this country. I would never penalize you for exercising that right, but Mr. Lively talked about acceptance of responsibility, contrition, remorse. I haven’t seen any of that from you.”

He sentenced Ruiz to the maximum possible punishment, longer even than the 50 years requested by prosecutors: 99 years.

The court went quiet. Even the prosecutor was shocked.

Years later, Robinson remembered that moment. “That was not something that I had expected,” he said.


In 2023, four years after the sentencing, a human rights lawyer from Mexico reached out to the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit law center in Atlanta that focuses on criminal justice. He let them know that the Mexican Consulate had been following Ruiz’s case from the time he was arrested through the slow-moving appeals process. His 99-year sentence had shocked them, and they wanted to find a lawyer in the U.S. who could steer the increasingly complicated appeal.

Ruiz’s family had cobbled together money for a private attorney, who filed motions to challenge his conviction and sentence. But they had run out of funds. Ruiz was preparing to represent himself when the attorneys from the center stepped in.

“I was like, ‘We need to help this kid,’” SCHR attorney Paulina Lucio-Maymon said. “Otherwise, he’s just gonna end up forgotten by the system.”

The Mexican Consulate connected Lucio-Maymon and her colleague Michael Admirand with family from Prattville, who in turn connected the attorneys with family in Ruiz’s hometown, José María Pino Suárez, in the Mexican state of Durango. Many in the small community knew Ruiz. As a young boy, he had helped his grandfather work a shared plot of farmland and manage his livestock. He dropped out after middle school to support his family and got his visa to come to the U.S. in the spring of 2018. He needed to make more money after his mother’s unexpected death.

“He was always trying to make sure everyone was taken care of,” said his cousin, Sandra Ruiz.

In the U.S., he was part of an all-immigrant crew of temporary visa workers employed by a contractor for the power company. The team trudged through Georgia and South Carolina backcountry, their feet snagging on roots and vines as they cleared vegetation from power lines. They often walked for 10 to 12 hours a day while carrying heavy canisters of weed-killing chemicals, and Ruiz suffered heat stroke twice, one of Ruiz’s fellow workers testified in an appeal hearing. Workers wore out their shoes every eight days, the worker said.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            First image: Ruiz, on the horse, grew up taking care of animals on his grandfather’s farm in rural Mexico. Second image: Ruiz, age 17, with his mom before she died suddenly in 2017.
    
            (Courtesy of Jorge Ruiz)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Ruiz, second from the right, with his work crew in Georgia in 2018
    
            (Courtesy of Jorge Ruiz)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Ruiz wanted to spend his last few weeks in the U.S. visiting family in Prattville before returning to Mexico. He missed his daughter, Noeli, and had begun making plans for her third birthday.

None of that history had been presented at his sentencing hearing. His attorney also failed to highlight his clean criminal record in Mexico.

In September 2019, less than a month after he handed down that 99-year sentence, Lewis had issued an unusual order. He removed Lively from the case despite there being no motion seeking his removal. Lewis determined Ruiz had received inadequate representation.

Lewis cited an offhand comment Lively made at the sentencing hearing. In response to the judge admonishing Ruiz for not being contrite, Lively told the judge that the decision to take Ruiz’s case to trial “may be more of a reflection of my bad advice to him than his own acceptance of responsibility.” Lewis wrote that he saw that as an admission that Lively was questioning his own representation of Ruiz. (Lively later told ProPublica he was trying to “deflect some of Judge Lewis’ criticism of Jorge onto me” and lamented how “that one sentence has been used as a cudgel against me and a tool to scapegoat me in this case.”)

In the hearings and filings that followed, Lewis continued to express concerns about the information that had not been presented at trial or sentencing. 

“The Court, when rendering a sentence in this case should have as much information as possible,” Lewis wrote in a more recent order. “Mr. Lively failed to provide any, despite having access to many different sources of information that could have affected the Defendant’s sentence.”

Lively did provide some evidence at Ruiz’s sentencing, calling his aunt and cousin to testify. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals later rejected a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel against him.

In a statement to ProPublica, Lively wrote that he believed he competently defended Ruiz. He said that he only called one trial witness because he felt the state had not proven his client’s guilt. He pointed to the state’s experts, who testified that Ruiz had a very low level of alcohol in his system and drifted slowly into oncoming traffic, which, according to Lively, showed Ruiz did not intentionally jerk the car across the center line. “The most powerful witness is one that is called by the opposition who proves your case,” Lively wrote.

He also described the case as “the most traumatic” he’s encountered in his 30 years as an attorney. “I have made the law my life’s work, and Jorge’s case caused me to question almost everything I believed about the legal system,” he wrote.

When Lucio-Maymon and Admirand first took on Ruiz’s case, they appealed both his murder conviction and his 99-year sentence. Lewis rejected their challenge of Ruiz’s conviction but agreed the sentence deserved another look.

To make their case for a shorter sentence, Ruiz’s attorneys compiled information about other fatal car crash cases. His former attorneys had appealed his conviction to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and lost. The one notable dissent on the panel of judges was penned by Republican Judge J. William Cole, who wrote that the facts did not support a murder conviction.

“Ruiz had consumed alcohol before the accident, but he was not determined to be legally intoxicated, nor was he charged with driving under the influence of alcohol,” Cole wrote. “Although he crossed to the wrong side of the road, there was no evidence that he was racing or driving in a grossly wanton manner.”

Admirand and Lucio-Maymon looked at the four cases cited in the decision to uphold his conviction. The drivers in those cases had blood alcohol levels that ranged from 0.16 to 0.3 — from double to nearly quadruple the level of criminal intoxication. Their sentences ranged from 12 to 25 years in prison.

The attorneys created a simple graph that compared those sentences and blood alcohol levels. Although Ruiz had the lowest amount of alcohol in his system, his sentence was by far the longest.

After Lewis granted a new sentencing hearing, Admirand and Lucio-Maymon felt hopeful. That disparity — along with testimony from Ruiz’s friends and family in Mexico — could help sway the judge toward mercy, they believed. They said they even started talking with the district attorney’s office with the goal of making a deal, though Robinson said he remembered those conversations differently. He recalled that he agreed to listen to evidence about Ruiz’s background but wouldn’t consider reducing the charge and would be hard-pressed to recommend less than 50 years.

“They did initially express some openness to discussion in this case,” Admirand said. “And then something changed.”


Although Lewis had presided over Ruiz’s trial and granted him a resentencing hearing, he was not behind the bench when Ruiz was set to be resentenced in 2024. By then, Lewis had been appointed to the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals.

The case was transferred to Sibley Reynolds, who had retired from the bench but still took cases as needed. When Admirand and Lucio-Maymon arrived early on Aug. 14, 2024, to prepare, they found the judge sitting in the courtroom, paging through a purple binder they had never seen before. It contained pictures of Hayes and letters from friends, family members and even a few local officials.

Each of the dozens of letters urged the judge to uphold Ruiz’s 99-year sentence. Prosecutors asked the judge for 50 years. Lucio-Maymon and Admirand, citing several sentences from cases across the 19th Circuit Court, were seeking 10 years.

Admirand said he watched as Reynolds carried the binder with him to the bench. The hearing he oversaw was short but eventful. At one point, Ruiz addressed Hayes’ family.

“I am profoundly sorry for having caused you this pain,” he said. “I want to say I’m sorry or forgive me, the way I have asked God to do every day during the almost six years.” 

Admirand presented all the evidence he believed had been missing from Ruiz’s first sentencing hearing in 2019. He told the judge about the cases they had found in the same judicial district with sentences that ranged from one to 25 years. And he presented mitigating factors — witnesses who testified about Ruiz’s character and work ethic.

His attorneys also played a series of videos of family members in Mexico, accompanied by dramatic music. 

When Robinson, who had been elected district attorney in 2022, started to make his argument against Ruiz, he invoked a patriotic anthem as a sort of rebuttal. He said the victim’s family was ready to move on and that he was going to make a case for them “courtesy of the red, white and blue.”

It was a reference to the title of the Toby Keith song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” which includes lyrics like, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” Robinson would later tell ProPublica the comment was taken out of context and was meant as a critique of the music in the video, which he described as “manipulative.”

Shortly after, Hayes’ mother asked the judge to uphold the original sentence.

“I’m asking for the 99 years that Judge Lewis saw fit to give,” she said. “Marlena’s life is worth that and so much more.”

At the end of the hearing, the judge announced his decision: He would reduce Ruiz’s sentence to 50 years.

He didn’t offer an explanation for why he chose what’s still an unusually long sentence. Admirand suspected the reason might be found in the purple binder. He objected to the judge considering it without the defense having seen it. He then asked for a copy of the material.

“I mean, it’s literally letters from the victim’s family,” said Assistant District Attorney Mandy Johnson in response to the objection.

When Admirand read it right after the hearing, he found much more than that, including notes from local public officials and incorrect information about the case. He said that, more alarmingly, there were letters that included language he considered biased. One letter said that if Ruiz was released early and deported, he would surely return to the U.S.

“He will again commit crimes,” the letter said. “He will again be a draw on our judicial system and society itself. He will once again be an unnecessary threat to all our lives, including yours.”

“Fry him!” demanded another one.
        
    
                    

    
            Excerpts of Letters Reviewed by the Judge in a Sentencing Hearing
                Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights added by ProPublica.

    

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    
The binder presented an opportunity to challenge what Admirand had come to believe was an underlying bias that permeated the case from the first moments after the crash, when a state trooper threatened to take Ruiz to jail if he did not speak English. In September 2024, he and Lucio-Maymon filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that the letters contained improper references to Ruiz’s nationality, including racially derogatory claims. In February, the Mexican Consulate filed an amicus brief in support of the appeal, only the second time in five years it has done that in a criminal case in the United States.

“Ruiz’s equal protection rights were violated from the moment this prosecution began,” the appeal said. “From his earliest interactions with law enforcement through the resentencing proceedings, Ruiz was treated more harshly than other similarly situated defendants because of his race. The Court should remedy this injustice.”

In June, Ruiz’s attorneys identified another 17 car crash cases over 15 years that were heard in the 19th Circuit Court. Most defendants received sentences of less than 15 years in prison, even in cases involving multiple fatalities or high blood alcohol levels. Only one, Ruiz, had a sentence longer than 25 years. Robinson argued those cases were different, though not because of the defendant’s race. Defendants in most of them had accepted plea deals. He did not acknowledge that all of those plea deals were more lenient than the one offered to Ruiz.

Lewis did not respond to questions, including ones about alleged bias in the case. In response to ProPublica’s questions, Robinson wrote that neither he nor the district attorney’s office “treated Jorge Ruiz more harshly than other similarly situated defendants because of his race.”

Though the district attorney’s office did not charge Ruiz with DUI, Robinson wrote that alcohol “was illegally consumed at a rate much higher than legally permissible for Ruiz to be operating a vehicle.” He also wrote, “I do not assess cases using a least common denominator approach. I do my best to evaluate them based on a totality of the circumstances approach.”

In August, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals asked for more information from Reynolds about his reasoning behind the 50-year sentence. Admirand and Lucio-Maymon have asked the court to take Reynolds off the case, arguing that he improperly reviewed the purple binder material. Reynolds did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Hayes’ family members have been outspoken about their loss. At every hearing, they tick off the milestones Hayes has missed. Her brother’s graduation. Her sister’s wedding. The births of nieces and nephews.

Ruiz’s family members are quietly marking off their own list. His daughter’s kindergarten graduation, her First Communion. The 9-year-old still doesn’t quite comprehend where he has gone.

Ruiz has learned a little English but still struggles with the language. He said through his attorneys that he’s never been able to adequately convey how bad he feels about the accident. It’s not just the language barrier, but also that his role in Hayes’ death left him so distraught that he felt like “my life didn’t matter anymore.”

Still, the hearing last year that reduced his sentence kindled some optimism. He said that when he first faced the prospect of 99 years behind bars, the only thing he could think about was never seeing his daughter again. After the hearing, his outlook changed.

“That gave me back hope that one day I’ll be able to see my family again,” Ruiz said.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Mollie Simon contributed research. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/ruiz-noncitizen-sentences-3x2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:15:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Complicated, Case, Jorge, Ruiz</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Scientists Completed a Toxicity Report on This Forever Chemical. The EPA Hasn’t Released It.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/scientists-completed-a-toxicity-report-on-this-forever-chemical-the-epa-hasnt-released-it</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/scientists-completed-a-toxicity-report-on-this-forever-chemical-the-epa-hasnt-released-it</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Sharon Lerner                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
This spring, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency completed a report on the toxicity of a “forever chemical” called PFNA, which is in the drinking water systems serving some 26 million people. The assessment found that PFNA interferes with human development by causing lower birth weights and, based on animal evidence, likely causes damage to the liver and to male reproductive systems, including reductions in testosterone levels, sperm production and the size of reproductive organs.

The report also calculated the amount of PFNA that people could be exposed to without being harmed — a critical measurement that can be used to set limits for cleaning up PFNA contamination in Superfund sites and for removing the chemical from drinking water.

For months, however, the report has sat in limbo, raising concerns among some scientists and environmentalists that the Trump administration might change it or not release it at all. 

The EPA told ProPublica the report would be published when it was finalized, though the press office did not answer questions about what still needed to be done or when that would likely happen. 

But the report’s final version was “completed and ready to post” in mid-April, according to an internal document reviewed by ProPublica. And two scientists familiar with the assessment confirmed the report has been finalized and ready for publication since April. 

“Scientifically, it was done,” said one of the two scientists, who both worked in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the unreleased report. 

“All that was left to do was to brief higher-ups about the report and post it,” the scientist said, adding that such a delay was unusual. “In recent years, the assessments tended to be finalized within a few weeks.”
        
    
                    
A draft version of the assessment was made public last year and drew objections from an industry trade group. The final version, which retained the calculations published in the draft report, was completed shortly before the EPA announced its intention in May to rescind and reconsider limits on the amount of PFNA and several other forever chemicals allowed in drinking water. The limits had been set last year by President Joe Biden’s administration. 

Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed to that pending change as a possible motivation for not publishing the PFNA assessment. “If you’re trying to roll back drinking water standards, you probably don’t want to release information that makes the case for why those standards are necessary,” said Minovi. 

The nonprofit science advocacy group called attention to the unpublished report in a social media post last month that said, “Without this assessment, federal and state agencies are denied the best available science that they rely on to protect public health.”

PFNA is so hazardous that the EPA struck an agreement with eight companies to phase it out nearly two decades ago. The chemical was a component of firefighting foam and a processing aid to make a kind of plastic used in circuit boards, valves and pipes. PFNA has been found in water near sites where the foam was used and in the drinking water in 28 states, according to an analysis of EPA and state data by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. 

Local governments around the country have been trying to get companies that used and made forever chemicals such as PFNA to foot the bill for the expensive job of cleaning up contamination. In 2019, the state of New Jersey ordered the owner of an industrial plant in West Deptford to address chemical contamination at the site, where high levels of PFNA had been found in the nearby soil and water. The state took the company, Solvay Specialty Polymers, to court, accusing it of failing to fully comply. As part of a legal settlement, Solvay agreed to pay more than $393 million and to clean up contamination. The company, which has since become Syensqo Specialty Polymers, pointed out to ProPublica other sources of PFNA contamination in the area of the plant and noted that it settled the suit without admission of liability.

Solvay tried to influence the EPA over the drinking water limit the agency set for PFNA and other chemicals in the class, according to lobbying records. The company also lobbied Congress over legislation that would prevent chemical assessments conducted by the agency’s Integrated Risk Information System program from being used in regulation. IRIS, as the program is known, analyzes the harm chemicals can cause and put together the PFNA report. Syensqo and Solvay did not respond to questions about lobbying and whether they asked the EPA either to change or not release the IRIS report on PFNA.

Scientists in the EPA’s IRIS program began work on the assessment because PFNA, short for perfluorononanoic acid, appeared particularly dangerous. Like other compounds in its class, PFNA doesn’t break down in nature. Scientists had already found it in soil and water around the country. It was also measured in food, air, indoor dust and fish — as well as in breastmilk, fetal tissues and human blood. Perhaps most worrisome, studies had already suggested that the chemical caused serious harm to people and lab animals.

A draft of the report, which reflected five years of collecting and reviewing studies, found that, in addition to developmental, liver and reproductive harms, PFNA “may cause” immune problems, thyroid effects, harm to the developing brain and a cluster of other disorders, including Type 2 diabetes. The American Chemistry Council took issue with the report’s findings on low birth weight and liver issues, arguing that the evidence wasn’t as robust as the report claimed. The industry trade group did not address the reproductive threats posed by PFNA, which have been documented by other regulatory agencies and are part of a larger body of evidence linking “forever chemicals” with male reproductive harms, such as smaller testes and a reduction in the number and mobility of sperm. Forever chemicals, also known as PFAS, are also associated with female reproductive problems, such as endometriosis, ovarian dysfunction and tumors and dramatic decreases in fertility 

Questions about the fate of the PFNA report extend to the fate of the IRIS program that conducted it and to the EPA’s handling of toxic chemicals more broadly. 

IRIS was created during Ronald Reagan’s presidency to provide an independent and reliable source of information about pollutants that can harm the public. Dozens of EPA scientists contribute to a typical assessment, which takes years to complete and is subject to extensive peer review. The level of scientific scrutiny and expertise means these documents are trusted by environmental experts around the world.

Many hoped that, because it was separate from regulatory arms of the agency, IRIS would be insulated from political pressures. But almost from its start, industry has targeted the program, whose assessments can trigger toxic waste cleanups and expensive regulatory changes. 

Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has set the direction for President Donald Trump’s second administration, called for IRIS to be eliminated. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress introduced legislation called the “No IRIS Act.” Their proposal would prohibit the EPA from using the program’s assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water, and from using them to map the health risks from toxic chemicals. That legislation has been referred to committee in both the House and the Senate but not yet passed in either branch.

Since Trump took office, the IRIS program has been decimated. The program was housed in the Office of Research and Development, which has been dramatically reduced under Trump as part of a major reorganization of the agency. Of 55 scientists ProPublica identified as having worked on recent IRIS assessments, only eight remain in the office, according to a source familiar with the program. The rest have either been assigned to jobs elsewhere in the agency or have left the EPA. 

“Through the movement of bodies, they have disassembled IRIS,” said one scientist who worked with the program for decades and recently left the EPA. “It feels like the efforts of a couple of generations of scientists who have worked extremely diligently to produce the world’s most highly vetted assessments has been set aside with no path forward.”

Meanwhile, the IRIS program stopped issuing the reports it has regularly posted for years about its progress. The most recent, published in February, noted that the PFNA assessment was scheduled to be released in the second quarter of the financial year, which ended in June. 

Asked about the status of the program, an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica that “it is inaccurate to say that IRIS no longer exists.” The press office did not respond to follow-up questions about whether it’s accurate to say that IRIS does exist, how many people still work there, whether the agency plans to allow continued access to its database of chemical assessments and how it plans to use those assessments in the future. The EPA has not made clear how it plans to continue gauging the toxicity of chemicals. 

In its May press release, the EPA said it was “committed to addressing” forever chemicals in drinking water. At the same time, it was rolling back drinking water limits on some of the compounds. The agency is also reconsidering bans on solvents called TCE and PCE, which are linked to Parkinson’s disease. It is offering exemptions from pollution restrictions for up to two years to companies that email the agency and is in the process of reversing rules designed to protect the public from toxic air pollution. The agency recently announced a plan to ease regulations on climate pollutants known as hydrofluorocarbons. 

Under Trump, the EPA, which was created to protect public health, has celebrated its efforts to reverse regulations and champion industry. But people concerned about the health effects of chemicals see the agency’s retreat from environmental protections as a betrayal. Laurene Allen, an environmental advocate who lives in Merrimack, New Hampshire, where PFNA was one of several forever chemicals discovered in drinking water in 2016, was awaiting the report and is frustrated and enraged by its delay. 

“This is the suppression of information,” said Allen, who co-founded the National PFAS Contamination Coalition. “We have the science, and it shouldn’t be obstructed.”
        
             

                                    
        
                        Mariam Elba contributed research. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:15:10 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Scientists, Completed, Toxicity, Report, This, Forever, Chemical., The, EPA, Hasn’t, Released, It.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>ICIJ members and partners honored with top journalism prize</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/icij-members-and-partners-honored-with-top-journalism-prize</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/icij-members-and-partners-honored-with-top-journalism-prize</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The winners of the prestigious Cabot Prize acknowledged the important role that collaboration has played in developing investigative journalism across the Americas. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/10/2025-Cabot-Prize-via-Columbia-760x427.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:15:07 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>ICIJ, members, and, partners, honored, with, top, journalism, prize</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Oregon Fast&#45;Tracks Renewable Energy Projects as Trump Bill Ends Tax Incentives</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/oregon-fast-tracks-renewable-energy-projects-as-trump-bill-ends-tax-incentives</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/oregon-fast-tracks-renewable-energy-projects-as-trump-bill-ends-tax-incentives</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has ordered state agencies to take “any and all steps necessary” to fast-track solar and wind permits that must break ground by next year or likely miss out on a federal tax credit Congress is ending.

The move follows reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica about the role that the state’s lengthy permitting process plays, according to renewables advocates, in Oregon having one of the slowest growth rates in the country for green energy. At the time, Kotek’s office said that she was “carefully considering opportunities to streamline Oregon’s energy siting processes.”

The Democratic governor’s order does not change existing state law, and at least one leading green energy advocate voiced skepticism about its impact because it fails to address another obstacle to construction: the federal government’s sluggish pace of adding transmission capacity to handle new wind and solar.

Kotek’s office, when announcing the order on Monday, couched it as the state’s attempt to reduce the risk “shovel-ready” projects lose out on federal tax benefits that make them more affordable.
        
    
                    
“With the elimination of promised incentives by the Trump Administration, states must step up as the last line of defense against climate catastrophe. We have to get renewable energy infrastructure built, and quickly,” Kotek said in a statement. “We cannot afford to lose this critical window.”

Oregon needs to build more renewable energy projects like wind and solar to meet its renewable energy goals. In addition, the state has experienced rising electricity costs amid soaring demand. Yet as OPB and ProPublica have reported, Oregon lawmakers have paid little heed to the region’s inadequate transmission system. In addition, they have rejected or watered down legislation designed to make it easier for developers to get their wind, solar and transmission projects through the state’s approval process.

Then, this year, President Donald Trump signed legislation dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It set a schedule for ending the federal investment tax credit and the production tax credit, which can fund 30% to 50% of most solar and wind projects. The credits were modified and extended during the administration of President Joe Biden as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The legislation signed by Trump says projects can still qualify for the credits if they meet a July 4, 2026, deadline for breaking ground and are completed by 2030. But projects that don’t start construction by July 4 must be up and running by Dec. 31, 2027, to qualify. That’s considered a tough time frame to meet.

One analysis estimated the loss of credits could cost Oregon about 4 gigawatts of planned wind and solar energy, which is roughly enough electricity to power 1 million homes. According to Atlas Public Policy, a data and policy firm based in Washington, D.C., Oregon has 11 wind and solar projects now at risk of not qualifying for the tax credit.

Nicole Hughes, executive director of the advocacy group Renewable Northwest, said Oregon may not get all of those projects or even a handful of them done in time to get the tax credits, in spite of Kotek’s order.

Hughes said that’s because “even projects that already have made it through the permitting process are being held back by massive transmission queue backlogs and some of the transmission upgrades that these projects were waiting for.”

Separate from state permitting, energy developers have to wait for the federal Bonneville Power Administration to allow projects to connect to its transmission lines. Bonneville owns about 75% of the Northwest’s transmission lines, and its lines are largely full with no capacity for new sources of electricity. It can take years before Bonneville determines whether a proposed project can plug into its grid.

“I don’t think it’s right to be just looking at this July 2026 deadline,” Hughes said. “Our energy issues are going to extend far beyond that date, and we need to be thinking more long-term about how we move projects quicker through both the permitting and transmission process.”

She nonetheless described Kotek’s order as a good first step, saying it put state agencies on notice that moving renewable projects forward is a priority.

Kotek’s office declined to comment on concerns raised about the executive order’s limitations.

A spokesperson for Bonneville stated that it has modified the interconnection process to move on a “first-ready, first-served” process that the agency says will improve current backlogs. The spokesperson said the federal agency expects to add about 2 gigawatts of new energy projects by the end of 2028 and complete the first phase of an interconnection study in January that could add more.

The executive order directs the Oregon Department of Energy and the state Energy Facility Siting Council to identify and prioritize siting approval for projects that must begin construction by July 4. The highest priority would be given to projects with secured contracts between a developer and a utility and that can demonstrate anticipated benefits to Oregon ratepayers.

The governor’s order also says the Oregon Public Utility Commission should consider using an outside contractor to study how solar and wind power projects connect to the electrical grid in the future.

“Congress and the Trump administration have launched an all-out assault on affordable clean energy and our safe climate future,” Climate Solutions Oregon Director Nora Apter said in the statement issued by the governor’s office. “By moving swiftly to get as many wind and solar projects across the finish line as possible before the loss of federal tax credits, Governor Kotek is defending Oregon families, family-wage jobs, and energy resilience.”

Oregon joins a handful of states that have already moved to more rapidly approve qualifying projects, like Colorado, Maine and California, due to the expiring federal tax credits. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2025 06:46:27 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Oregon, Fast-Tracks, Renewable, Energy, Projects, Trump, Bill, Ends, Tax, Incentives</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/these-activists-want-to-dismantle-public-schools-now-they-run-the-education-department</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/these-activists-want-to-dismantle-public-schools-now-they-run-the-education-department</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and joked about padlocking the door.

She calls it “the final mission.”

But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling. 

Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students.

McMahon has described her agency moving “at lightning rocket speed,” and the department’s actions in just one week in September reflect that urgency.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    

    Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools.



        
    
                    
The agency publicly blasted four school districts it views as insubordinate for refusing to adopt anti-trans policies and for not eliminating special programs for Black students. It created a pot of funding dedicated to what it calls “patriotic education,” which has been criticized for downplaying some of the country’s most troubling episodes, including slavery. And it formed a coalition with Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, PragerU and dozens of other conservative groups to disseminate patriotic programming. 

Officials at the Education Department declined to comment or answer questions from ProPublica for this story. 

At times, McMahon has voiced support for public schools. But more often and more emphatically she has portrayed public schools as unsuccessful and unsafe — and has said she is determined to give parents other options.

To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for roughly 200 years. 

Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration.

In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to cobble together customized educational plans for their children. Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons.

More than 8 in 10 elementary and secondary students in the U.S. go to a traditional public school. But Burke expects that public schools will see dramatic enrollment declines fueled by both demographic and policy changes. 

Addressing an interviewer in an April podcast, she noted: “We’re going to have a lot of empty school buildings.”
        
            
    
    
    
    
                    
In a 2024 podcast, Noah Pollak, now a senior adviser in the Education Department, bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools, which he said has led to lessons he finds unacceptable, such as teaching fourth graders about systemic racism.

“And so the work that I do is trying to come up with creative policy ideas to stop that, to turn back the tide, to figure out ways that conservatives can protect these institutions or build new institutions,” said Pollak, who has been an adviser to conservative groups. 

As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight. Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she is against “any sort of regulation.”

President Donald Trump himself said in July that the federal government needs only to provide “a little tiny bit of supervision but very little, almost nothing,” over the nation’s education system except to make sure students speak English.

Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state constitution. 

Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or family income; private schools can selectively admit students. 

Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated public school setting.”

Allison Rose Socol, a policy expert at EdTrust, an organization focusing on civil rights in schools, decried what she called the “demo crew” in McMahon’s office. Socol described McMahon’s push to help grow private school enrollment through taxpayer-funded vouchers and other means as a “great American heist” that will funnel money away from the public system.

“It’s a strategic theft of the future of our country, our kids and our democracy,” she said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                        
    
        “Lead as Christians”
    
        
    
                    
Attention on McMahon often focuses on her former role as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. It was no different on the day of her Senate confirmation hearing, when journalists and social media delighted in noting that seated behind her was her son-in-law, the retired wrestler known as Triple H.

Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in the front row from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump administration.

Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events. In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy Institute have been hired in the department.

AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released a policy paper in 2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state and “plant Jesus in every space.” 

The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such as gender fluidity.”

The first AFPI leader pictured in that report is McMahon.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Linda McMahon testifies at her Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of education. Seated behind her are, from left to right, son Shane McMahon, Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, the former wrestler Paul Levesque (also known as Triple H), daughter Stephanie McMahon, Erika Donalds of the America First Policy Institute, and Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.
    
            (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020 election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools.

Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024.

Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip liberal influence from the courts, politics and schools. 

Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins and connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists — had similar goals. 

The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization,” he concluded. The groups say they are merely trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica.

These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of government, either through official roles in the agency or through the administration’s adoption of their views. 

When the department created an “End DEI” portal to collect tips about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in schools, it quoted Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice in the press release. She encouraged parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.” Moms for Liberty referred to the portal as the “culmination” of Justice’s work. (Federal judges ruled against some of the administration’s anti-DEI actions and the department took the controversial portal down in May.) 

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.” 

She and others say most public schools don’t teach students to read, are dividing children over race and are secretly helping students to change genders — familiar claims that have been widely challenged by educators. 

When Trump signed an executive order in March to dismantle the Education Department, Justice sat in the first row, as she had at McMahon’s confirmation hearing. The president praised her, along with various governors and lawmakers. “She’s been a hard worker,” he said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    

    Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.”



        
    
                    
Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, who was also at McMahon’s confirmation, stood next to McMahon when the secretary announced an investigation into the Maine Department of Education for keeping records from parents about student gender identity plans. Defending Education has filed civil rights complaints against colleges and school districts and has been successful in having its causes taken up by the Trump administration. 

In an email, Neily told ProPublica she is proud of the work that Defending Education has done to challenge schools that have supported DEI in their curricula and have allowed students to hide their gender identity from parents. She singled out teacher unions and “radical education activists” while blaming drops in student achievement on “the education-industrial complex.”

“The sooner this stranglehold is broken, the better,” she wrote. 

McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon to a top post in her office. 

Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. 

She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what they’re being taught in public schools.
        
            
    
    
    
    
                    
Reached by phone, Kilgannon told ProPublica, “I have no comment,” and hung up.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                        
    
        Overhauling “Government Schools”
    
        
    
                    
Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire who was education secretary in Trump’s first term, cheered on July 4 this year when Congress instituted America’s first federal voucher program. It came in the form of a generous tax credit program to encourage voucher expansion at the state level. Families can start accessing the aid beginning Jan. 1, 2027.

DeVos once said she wanted “to advance God’s kingdom” through vouchers for religious schools and has funneled vast amounts of her family fortune into advocating for school choice. She called the passage of the federal measure “the turning point in ending the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly.”

An article in The Federalist, a conservative publication, boiled down the implications into one headline: “How Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Will Help Kids Escape Failing Government Schools.”

But school choice isn’t the only tool that Trump’s education leaders are using to target public schools. McMahon has gutted the Education Department’s civil rights division, where lawyers and other federal employees work to ensure all students can access public school, free from discrimination. 

The administration rolled back protections for LGBTQ+ students and students of color, prioritized investigating discrimination against white and Jewish students, and launched aggressive investigations of states and districts that it says refused to stop accommodating transgender students.

It has rescinded official guidance that said schools had to provide language help and other services for students who are learning English, contradicting long-established federal law. 

And Trump officials have repeatedly cast public schools as dangerous even as the agency canceled about $1 billion in training grants for more school mental health professionals — money that had been authorized by Congress to help prevent school shootings. The administration now says it plans to resume paying out a fraction of that funding, which would be used for school psychologists.

Over and over, the department has used the threat of pulling federal funding to force compliance with new directives and rapid shifts in policy. The department, for instance, threatened to withhold money from schools that did not verify they were ending diversity initiatives, which were designed to address inequitable treatment of Black, Native and Latino students.

In August, the department announced it was withholding millions of dollars in grants from five northern Virginia school districts that had refused the department’s demands to bar transgender students from using restrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender identity. The districts argued that complying would mean defying Virginia law and a 2020 federal appeals court ruling. 

Nevertheless, the Education Department told the districts that until they acquiesced to the agency’s bathroom rules they would have to pay expenses up front and request reimbursement. McMahon wrote to districts that “Lindsey Burke is available to answer any questions.”

The Fairfax County Public Schools sued and in a legal filing said it faced losing $167 million this school year, money that it was relying on to provide meals to students, support programs for children with disabilities, help English-language learners and enhance teacher training. The federal department has argued that it has discretion to withhold funding and admonished the district for taking the agency to court.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                    

    Trump officials have repeatedly cast public schools as dangerous even as the agency canceled training grants for more school mental health professionals — money that had been authorized by Congress to help prevent school shootings.



        
    
                    
In this atmosphere, public school advocates are particularly concerned about what will happen to funding for Title I grants, which is the federal government’s largest program for schools and is aimed at helping students from low-income families. In early September, House Republicans proposed slashing more than $5 billion from the $18.4 billion earmarked for Title I, putting at risk reading and math teachers, tutors and classroom technology. 

At the same time, under McMahon, the Education Department is trying to redefine how states and districts can spend the money. 

In three guidance letters so far this year, the agency encouraged states to divert some Title I money away from public school districts. One suggested paying for outside services, such as privatized tutoring. Another urged states to use Title I money to benefit low-achieving students who live within the boundaries of a high-poverty public school but attend private schools.

McMahon is prepared to loosen even more rules on the money. The federal dollars currently are distributed to districts using a formula. Project 2025 calls for Title I to be delivered to states as block grants, or chunks of money with few restrictions. McMahon has encouraged states to ask her to waive rules on spending the money.

Critics of this approach fear that Title I money could eventually be used in ways that undermine public schools — on private school vouchers, for example.

Public school advocates like William Phillis, a former official at the Ohio Department of Education, fear the change would devastate public schools.

“I just know any block grant or any funding that would be left up to state officials on Title I money would be misappropriated in terms of the intent,” Phillis said. “Block grants to Ohio would go to the private sector.”

A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce did not respond to requests for comment.

Rainey Briggs, chief of operations for Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa, said he supports parental choice but worries that public schools will suffer financially and will not have the resources to stay up to date. 

And he fears that right-wing narratives around public schools, the distrust and lack of support for highly trained district leaders — whether from some parents or politicians — could lead accomplished educators to walk away. 

“Public education is irreplaceable,” he said, citing its commitment to serve every child regardless of their background or circumstance. 

Those influencing Trump’s education agenda disagree.

“If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place,” Justice told ProPublica.
        
    
                    
    
        
            Help ProPublica Report on Education
        

    
        
             

                                    
        
                        Illustrations by Pete Gamlen. Visual editing by Cengiz Yar. Design and development by Anna Donlan. Mollie Simon contributed research, and Brandon Roberts contributed reporting. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/SOCIAL-2025-finalmission-gamlen-opener-dt-2.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 08 Oct 2025 16:12:07 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>These, Activists, Want, Dismantle, Public, Schools., Now, They, Run, the, Education, Department.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>MBI Scheme: Keh Chuan Seng &amp;amp; Andrew Tan of Tanco Holdings Dragged Into Scandal</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/mbi-scheme-keh-chuan-seng-andrew-tan-of-tanco-holdings-dragged-into-scandal</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/mbi-scheme-keh-chuan-seng-andrew-tan-of-tanco-holdings-dragged-into-scandal</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The chain of investigations into the illegal investment scheme MBI International has continued to rattle Malaysia’s capital market, ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2025/10/keh-and-tanco.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2025 11:23:15 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>MBI, Scheme:, Keh, Chuan, Seng, Andrew, Tan, Tanco, Holdings, Dragged, Into, Scandal</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>This Little&#45;Known Appeal Could Force Your Insurer to Pay for Lifesaving Care. Here’s How to File It.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/this-little-known-appeal-could-force-your-insurer-to-pay-for-lifesaving-care-heres-how-to-file-it</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/this-little-known-appeal-could-force-your-insurer-to-pay-for-lifesaving-care-heres-how-to-file-it</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Duaa Eldeib                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
When a health insurance company refuses to pay for treatment, most people begrudgingly accept the decision.

Few patients appeal; some don’t trust the insurer to reverse its own decision. 

But a little-known process that requires insurers and plans to seek an independent opinion outside their walls can force insurers to pay for what can be lifesaving treatment. External reviews are one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, and only a tiny fraction of those eligible actually use them. 

ProPublica recently reported the story of a North Carolina couple, Teressa Sutton-Schulman and her husband, who we identified in the story by his middle initial, L, to protect his privacy. Last year, L suffered escalating mental health issues and needed intensive psychiatric care.  Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield issued the couple multiple denials in their case, even after Sutton-Schulman’s husband attempted suicide twice in the span of 11 days. 

The instructions for an external review were buried on page seven of one of the denial letters. 

“You can now request that your case be reviewed by a health care provider who is totally independent of your health plan or insurance carrier,” read the letter from the state insurance department in Texas, where the treatment occurred.

Skeptical but hopeful, Sutton-Schulman submitted the request for the external review. Their case was assigned to Dr. Neal Goldenberg, an Ohio doctor who works for a third-party review company as a side job. After reading the extensive appeal, Goldenberg overturned Highmark’s denial to cover treatment that had cost Sutton-Schulman and L more than $70,000. 

Highmark previously said in a statement that the company was “passionate about providing appropriate and timely care” to its members. It acknowledged that “small errors made by physicians and/or members can lead to delays and initial denials” but said that those are corrected on appeals.
        
    
                    
The lesson is simple, explained Kaye Pestaina, a vice president at the nonprofit health policy think tank KFF, who has studied external appeals.

“Appeal, appeal, appeal, appeal,” she said. “That’s all you have.”

External appeals have been around for decades at the state level, but in 2010, the Affordable Care Act expanded access to the reviews for the majority of people who get their health insurance through work. The details around the external review process vary depending on whether an insurance plan is regulated by state or federal laws. 

Karen Pollitz helped draft the federal regulations around external reviews during the Obama administration, but she said an extensive lobbying effort on behalf of insurance companies and employers weakened the initial protections. Now, only a fraction of denials are eligible for an external review, and the health insurance plan gets to hire the reviewers. 

Transparency requirements that called for insurers to report data around denials and other metrics, she said, also were largely not implemented. 

“There are all kinds of ways they could strengthen the laws and the regulations to hold health plans more accountable,” said Pollitz, who left the administration after the rollbacks and worked at KFF before retiring. 

But for now, Pollitz said, filing external appeals is sometimes the only recourse patients have. An advantage of the Affordable Care Act, she added, was that it established state consumer assistance programs to help people get the coverage they were promised. 

Federal funding for those programs dried up a couple of years later, but about 30 states decided to find other ways to pay for the programs. (Want to find out if your state has one? Here’s a list from federal officials.) If the remaining 20 or so states — including Wisconsin and Ohio — established programs, families would reap the benefits, according to Cheryl Fish-Parcham, director of private coverage at the consumer health care advocacy organization Families USA.

“Every state needs one of these programs,” she said. “Health care is so complicated, and people really need experts to turn to.” 

Fish-Parcham meets with representatives from consumer assistance programs across the country every month. The models differ from state to state. Programs are housed in state attorney general offices, in nonprofits and even as independent agencies. Helping patients or their providers with external appeals is a key part of the programs’ role. The first step often is simply letting them know that appeals — both internal and external — are options.

“The numbers are low because some people just give up. They’re frustrated. They’re tired. They’re battling cancer,” said Kimberly Cammarata, director of Maryland’s Health Education and Advocacy Unit, the state’s consumer assistance program. “And sometimes the information about why the claim was denied or about how to appeal is terribly unclear. A lot of these outcome letters will say you have a right to an external appeal, but they don’t exactly tell you where to go.”

Some states have enacted legislation to combat that confusion. For example, insurers in Maryland are no longer able to bury information on appeals deep in their denial letters. Beginning this month, a new state law requires insurers to include information at the top of all denial letters in “prominent bold print” that states the member has the right to appeal or file a complaint to the insurance commissioner. That declaration advises consumers that the letter contains information on how to file an appeal and reach the Health Education and Advocacy Unit. The unit’s address, phone number, fax and email must also be included in the body of the notice. 

Connecticut added similar information at the top of denial letters in a box on the front page in 2023. The office saw an almost immediate effect. In the two years that followed, more than 40% of referrals to the state’s Office of the Healthcare Advocate came from people who received denial letters with the new language. 

The office isn’t funded through taxpayer money. It’s paid for entirely by state assessments on insurance companies.

“We want to help people,” said Kathleen Holt, who was nominated in 2024 by Connecticut’s governor to lead the office as the state health care advocate. “The insurance companies know that people don’t appeal, and in some ways I think they can be more aggressive with their denials. They don’t expect people to come back, and when they do that very small percentage of the time, it’s the cost of doing business for them.”

Connecticut’s data shows that the health care advocate office has been able to resolve or overturn denials in the patient’s favor about 80% of the time, Holt said. Some plans may charge up to $25 per external appeal, but Connecticut did away with that fee several years ago. Some states, including New York, have been tracking the outcomes of their external appeals online, which the public can review. 

“We can help people write their appeals,” Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society, said of New York residents. “We write appeals for them, sometimes going through thousands of pages of medical records and writing 15- to 20-page appeals.”

Experts say these six things can help patients and providers after a denial. Since we are journalists and not lawyers, we are unable to provide any legal advice about this process.


Gather your information: Experts suggest not throwing out any letters or notices from your insurer, including denial notices, explanation of benefits, correspondence and plan documents. If you’ve misplaced them, they said you can contact your insurer for additional copies. They also recommend downloading or requesting your medical records. You can request your claim file, which most people have a right to under federal regulations.
Does your state have a consumer assistance program? Not all states have consumer assistance programs. Here’s a list of those that do. Advocates recommend reaching out and asking them to explain the denial. It might be as simple as a missing or incorrect code. Their job is to use their time, experience and resources to explain the process. Their services are free. Other programs and nonprofits also offer assistance.
Why were you denied, and what are your timelines to appeal? Are you being denied because the insurer determined the treatment was not medically necessary or because your plan didn’t cover it? Does your plan follow federal or state regulations? Experts say these distinctions may determine if and how you appeal your denial. Most plans give you about 180 days from the date of the denial notice to appeal internally, but experts say not to wait. If you’re not sure about the answers to any of these questions, you can call your insurer and ask. They are required to provide you the reason for denial.
Can your health care provider help? Experts suggest reaching out to your doctor or therapist. They said some providers will file the appeal on your behalf. Others will write a letter of support. At the very least, advocates agree, most should help you understand why your treatment was denied and what additional steps you can take.
Filing an internal appeal: Before you can file an external appeal, you typically have to attempt to resolve the dispute internally with the insurance company. This step may involve one or two levels of internal appeals.
How to request an external appeal: This is your last shot before considering a lawsuit. After you’ve exhausted your internal appeals, you can contact your insurer to request an external appeal. When you file a request for a federal external review, your plan usually has five days to consider your request.

If the insurer agrees that your denial is eligible, it will provide directions on where to file the appeal. Experts say to make sure to read the notice all the way through.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Remember that only certain denials are eligible for external appeals. These denials typically involve medical judgment, surprise medical bills, or an insurer deciding to retroactively cancel coverage or determining that a treatment was experimental. Denials based on the terms of the plan or because the service was out of network generally are not eligible.  

Under federal rules, third-party review companies typically have between 45 and 60 days to decide the outcome of an external review. You may ask for an expedited appeal if the situation is urgent. In those situations, you may also be eligible to request an external review without exhausting your internal appeals or even file both internal and external appeals at the same time. Federal requirements typically call for expedited external appeals to occur as quickly as your condition requires but not take longer than 72 hours.   

If the external reviewer decides to overturn your denial, the determination is binding. Your insurer is required by law to accept the decision and pay for treatment. If the reviewer rules against you, you may be able to file a lawsuit. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/mental-health-external-reviews-explainer.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2025 02:38:18 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>This, Little-Known, Appeal, Could, Force, Your, Insurer, Pay, for, Lifesaving, Care., Here’s, How, File, It.</media:keywords>
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<title>Seattle Spent Millions on Hotel Rooms to Shelter Unhoused People. Then It Stopped Filling Them.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/seattle-spent-millions-on-hotel-rooms-to-shelter-unhoused-people-then-it-stopped-filling-them</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/seattle-spent-millions-on-hotel-rooms-to-shelter-unhoused-people-then-it-stopped-filling-them</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Ashley Hiruko, KUOW                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KUOW public radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
When Brenna Poppe moved into the Civic Hotel off the damp streets of Seattle in late 2022, she cried with joy. During her next year at the city-sponsored homeless shelter, she’d meet other guests who felt the same way — overwhelmed by the sudden realization that tonight, they would not sleep outside.

The Civic got quieter last year, however. Rooms around her, their doors still painted bright yellow from when the hotel was a boutique property, started to empty out. A “deafening silence” crept in, she recalled.

The 53-room hotel was converted to a shelter in the early days of the pandemic, and the city of Seattle kept it going. After Poppe’s first year there, the city in February 2024 signed a $2.7 million lease extension to continue using rooms at the Civic and other buildings as shelter space through the end of the year. And yet, despite committing to pay the rent, the city stopped sending people there. 

Existing residents moved on to permanent housing or elsewhere and no one took their place. Dozens of rooms went unfilled.

By December, Seattle taxpayers were paying a hefty $4,200 a month per empty room — at a time when thousands of Seattleites were without a roof over their heads.
        
    
                    
City officials described their decision to leave the rooms vacant as simply a “pause” while they evaluated what to do about an anticipated budget deficit.

One-time federal funding was going away and, if the city eventually succeeded in securing long-term funding, officials wanted to find a cheaper location than the Civic. They said the uncertainty forced them to both hold onto the Civic and stop placing people there, to avoid later sending clients back to the street.

But internal records reveal more complicated motives. At the same time as the city was halting placements, it rejected a move to a cheaper shelter location, which the main advocate of the plan said would keep the program running without interruption. A top official in the office of Mayor Bruce Harrell, explaining the decision in private, voiced animosity toward the nonprofit leader who pitched the new location and signaled an end to city support for the leader’s program. 

Regardless of the rationale, the outcome of the city’s decision was that for nearly a year, Seattle paid for just as many rooms as before yet helped fewer and fewer people off the street with them.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, whose plan to address homelessness promised to “better track shelter capacity and ensure beds do not go unfilled.”
    
            (Megan Farmer/KUOW)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Placements resumed this year, in a new location, after a 16-month gap.

Many West Coast cities are struggling, as Seattle has, with a rise in homelessness in recent years. Before referrals were halted, the effort that placed people at the Civic had already moved hard-to-reach homeless people from the street to a shelter space and, in many cases, then on to long-term housing and stability.

Seattle’s decision to keep dollars flowing to an effort it had suspended comes as cities such as Los Angeles are facing criticism for failing to accurately track outcomes of their massive outlays on homelessness.

Allowing vacancies to grow at city-leased shelter space also seems to be at odds with a commitment by Harrell, whose 2022 plan to address homelessness promised efforts to “better track shelter capacity and ensure beds do not go unfilled.” 

(A spokesperson for Harrell responded that it’s important to note city-funded shelters had 2,850 units in all last year, 87% of which were full on any given night. The city declined a request to interview Harrell.)

Poppe, who lived at the Civic through 2024, viewed its empty rooms as a squandered opportunity, and she told the shelter staff as much.

“Multiple times,” Poppe said, “I spoke to staff about this egregious amount of open rooms.”
        
    
                    

    
            After Initial Ramp-Up, Occupancy in City-Funded Rooms Plummets
        

                        
                    
                

            Notes: Data unavailable for June 2024. “City-funded rooms” are defined as rooms reserved for the city of Seattle. Each bar represents a count taken on one day of the month.
    
            (Source: CoLEAD, a nonprofit-led program that partnered with Seattle to fill city-funded rooms as shelter space)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The Blade
On any given day in a section of Third Avenue between Pike and Pine streets known as The Blade, disorder is commonplace. Some people are screaming at the air, their pants falling off their frail frames. Others are sleeping, huddled in doorways to keep warm and safe. This human suffering stands in contrast with neighboring symbols of Seattle’s affluence: Pike Place Market, Benaroya Hall and the downtown shopping district are within a five-minute stroll.

A walk-up-only McDonald’s on the corner has been dubbed “McStabby’s,” referencing violent crimes that have taken place nearby over the years.

In 2022, nonprofits and downtown businesses came up with a plan that would ultimately involve the Civic Hotel.

The Third Avenue Project was designed to reduce the violence and open drug use through extensive outreach and the deescalation of conflicts between people on the street. But housing was also on the minds of the organizers.

Many believed in a modified version of the “housing-first” approach, which is predicated on the idea that any issues people struggle with on the streets are best addressed if they first find shelter, with no requirements for sobriety. Despite Seattle’s shortage of shelter beds and affordable permanent housing, the nonprofit leaders involved with Third Avenue hoped to help at least some clients move indoors.

The concept seemed to line up with the priorities of Harrell, who on his campaign website the year before had promised “an accountable, ambitious plan with transparency and benchmarks to expand and provide housing and services on demand to every unsheltered neighbor.”

Third Avenue Project organizers got to work after Harrell took office, with significant funding from the city.

“Safety ambassadors” were the first step. They would reverse overdoses and intervene when scuffles broke out, but also develop relationships with people in the street and then connect them with shelter and services. 

“The hardest thing that we do is seeing people in the dire straits that they live in daily,” said Stephenie Wheeler-Smith, CEO of the company that hires the ambassadors, We Deliver Care. “This is not easy work. People don’t want to come out and touch these people or look at them or see their wounds or help them get health care.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Safety ambassadors Trey Kendall, left, and Dee Stokes hand out water and snacks in July in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.
    
            (Megan Farmer/KUOW)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Importantly, safety ambassadors wouldn’t just move people along. They also could be a first point of contact on a path to permanent housing.

As one element of their $2.1 million contract with the city, the safety ambassadors referred homeless people on Third Avenue to housing and emergency shelter providers. The main one they’d use was a nonprofit-led program called CoLEAD, which had a $4.6 million contract with the city in 2023 that included placing people in temporary lodging and providing support services they needed. 

The next step was the Civic Hotel. City officials signed a $1.1 million six-month lease with the Civic’s owners for its 53 guest rooms. CoLEAD would also let Third Avenue clients use rooms in any of the other shelters it managed, and at the same time the program would send clients from other referral sources to the Civic.

Unlike with some other shelters, these clients did not have to stop using drugs or alcohol, and they had access to their own space, which was ideal for people who may have struggled at traditional shelters.

The plan got results. 

By November 2023, city-funded rooms at the Civic and other buildings were packed. 

Marco Brydolf-Horwitz, who studied CoLEAD for nearly two years as part of a doctoral program, said he saw people transformed by the stability of temporary lodging.

“You can’t do much when people are on the street,” he said. “Once people are inside, then you can figure out what level of housing resources are needed.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            People shelter themselves along Third Avenue.
    
            (Megan Farmer/KUOW)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The Halt
For all the success stories, the problem with the Civic was cost. The county had snapped it up as a temporary measure during the frenzy of the pandemic, and the city inherited it. After the initial lease, rent had risen to the equivalent of $2.6 million a year in 2023.

On Jan. 2, 2024, Lisa Daugaard, one of the nonprofit leaders managing the Third Avenue Project, pitched the city on a cheaper alternative: an apartment building in North Seattle with 11 more rooms the city could use for $1 million less. 

The city’s obligations with the Civic had ended when its lease expired the month before. Daugaard could get the city’s clients moved by February. Daugaard simply needed some assurance the city would keep backing the project because she was considering a three-year lease on the new location.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Internal chat messages between Chief Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and other staff in the mayor’s office. “DM Burgess” is Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, who did not respond to a request for comment from KUOW and ProPublica.
    
            (Obtained by KUOW)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
A few weeks later, Daugaard had her answer: Stop placing Third Avenue clients in city-funded beds, cycle existing ones into permanent housing and “ramp down” the Civic Hotel shelter. It was couched as a “pause” in placements through CoLEAD, records show.

In emails to Daugaard — and, in at least one case, internally — city officials cited uncertainty created by a looming budget deficit as one of the main reasons for the new marching orders. They reiterated this explanation, along with an expected loss in one-time funding, in interviews and emails with KUOW and ProPublica.

The mayor’s press secretary, Callie Craighead, said the city was “committed to maintaining shelter investments” but had “no way to provide such confirmation” to Daugaard until the city developed its next budget. She said the North Seattle apartment building was also not move-in ready at the time. Extending the lease at the Civic was a stopgap to avoid sending clients back to homelessness. 

Chief Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington described the halt in referrals as a way of “winding down” operations at the Civic in anticipation of a move to a new spot, a “best practice” among social services managers. 

But a chat message from Washington to a colleague, released to KUOW and ProPublica last week through a public records request, spells out additional reasons for turning down Daugaard’s proposal. It says, in part: “because I want her out of the homelessness business. She is not good at it.” 

Washington stated in the message, incorrectly, that the proposed North Seattle location was another hotel, “which is not cheap” and concluded, “This means we would be leasing hotels forever.” 

She also asserted that CoLEAD had a high rate of returns to homelessness and a low rate of placements in permanent housing.

Data provided by the mayor’s office and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority shows otherwise. The year before, CoLEAD moved a far bigger share of its clients from its city-funded beds into permanent housing than emergency shelter operators as a whole: 65%, compared with 26%.

Contacted by KUOW and ProPublica last week, Washington said she’d known Daugaard for 10 years and that “I have nothing but respect for her work.” She said of her chat message about ending CoLEAD’s role in the city’s response to homelessness: “Discussions are different than decisions.” She noted that the city’s relationship with CoLEAD continues today.

Daugaard declined to comment on Washington’s private message naming her. The nonprofit that employs Daugaard and oversees CoLEAD issued a statement defending the program’s track record at placing people in permanent housing as “exceptional.”

The mayor’s proposed budget for next year supports programs that follow CoLEAD’s approach, the statement said, “and we greatly appreciate that, in the end, the City has backed this model which has proven to serve the interests of Seattle neighborhoods and chronically unsheltered individuals alike.”

As of February 2024, the North Seattle plan was formally off the table. The city extended its lease with the Civic. 

Officials committed to spending $225,000 a month for 53 rooms through year’s end — despite having just told nonprofit shelter managers to ensure those rooms emptied out.

The Fallout
The disruption to the flow of clients off Third Avenue and into the city-funded rooms gradually became noticeable. 

The kind of shelter that the Civic Hotel provided — individual rooms that came with services such as help in accessing health care — is a valuable resource, especially when it comes to people who may be struggling with mental illness or addiction, like many of those on Third Avenue. Traditional shelters lack privacy and personal space.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            A typical guest room in the Civic Hotel, first image, and the building’s lobby area, pictured in 2019.
    
            (Civic Hotel via TripAdvisor)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
With the ending of placements at the Civic and city-funded rooms in other CoLEAD shelters, safety ambassadors who were paid to quell the violence on Third Avenue turned to other shelter organizations. But it wasn’t enough to fully offset the loss of CoLEAD’s buildings. 

KUOW and ProPublica examined data from We Deliver Care for placements to organizations that provide shelter or housing, including the nonprofit that operates CoLEAD. The number went from 47 in 2023 to 30 in 2024.

Meanwhile, 35 rooms at the Civic and other shelters that CoLEAD managed sat empty as of December 2024.

Among the people who would have said yes to one of the rooms the city had left unused was Tiffany Fields, who at the time was struggling to stay safe outdoors.

“It ain’t no joke,” Fields said of life on the street. “It’s not fun. It’s not for play.”

Fields slept at downtown bus stops, often gathering with groups or pretending to have a firearm in her coat to stay safe. She spoke to herself out loud when she felt at risk in the hopes that feigning mental illness would ward others off.

“I’ve seen a lot of weird things,” Fields said. “They tend to prey on women by themselves, but I know how to hold my own.”

A 2023 University of Washington study of the Third Avenue Project found that of the 980 people contacted by We Deliver Care’s safety ambassadors through October 2023, 90% were unhoused. 

“From a human perspective, people want to be inside and they want to be sheltered,” said Wheeler-Smith, leader of the outreach efforts to connect people on Third Avenue with services. “And unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of places to send people to be sheltered, period.”

Daugaard, whose group works alongside Wheeler-Smith’s safety ambassadors, said it was demoralizing for the outreach workers to keep talking to people on Third Avenue about their struggles with limited chances to fundamentally change the path they’re on.

Losing the rooms that the Civic provided meant that “all they’re doing is kind of keeping a lid on the level of disorder and its impact on other people,” Daugaard said.

(The University of Washington report, based on time spent on the street with the safety ambassadors, described reversed overdoses and defused conflicts.)
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            The kind of shelter that the Civic Hotel provided — individual rooms with supportive services such as help with healthcare and job training — is a hot commodity, especially when it comes to people who may be struggling with mental illness or addiction, like many of those on Third Avenue.
    
            (Megan Farmer/KUOW)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Of the estimated 5,000 shelter beds available in Seattle’s city limits and on nearby Vashon Island during early 2024, only 3% were free, according to an annual point-in-time count. Another 4,600 people lived without shelter at the time.

Rachel Fyall, associate professor at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy &amp; Governance, said the cost of not housing people includes emergency room care, jail cells and police on the street.

“Philosophically,” Fyall said, “any room that is unused is too many rooms.”

But when organizers know a shelter is likely to close soon, does it then make sense to leave rooms unused so newcomers won’t have to relocate shortly after they arrive?

Noah Fay, senior director of housing programs at another nonprofit that runs homeless shelters, said the desire to avoid disruptions for residents has to be balanced against the desire to keep beds full when unmet demand in Seattle is enormous. 

He said his organization recently prepared for a shelter shutdown by halting referrals two months ahead of time. The city did so 11 months before its lease ended.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            A crowd of people gathers in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood in March.
    
            (Megan Farmer/KUOW)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“Pause” Lifted
In July, Fields was strolling through the Third Avenue area.

A safety ambassador called out to her and said Fields’ caseworker had been looking for her. The caseworker had good news. She was getting shelter.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding?’” Fields recalled. “‘Please tell me it’s not a sick joke.’”

The city had recently ended the “pause” on placing CoLEAD clients in temporary shelters. 

The new venue was the North Seattle apartment building Daugaard had proposed more than a year earlier. The nonprofit running CoLEAD named it the Turina James.

Washington told KUOW and ProPublica CoLEAD had “significantly improved” its record of moving people to permanent housing since the pause, proving it was a good decision. (Data show CoLEAD’s success rate with city-funded clients declined from 65% in 2023 to 56% last year, while its success for all clients improved marginally, from 69% in 2023 to 71% last year. The city did not address the apparent discrepancy.)
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Tiffany Fields
    
            (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source image: courtesy of Tiffany Fields.)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Fields’ intake was done over the phone, and an Uber was sent to pick her up and take her to her new temporary home. When she arrived, she said, she was welcomed with open arms. She was given gifts and a key. 

“God, he works in mysterious ways,” Fields said. “Sometimes when you call on him, he may not come right then and there, but when he does come, when he does show up, he shows out.”

Fields said she’s felt much more stable since making it indoors.

“I’m happy. I’m in a very, very, very good place,” Fields said. “So I can, you know, get my life back on track, get my life back in order.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
Others on Third Avenue are still waiting for housing. But the paths available to them look much different now, even with referrals resuming, than they did in 2022 and 2023. When making placements at the Turina James, unlike at the Civic and other CoLEAD shelters, the city is no longer emphasizing Third Avenue clients but instead people from Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.

Brenna Poppe, the woman who lived in the Civic as it emptied out, was still sleeping indoors as of July. She was staying at the North Seattle property, still thankful to have a roof over her head.

Around her, the rooms were starting to fill up. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2025 15:04:33 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Seattle, Spent, Millions, Hotel, Rooms, Shelter, Unhoused, People., Then, Stopped, Filling, Them.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Losing Streak</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/losing-streak</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/losing-streak</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2025 02:38:15 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Losing, Streak</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Accused author of unauthorised pamphlets attacking Allegra Spender identified</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/accused-author-of-unauthorised-pamphlets-attacking-allegra-spender-identified</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/accused-author-of-unauthorised-pamphlets-attacking-allegra-spender-identified</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has brought proceedings against a man accused of printing and distributing unauthorised and anonymous pamphlets attacking federal independent MP Allegra Spender during the election campaign.More than 47,000 leaflets were distributed in the electorate of Wentworth in the lead-up to election day, criticising Ms Spender for being weak on antisemitism and attacking her stance on indefinite detention. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:31:27 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Accused, author, unauthorised, pamphlets, attacking, Allegra, Spender, identified</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Before Tom Dundon Agreed to Buy the Portland Trail Blazers, Oregon Accused the Company He Created of Predatory Lending</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/before-tom-dundon-agreed-to-buy-the-portland-trail-blazers-oregon-accused-the-company-he-created-of-predatory-lending</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/before-tom-dundon-agreed-to-buy-the-portland-trail-blazers-oregon-accused-the-company-he-created-of-predatory-lending</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Tony Schick and Conrad Wilson, Oregon Public Broadcasting                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
When the Portland Trail Blazers went up for sale this year for the first time in three decades, local leaders were so determined to keep the team in Portland that they penned a widely publicized letter promising the National Basketball Association they’d work with whoever the new owner was to secure an overhaul of the team’s arena.

Fans cheered as a group of investors led by Texan Tom Dundon went all-in with a $4 billion bid for the team, which has now been accepted. Many speculated about what Dundon’s ownership of a newly successful National Hockey League team in Raleigh, North Carolina, would portend for Oregon’s oldest and biggest sports franchise.

There was no public discussion locally about the fact that Dundon created a company Oregon accused in 2020 of preying on residents through high-interest car loans they couldn’t afford. The state’s then-attorney general said that the business practices of Santander Consumer USA were “predatory and harmful and will not be tolerated in Oregon” as she announced Oregon’s piece of a $550 million multistate lawsuit settlement with the company.

In addition, Oregon is part of an ongoing multistate investigation into another national subprime lender for which Dundon has served in a leadership role, Exeter Finance. The Oregon Department of Justice confirmed to Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica the state’s role in the investigation, the existence of which Exeter has disclosed in securities filings.

It’s unclear how these issues might affect the commitment of Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson to a partnership, which could include tens or hundreds of millions in public money based on past arena projects in other cities. Spokespeople for both Wilson and Kotek declined to answer when asked if the elected leaders knew about Dundon’s history with regulators.
        
    
                    
Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve regulator who teaches finance at Boston University, said Dundon’s record is an important consideration.

“The money used to buy the Portland Trail Blazers is money that was built on predatory lending,” Williams said of Dundon. “He had an opportunity. He seized it. He made lots of profit. And how did he make that profit? He made it on the backs of low- and poor-credit individuals.”

Dundon’s purchase of the Blazers awaits approval from the NBA’s board of governors, which often takes months, before it can close.

OPB and ProPublica received no response after sending a summary of their reporting and a list of questions to Dundon, his investment firm, the public relations staff of his hockey team and the attorneys representing him in a bankruptcy dispute.

Dundon later answered to a text message seeking comment: “Unfortunately at this point in the process I am not available. Happy to speak with you after closing. Thx.”

Dundon left Santander Consumer in 2015. In biographical posts online and previous news media interviews, Dundon has described his approach to subprime lending as providing opportunities for people with bad credit to own cars and making sure borrowers receive a fair deal.

“Just because someone has bad credit doesn’t mean they are a bad person,” he told The Dallas Morning News shortly after leaving the company.

Santander Consumer declined to comment on Dundon. In a statement, the company said: “Operating in a highly regulated industry, we have robust processes in place that are designed to protect customers and adhere to all regulatory requirements and industry best practices.”

A spokesperson for Exeter Finance declined to comment. The company has said in filings that it is cooperating with the current investigation by states’ attorneys general.

The case that Santander Consumer settled with attorneys general in 2020 concerned more than 265,000 borrowers across the country, including 2,000 in Oregon. The settlement agreement said it did not constitute evidence of, or admission to, any of the state’s allegations against the company.

As for Exeter Finance, Oregon consumers have filed 23 complaints against it with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all of which the agency listed as “closed with explanation” from the company.

One of those complaints was from AshLe’ Penn.

Penn, a single mother of three working as a staffing company account manager in 2021, needed a car. Her credit was bad. But a dealership was able to get her a loan on a 2014 Chrysler 300 through Exeter Finance.

Penn would have to make $511 monthly payments over 72 months, reflecting an interest rate of 28%.

“The interest rate was pretty insane,” she said in an interview. “But I needed a car so bad.”

Two years later, Penn found herself three payments behind and had been evicted from her apartment, she said. According to her consumer complaint, she was living in the sedan when Exeter sent a company to repossess it in January 2023. It was late at night, and she was parked outside her ex’s house. Her daughters watched from inside. She wrote that she spent the next 10-plus hours locked in her car, in a standoff with the repo agent, before enlisting a bankruptcy attorney who halted the repossession.

She recorded much of it on video, which she shared with Exeter.

“It was horrific. I mean, I cried. I cried for God,” Penn told OPB and ProPublica. “I was afraid to leave my car. I couldn’t get out of my car after that. I was just so afraid somebody was going to take it.”

Penn complained, arguing the law prohibits repossessing a car with someone inside, and demanded $150,000 in compensation. Exeter told her that it had done a thorough review, which concluded that she had failed to pay and that she was warned ahead of time her car would be taken away.

Penn’s version of events, Exeter wrote, could not be corroborated.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            AshLe’ Penn at her home. Her consumer complaint said she was living in her car in 2023 when Exeter Finance tried to repossess the vehicle.
    
            (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Building an Auto Loan Giant
Allegations of predatory lending would hardly stand out among NBA owners.

It is a billionaires’ club whose past and current members or their companies have been accused of housing discrimination, knowingly underwriting improper mortgages, exploiting prison inmates, making racist comments and engaging in sexual misconduct. The Blazers’ current owner, Jody Allen, settled lawsuits in which her company’s security guards accused her of sexual harassment and attempting to smuggle penguin skulls and giraffe bones out of Antarctica and Africa. All the owners, including Allen, have denied the allegations against them in court filings or in statements to the news media.

Dundon’s path to NBA ownership began at used car dealerships, where he worked in finance. In the mid-1990s, he and other former dealership workers co-founded the company Drive Financial Services. Dundon became its president and chief operating officer.

The company billed itself as “setting a new standard in the sub-prime lending industry.” Dealers appreciated that Drive Financial would loan money to people other companies wouldn’t, according to its website at the time, because it was able to “overlook negative credit histories such as charge offs, bankruptcies and repossessions.”

Finance experts who’ve studied the subprime lending industry say it offers a last resort for some people to own a car. Lenders set high interest rates in part to absorb the losses from those who can’t make payments. Even when lenders follow consumer laws, defaults are common.

“The alternative is, ‘Let’s just not issue loans to people that are very risky, and then they’ll never default,’” said University of Utah professor Mark Jansen, who has authored several papers on subprime loans. “But in a lot of places without public transport, no car means no job.”

In 2006, the Spanish company Banco Santander acquired Drive Financial and transformed it into Santander Consumer USA. Dundon kept a 10% ownership stake and a seat on its board of directors. He stayed on as CEO of the newly formed company.

Dundon emerged as a key figure in the growth of the subprime auto loan industry, said Williams, the Boston University finance professor.

Williams, who made car loans as a bank officer before working in financial regulation and risk analysis, now teaches classes about subprime car loans and other lending risks. He started studying car financing companies like Santander when he was researching a 2010 book about systemic risk in the finance industry. In 2015, he was one of the experts the New York Senate tapped for help with a report on the risks of the subprime auto loans industry.

Williams said Dundon “was one of the individuals that really grew the industry. Many would argue that he took it to a new level.”

Under Dundon, the value of Santander Consumer jumped from just over $600 million at the time of the acquisition to nearly $9 billion in 2014, according to Bloomberg.

That growth was built almost entirely with subprime borrowers. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Santander Consumer’s early years show the average credit score on its loans was below 540. Roughly two-thirds of its loans had interest rates over 20%.

A speaker bio for Dundon, posted by the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, said he was “able to impact lives by increasing access to reliable transportation for individuals with limited credit history” during his time at Santander Consumer.

But the company was also drawing consumer complaints.

Kenneth Dost was living in Scappoose, Oregon, when the housing market crashed and the architecture firm he worked with went under in 2007.

He was still struggling financially in 2010 when Santander Consumer took over the 15.85% Citi Financial loan that he’d used to buy his yellow Ford F-150 pickup. He said in his complaint with the Oregon Department of Justice that Santander Consumer agreed over the phone to lower his payments from $399 a month to $281. Dost said he then spent weeks going back and forth with the company trying to provide requested documents.

In November that year, Dost said, his daughter saw the yellow truck being hauled away shortly after she stepped off her school bus. After repossessing the Ford, Santander Consumer said in a letter to Oregon officials that the loan modifications Dost thought he received were actually subject to management’s approval and that Dost’s loan “did not meet the guidelines.”

In another letter, Santander Consumer told Oregon officials the documentation necessary to modify Dost’s loan was “not received in its entirety.” The letter also said Dost was 59 days delinquent by the time he sought the modification.

After selling the truck at auction, Dost said, Santander Consumer informed him he still owed more than $2,000. That included a fee for repossessing his truck.

“This ends up being a further windfall for Santander and more money they can bleed from us,” Dost told state investigators. “This is wrong.”

Dost became one of 24 borrowers Oregon’s Department of Justice named in an April 2012 “investigative demand” letter addressed to Dundon. The state ordered the Santander Consumer CEO to give testimony in person or else turn over the borrowers’ documents.

Santander chose the latter, and Oregon’s attorney general reached an “assurance of voluntary compliance” with the company in 2013 that required it to take steps to protect consumers and pay the state $25,000. The agreement said it was not an admission by the company that it violated the law.

There was more to come.

Leaving Santander
Dundon knew pressure on his company from regulators was mounting.

In financial reports between late 2014 and early 2015, Dundon disclosed that in addition to a state attorneys general investigation, Santander Consumer also had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice and a notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission that the agency planned to investigate its lending practices.

In early 2015, the company reached a $9 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over allegations the company illegally repossessed military service members’ cars. The company neither admitted nor denied the allegations under the settlement. It was quoted as saying it fully cooperated with the government and had taken steps to improve its compliance with the law.

Around that time, a front-page story in The New York Times detailed how Dundon and others had amassed wealth by packaging risky auto loans made to low-income people and selling those loans as securities for hundreds of millions of dollars. Regulators said it resembled the way banks sold bundles of shoddy home loans before the housing bubble burst in the mid-2000s.

Dundon reassured stock analysts in April 2015 that “we’re too good to have a bust.”

But on the same earnings call, Dundon acknowledged problems, saying the company had “a lot of work to do” to meet regulatory expectations.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was one regulatory agency looking into Santander Consumer. It found numerous deficiencies with the company. In late June 2015, Santander Consumer’s board of directors voted to accept a Fed enforcement action that required the company to submit written plans to improve its risk management and company structure.

Dundon was out as CEO the same day the enforcement agreement took effect, July 2, 2015. In his interview with The Dallas Morning News at the time, Dundon said that the Federal Reserve issues didn’t involve him and that he and Santander Consumer’s parent company “had different ideas about how to run a business.”

He netted more than $700 million in his separation agreement, which included cashing out his stock, SEC filings show.

A slew of multimillion-dollar legal settlements followed for Santander Consumer in the wake of Dundon’s departure: $26 million for allegations of “unfair, high-rate loans” in Massachusetts and Delaware; $12 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found it engaged in “deceptive acts” and violated consumer protection laws; and $550 million — the largest payout — with 34 attorneys general, including Oregon’s. The company did not admit wrongdoing in any of these cases.

After settling with state attorneys general, the company stated at the time it had “strengthened our risk management across the board” and called the lending that regulators had scrutinized a “legacy” issue.

After Santander Consumer
Dundon used the money he made through Santander Consumer to make a wide range of investments, and he soon became known less for his tenure as an auto lender and instead as a prominent figure in recreational and professional sports.

Through a new firm, Dundon Capital Partners, he invested in Topgolf, an entertainment and restaurant chain built around golf driving ranges that was rapidly growing at the time. Along with forays into real estate and health care companies, he became the sole owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes in 2021.

Yet Dundon remained a player among subprime auto lenders.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Dundon Capital Partners invested $100 million in Carvana in 2017, and sold much of the stock a year later. Almost half of the loans that Carvana issues are subprime, according to a report from the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research.

In 2023, Dundon Capital invested in subprime car lender Exeter Finance, according to the research firm Pitchbook.

Exeter Finance was founded in 2006 in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, the city where Dundon and others founded the company that became Santander Consumer. Exeter’s website shows that several former Santander executives took leadership roles at Exeter starting in 2015, while Santander Consumer was under state and federal scrutiny. Exeter is currently listed on Dundon Capital’s website as part of its portfolio, and a 2022 news release from Exeter identified Dundon as chairman of the board.

A 2024 investigation by ProPublica found that because of the way Exeter Finance handled loans, it sometimes made more money when borrowers defaulted than when they paid on time.

Exeter has settled allegations of unfair lending practices, paying more than $6 million combined to Massachusetts and Delaware. (The company did not admit wrongdoing in either case.) Meanwhile, it is under investigation by the attorneys general in 42 states, it said in a corporate filing this year. These include Oregon, a spokesperson for Attorney General Dan Rayfield confirmed.

Exeter has described the current multistate inquiry as an extension of demands for information that started in 2015. The company wrote that the initial investigation concerned its “origination, servicing and collection practices” and that it cooperated with state requests for documents.

For JT Cotter of Bend, Oregon, Exeter Finance was the only lender available when he bought a used Honda Pilot at Carmax in 2022 for $28,000. 

Cotter, who works privately with families of children with special needs, said he had previously defaulted on a 2018 high-interest car loan from Santander Consumer.

“It demolished me,” he said.

When Cotter needed a new car and Exeter offered him a rate of 19%, he thought, “‘Oh, it’s just another Santander.’ But I didn’t know there was actually a connection.”

Exeter let him skip payments and extend his loan, a practice that ProPublica’s 2024 investigation found was fundamental to the company’s business model. (The company said at the time that it communicates with customers to ensure they know the costs involved with extensions.)

Cotter said what he didn’t know was that the payments Exeter let him skip were moved to the end of the loan, increasing the interest and fees he had to pay. By 2024, his $731 monthly payment went entirely toward interest, according to an Exeter billing statement reviewed by OPB and ProPublica. Exeter repossessed the Pilot eight months ago.

He never filed a complaint with the state Department of Justice because, he said, he didn’t know it was something he could do.

Cotter now drives a Subaru. He said he saved up and paid cash for it.

A New Arena

        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Portland’s Moda Center arena in 2025. Memorial Coliseum, behind it, was the Blazers’ home until the 1990s.
    
            (Brooke Herbert/OPB)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Portland’s city-owned Moda Center arena has been the home of the Trail Blazers since it opened in 1995 under the name the Rose Garden, replacing the city’s aging Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

The team’s future in the Rose City wasn’t a prominent debate in Portland until Allen, the owner, put it on the market in May. Asked to comment on the team’s future in light of a potential sale, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver declared to reporters that Portland “likely needs a new arena.”

“That will be part of the challenge for any new ownership group coming in,” Silver said at the time.

Others echoed Silver’s sentiment. Marshall Glickman, whose father founded the Trail Blazers in 1970, said during an August interview on OPB’s “Think Out Loud” that any new owner would have “extraordinary leverage” over the city and the state to pay for a new or renovated arena. “And that leverage comes from the threat, which may be spoken or it may not be spoken, but the portability of the team that it could leave.”

Glickman started an organization, Rip City Forever, to build public support for keeping the Blazers in Portland. He declined to comment further but said his statements during the “Think Out Loud” interview were not directed specifically at Dundon, whose name had not yet surfaced.

Cities rarely come out ahead when they put tax dollars into these stadium projects, a group of researchers concluded in 2022 after examining more than 130 economic studies of publicly financed stadiums. Any public benefits from increased foot traffic, new visits to nearby businesses or heightened civic stature were too small to justify the amount the public spent, the review found.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Wilson and Kotek, the Portland mayor and Oregon governor, stepped up in a big way nonetheless. In their letter to Silver, they said they’d heard his concerns about the Blazers arena “loud and clear” and “fully support renovating the Moda Center to become a point of pride for the Blazers and for our city.”

“We are prepared to explore the public-private partnerships needed to make it happen,” they concluded.

Then, on Sept. 12, the current Blazers owner announced that the franchise had accepted Dundon’s purchase offer.

Dundon has not commented on the Blazers acquisition since, but U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said he’d spoken with him just before the bid became public. “He sounded very excited about the team’s future being here in beautiful Portland,” Wyden told reporters.

As in Portland, there were concerns the NHL’s Hurricanes would leave Raleigh for a bigger market when Dundon bought the team. In 2023, the Hurricanes signed a long-term lease in the city, announcing the development of a billion-dollar arena and surrounding entertainment district. The deal included $300 million in public money.

Oregonians who borrowed money from companies linked to Dundon voiced emotions ranging from dismay to disgust when they learned their tax dollars might go toward supporting Dundon’s latest investment.

“Great,” Dost said. “Making a partnership with the devil, essentially is what that is.”

Penn, who was homeless when Exeter sent a repo company to take her car away, said she considers herself a Blazers fan. She’s never made it to a game in person, but her kids went on a school-sponsored trip to the Moda Center this year.

She fended off repossession back in 2023, but the car broke down a few months later. She couldn’t afford to fix it and stopped trying to make payments. She eventually found Section 8 housing, but without a vehicle, she said her kids had to stop playing soccer and basketball because she had no way to get them to practices and games.

Penn said she wonders if the people who run Exeter know what’s happened to borrowers like her.

“I’ve seen their executive team, and they’re definitely eating and feeding their families,” she said, having looked the company up online, “and I think it’s definitely at the expense of others not being able to.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Without a car, Penn says her kids had to stop playing soccer and basketball because she had no way to get them to practices and games.
    
            (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)
    
    
    

    

        
             

                                    
        
                        Doris Burke and Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/subprime-nba-owner-OG_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:31:27 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Before, Tom, Dundon, Agreed, Buy, the, Portland, Trail, Blazers, Oregon, Accused, the, Company, Created, Predatory, Lending</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trump-canceled-94-million-pounds-of-food-aid-heres-what-never-arrived</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trump-canceled-94-million-pounds-of-food-aid-heres-what-never-arrived</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Ruth Talbot and Nicole Santa Cruz, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling for ProPublica                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
On a sweltering morning in Vidalia, Louisiana, Shannan Cornwell and Freddie Green got in a long line to wait for food. 

The couple has struggled to pay for groceries amid soaring prices and health setbacks, they said. She had back surgery. He had undergone cancer treatment.

They turned to a local food bank to supplement their diets. Although they’re grateful for the food, lately they’ve noticed changes in what they receive. For months in the spring and summer their pickups did not include any meat, Cornwell said. 

“You have to learn how to adapt to what you have,” Green said. “Which is hard,” Cornwell added.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Shannan Cornwell, 50, and Freddie Green, 58, with their dog Stormy and a bag of groceries they received from a food bank.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In the spring, the Trump administration abruptly cut $500 million in deliveries from a program that sends U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks and other organizations across the country — about a quarter of the funding the program received in 2024. The items that were delivered through The Emergency Food Assistance Program were some of the healthiest, most expensive items that organizations distribute. 

The cancellation of these deliveries comes at a critical time for food banks. Food insecurity is higher than at any time since the aftermath of the Great Recession, according to federal data, and many food banks are reporting higher need than they saw at the peak of the pandemic. Demand is only expected to increase; this summer, President Donald Trump signed into law the largest cut to food stamps in the program’s history. 

ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture of each planned delivery in 2025, detailing the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached hungry people because of the administration’s cut.

The cancellations began in mid-May, when over 100 orders of 2% milk bound for 31 states were halted.

The records show 4,304 canceled deliveries between May and September across the 50 states, Puerto Rico and D.C. (Experience this as an interactive story on ProPublica’s website.)

All told, the deliveries accounted for nearly 94 million pounds of food. The true loss is likely greater, food banks said, because not all of the year’s deliveries had been scheduled.
        
    
                    
Most food banks rely on a combination of federal or state dollars, private giving and partnerships with businesses that donate leftover food. While the cancellations were disruptive to all food banks, according to their representatives, those that receive state funding or have strong community support said that they have weathered the cuts better than others.

The Food Bank of Central Louisiana, where Cornwell and Green’s groceries come from, gets more than half of its food from the federal government and receives very little state support. It serves rural areas of Louisiana, which has the highest poverty rate in the nation, according to U.S. census data.

The Trump administration canceled 10 orders for the food bank totaling over $400,000 of pork, chicken, cheese, dried cranberries, dried plums, milk and eggs, records show. The food bank has struggled to keep up with demand following the cuts and a decrease in private donations. Staff told ProPublica they used to distribute 25-pound packages of food, but over the summer, some packages shrank to about half of that weight.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            The longtime director of The Food Bank of Central Louisiana told ProPublica the organization’s warehouses are emptier than usual.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“We’re not turning people away with no food. It’s not to that point,” said Jayne Wright-Velez, who has been the executive director at the food bank for 30 years. “But people are getting less food when they come to us.”

The organization has tried to fill the gap with produce donations, but transporting and distributing fruits and vegetables is challenging, and multiple patrons told ProPublica the produce had gone bad by the time they received it. 

On a recent morning, Codie Dufrene, 23, came to collect food for her grandfather and his neighbors, who live 45 minutes from the closest grocery store.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Codie Dufrene holds a cantaloupe she received from The Food Bank of Central Louisiana.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Usually, the trunk of Dufrene’s car would be full. Not lately. 

Dufrene received chicken for the first time “since way before the summer.” But the poultry came from a donation that hardly made up for the 74,000 pounds of chicken that never arrived in June.

She said that though her family is grateful and will use whatever they get, the quality of the food can be discouraging. Dufrene pointed out the condition of a cantaloupe she received. “You can tell — they’re frozen and they’re already super, super soft.” She said her mother would likely give them to her pigs, “because people can’t really eat those.”

Wright-Velez said the food bank trains its staff on food safety and does its best to check everything before it goes out, but it’s difficult to do at a large scale. “Especially in the heat of the summer, things just go bad so quickly,” she said. “The clock’s ticking as soon as we get the donation.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Jayne Wright-Velez, executive director of The Food Bank of Central Louisiana
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The Emergency Food Assistance Program was created in 1983 to purchase farmers’ surplus food and distribute it to low-income people. The program’s budget is typically authorized every five years as part of the Farm Bill, but in 2018, the first Trump administration added funds to help farmers struggling under retaliatory tariffs the U.S. faced amid trade disputes. The additional, discretionary federal funds helped food banks serve more people; last fiscal year, they got nearly twice as much money from the fund as they did from their congressional allocation.

Now characterizing the additional funding as a “Biden-era slush fund,” the second Trump administration cut $500 million that had already been allocated. The government is still distributing food through other parts of the program, but food banks were caught off guard by the canceled deliveries because it’s rare for funding to be cut mid-year. Food bank managers, some with decades of experience, couldn’t recall a disruption like it. With the Farm Bill slated for renewal this fall, officials who run food banks worry that any additional cuts would cause them to have to scale back the number of people they serve. 

Already the need is greater than what food banks have on hand, said Shannon Oliver, the director of operations at the Oregon Food Bank.

“We’re having to kind of prepare for the fact that there’s just not going to be enough food, and having to be clear with setting the expectation that we’re doing everything we possibly can,” she said. 

The USDA did not respond to questions or requests for comment. In a May letter responding to senators’ concerns about the funding cut, the agency said it had made additional food purchases through another program and that the emergency food program continues to operate “as originally intended by Congress.”

“While the pandemic is over, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has not and will not lose focus on its core mission of strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets, and ensuring access to nutritious foods,” the letter said.

The Need Continues to Grow
By 8 a.m., the line in the parking lot of a library in Albuquerque, New Mexico, snaked around a chain-link fence. People had been waiting for hours to pick up groceries from Roadrunner Food Bank, which lost about 850,000 pounds of food to the funding cut, according to USDA records. As a result, people are receiving less dairy, meat and other high-protein items.

New Mexico consistently ranks among the poorest states in the nation, and it has more food bank distribution sites than full-service grocery stores, according to data provided by the USDA and Roadrunner Food Bank. And in recent months, organizers have noticed more people showing up than usual. 

“They’re having to run from place to place to place to try to stitch together enough coverage for their family,” said Katy Anderson, a vice president at the food bank.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Vivian Santiago relies on food banks in part because her federal food benefits aren’t enough to cover increased grocery prices.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Vivian Santiago, 54, pieces together what she can from food-distribution sites across Albuquerque. She also uses her benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to feed her daughter and 9-year-old granddaughter. Lately her electronic benefits card isn’t lasting even halfway through the month because of the increase in grocery prices, which have risen nearly 30% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

“It’s hard out there,” she said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Patricia Parker says she’d go days without food if not for the supplies she got from a food bank.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Patricia Parker, 42, suffers from kidney failure and receives disability benefits. 

Parker has been homeless for about six months, sometimes sleeping in her car or staying with friends. She’s looking for a job after a recent stint at a laundromat didn’t work out. As she carried Doritos, green grapes, potatoes and onions from the Albuquerque food bank, she said she appreciates the help. 

“I won’t have to go days without food,” she said. 

Workers at food banks and pantries said that the canceled deliveries add to the growing challenges they face. Many staff members said they had seen a decline in private contributions and volunteers. Grocery stores and food manufacturers, which started managing their inventories more efficiently during the pandemic, now have less leftover food to give. Other Trump cuts have disrupted AmeriCorps, which helps staff mobile food pantries and other services, and are ending the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided food from local farmers. 

Food banks with more resources can be more creative. Several told ProPublica they’ve hired someone whose job is to find grocery stores in the area willing to donate food. But in areas where grocers are scarce, there are fewer options. In some cases, food banks are among the only places where people can get fresh fruits and vegetables.

“When we see federal cuts like this, that affects entire communities and villages and towns,” said Stephanie Sullivan, assistant director of marketing and communications at Food Bank for the Heartland, which serves 93 counties across Nebraska and western Iowa.

“There’s Not an Option B”
Cuts and changes to foundational federal programs for low-income people — namely, SNAP and Medicaid — are a looming concern. The increase in need even before these changes take effect could signal that food banks are a “canary in the coal mine” for what’s to come, said Christopher Bosso, a food policy expert at Northeastern University and the author of a book on SNAP. 

Hunger will also be harder to measure now that the USDA has canceled an annual food insecurity survey, calling it “redundant” and “politicized.” 

“It feels like the idea is to make it harder to identify the consequences of the policy changes that we’re seeing right now,” said Marlene Schwartz, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut.

Food bank administrators emphasized that they could not fill the gap created by benefit cuts in the administration’s multitrillion-dollar spending bill. Feeding America, a national nonprofit association of food banks and other organizations, estimates that for every meal its food banks provide, SNAP provides nine. The majority of people who receive food assistance also receive Medicaid, so reductions in both programs could force people to choose between health care and groceries.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Food to be distributed at the Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The legislation cuts SNAP by $187 billion, or 20%, through 2034, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The bill, which has expanded work requirements for some recipients and taken protections away from others, will also increase the amount of money that states must contribute to the program for the first time in decades. Experts say it’s unclear how cash-strapped states will be able to shoulder that cost. 

Two experts on food insecurity told ProPublica that hunger is expected to rise with the new program rules as it has when SNAP spending has been reduced in the past. There could also be ripple effects: Research has shown that people enrolled in SNAP are less likely to be hospitalized. And grocery stores where the majority of customers use these benefits could close, said Gina Plata-Nino, the interim SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit that works to eradicate hunger.

The people who are harmed are “working incredibly hard,” Plata-Nino said. 

“They are Americans who are falling on hard times and just need those resources to be able to have economic mobility and be able to escape poverty,” she said. “Without those resources, it just makes them even poorer and less equipped to be able to handle the tough economy that all of us are facing now.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Michael Heaton’s federal food benefits shrank significantly and he uses food banks to help cover the gap.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Michael Heaton, 76, takes care of his 31-year-old son, who has autism; the two live off Heaton’s Social Security and his son’s disability payments. After the pandemic, Heaton, who is retired, said he saw his SNAP benefits shrink from $600 a month to just over $100. To supplement their diets, he goes to pantries and food-distribution centers around Albuquerque.

On a recent morning, he picked up two bags. “This fills that gap,” he said. “We only take what we need, we’re not trying to be gluttonous or anything.” 

Even food banks that rely less on federal funding are worried about what comes next if the emergency food assistance program is reduced or altered in a significant way. 

“There’s not an option B,” said Brian McManus, the chief operations officer of the Food Bank of Central New York. 

Louisiana, one of the states most reliant on SNAP, stands to be among the places hardest hit by further cuts.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Elvin Ortiz, 67, says he has been using a food bank for around two years and has noticed changes in the quality of the food.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“It’s unfortunate that in a time where the social safety nets are being cut, that our resources are also being cut,” said Wright-Velez. 

If people haven’t experienced food insecurity, or don’t know someone who has, they might forget something important, she said: 

“Those are real people on the other end of those cuts.”

In all, the USDA records indicate that food banks were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived. Food banks had planned to schedule more deliveries in the coming months. Those orders are not reflected in this data.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Anna Donlan contributed design. Illustrations by Justin Metz for ProPublica. Art direction by Andrea Wise. Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/federal-food-cuts-promo.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:11:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trump, Canceled, Million, Pounds, Food, Aid., Here’s, What, Never, Arrived.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Elon Musk’s SpaceX Took Money Directly From Chinese Investors, Company Insider Testifies</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/elon-musks-spacex-took-money-directly-from-chinese-investors-company-insider-testifies</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/elon-musks-spacex-took-money-directly-from-chinese-investors-company-insider-testifies</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Justin Elliott and Joshua Kaplan                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken money directly from Chinese investors, according to previously sealed testimony, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States’ most important military contractors.

The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the privately held company has been disclosed. While there is no prohibition on Chinese ownership in U.S. military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated and the issue is treated by the U.S. government as a significant national security concern.

“They obviously have Chinese investors to be honest,” Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major SpaceX investor, said in a deposition last year, adding that some are “directly on the cap table.” “Cap table” refers to the company’s capitalization table, which lists its shareholders.

Kahlon’s testimony does not reveal the scope of Chinese investment in SpaceX or the identities of the investors. Kahlon has long been close with the company’s leadership and runs his own firm that acts as a middleman for wealthy investors looking to buy shares of SpaceX.
        
    
                    
SpaceX keeps its full ownership structure secret. It was previously reported that some Chinese investors had bought indirect stakes in SpaceX, investing in middleman funds that in turn owned shares in the rocket company. The new testimony describes direct investments that suggest a closer relationship with SpaceX.

SpaceX has thrived as it snaps up sensitive U.S. government contracts, from building spy satellites for the Pentagon to launching spacecraft for NASA. U.S. embassies and the White House have connected to the company’s Starlink internet service too. Musk’s roughly 42% stake in the company is worth an estimated $168 billion. If he owned nothing else, he’d be one of the 10 richest people in the world.

National security law experts said federal officials would likely be deeply interested in understanding the direct Chinese investment in SpaceX. Whether there was cause for concern would depend on the details, they said, but the U.S. government has asserted that China has a systematic strategy of using investments in sensitive industries to conduct espionage.

If the investors got access to nonpublic information about the company — say, details on its contracts or supply chain — it could be useful to Chinese intelligence, said Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who has worked for the State Department scrutinizing foreign investments. That “would create huge risks that, if realized, would have huge consequences for national security,” she said.

SpaceX did not respond to questions for this story. Kahlon declined to comment.

The new court records come from litigation in Delaware between Kahlon and another investor. The testimony was sealed until ProPublica, with the assistance of lawyers at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the law firm Shaw Keller, moved in the spring to make it public. SpaceX fought the effort, but a judge ruled that some of the records must be released. Kahlon’s testimony was publicly filed this week.

Buying shares in SpaceX is much more difficult than buying a piece of a publicly traded company like Tesla or Microsoft. SpaceX has control over who can buy stakes in it, and the company’s investors fall into different categories. The most rarefied group is the direct investors, who actually own SpaceX shares. This group includes funds led by Kahlon, Peter Thiel and a handful of other venture capitalists with personal ties to Musk. Then there are the indirect investors, who effectively buy stakes in SpaceX through a middleman like Kahlon. (The indirect investors are actually buying into a fund run by the middleman, typically paying a hefty fee.) All previously known Chinese investors in SpaceX fell into the latter category.

This year, ProPublica reported on an unusual feature of SpaceX’s approach to investment from China. According to testimony from the Delaware case, the company allows Chinese investors to buy stakes in SpaceX so long as the money is routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs. Companies only have to proactively report Chinese investments to the government in limited circumstances, and there aren’t hard and fast rules for how much is too much.

After ProPublica’s report, House Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raising alarms about the company’s “potential obfuscation.” “In light of the extreme sensitivity of SpaceX’s work for DoD and NASA, this lack of transparency raises serious questions,” they wrote. It’s unclear if any action was taken in response.

Kahlon has turned his access to SpaceX stock into a lucrative business. His investor list reads like an atlas of the world. The investors’ names are redacted in the recently unsealed document, but their addresses span from Chile to Malaysia. One is in Russia. At least two are in mainland China. One is in Qatar. (In one email to SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Kahlon said a Los Angeles-based fund had money from the Qatari royal family and was already invested in SpaceX.)

“You made a big fortune,” a China-based financier wrote to Kahlon four years ago. “Lol something like that. SpaceX has been the gift that keeps on giving,” Kahlon responded. “All thanks to you.”

Kahlon first met with SpaceX when it was a fledgling startup, according to court records. SpaceX’s CFO, Bret Johnsen, who’s been there for 14 years, testified that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have.” Johnsen also testified that SpaceX has no formal policy about accepting investments from countries deemed adversaries by the U.S. government. But he said he asks fund managers to “stay away from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean ownership interest” because that could make it “more challenging to win government contracts.”

There are indications that by 2021, Kahlon was wary of raising funds from China. The U.S. government had grown increasingly concerned about Chinese investments in tech companies, and that June, Kahlon told an associate he was “being picky” with who he’d let buy into a new SpaceX opportunity. “Only people I want to have a relationship with long term. No one from mainland China,” Kahlon said.

But as he raced to assemble a pool of investors, those concerns appeared to fade away. By November 2021, Kahlon was personally raising money from China to buy SpaceX stakes. He told a Shanghai-based company that if it invested with him, it would get quarterly updates on SpaceX’s business development, “visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X’s CFO,” court records show.

The Shanghai company ultimately sent Kahlon $50 million to invest in Musk’s business, according to court records. SpaceX had the deal canceled after the plan became public.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Do you have any information we should know about Elon Musk’s businesses? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.

        

    


                                    
        
                        Alex Mierjeski contributed research. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/China-SpaceX-OG.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:58:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Elon, Musk’s, SpaceX, Took, Money, Directly, From, Chinese, Investors, Company, Insider, Testifies</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Chicago Cop Who Falsely Blamed an Ex&#45;Girlfriend for Dozens of Traffic Tickets Pleads Guilty but Avoids Prison</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/chicago-cop-who-falsely-blamed-an-ex-girlfriend-for-dozens-of-traffic-tickets-pleads-guilty-but-avoids-prison</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/chicago-cop-who-falsely-blamed-an-ex-girlfriend-for-dozens-of-traffic-tickets-pleads-guilty-but-avoids-prison</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ 
                by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
A former Chicago police officer facing trial for perjury and forgery has admitted he lied under oath dozens of times when he used an audacious alibi to get out of numerous speeding tickets and other traffic violations. Over more than a decade, he repeatedly blamed an ex-girlfriend for stealing his car and racking up the tickets — and each time, the story was bogus. 

Jeffrey Kriv, one of Chicago’s most prolific drunk-driving enforcers during his more than 25 years as a cop, was sentenced to 18 months’ probation and ordered to pay $4,515 in restitution after pleading guilty last week to a lesser charge of felony theft. A plea agreement with prosecutors in Cook County, where Chicago is located, allowed Kriv to avoid jail time and ended the criminal case against him, but the implications of his actions go far beyond his own case.

A ProPublica analysis of court and police records has found that prosecutors have dropped at least 92 traffic and criminal cases that were based on arrests Kriv made and tickets he wrote. Most of the cases that were dismissed involved drunk and dangerous driving. Defense attorneys in those cases have cited Kriv’s perjury case and his credibility issue.

ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune previously detailed Kriv’s history of alleged misconduct as an officer, including that he’d been investigated at least 26 times over allegations of dishonesty for falsifying records, making false arrests and other matters. He was the subject of nearly 100 complaints from citizens and fellow officers in his career; most officers face far fewer. 

Kriv denied the allegations in many of those cases and blamed others on how often he made stops and arrests. In the end, many of the investigations could not be pursued because his accusers did not sign formal complaints, and some complaints, including those that involved allegations of dishonesty, were not sustained by police oversight officials. In other cases, oversight officials found Kriv responsible for the misconduct. 

He retired in 2023, just before prosecutors charged him.
        
    
                    
Kriv’s plea deal was filed in Cook County court on Sept. 24, about a week before his case was scheduled to go to trial. Prosecutors for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office told ProPublica this week that Kriv had 56 of his own traffic tickets dismissed after providing false testimony to judges. That’s more than the 44 tickets that prosecutors had previously indicated in court records. The fines for those tickets would have been $4,515, the amount he was ordered to pay in restitution. 

Addressing the fallout from Kriv’s perjury case on other court cases built on his policing, the state’s attorney’s office said it dropped pending cases against individuals who Kriv had arrested or ticketed because it could not proceed without his testimony.

“We could not call him as a witness due to the false statements he previously made in order to have his own personal tickets dismissed,” the office wrote in response to questions from ProPublica. One case was dismissed as recently as August, records show. Prosecutors said there are no pending cases in which Kriv’s testimony is needed. 

The state’s attorney’s office said that, going forward, any claims from individuals who had been convicted in Kriv-involved cases will be “carefully reviewed.” There also are defendants who have not shown up in court and have warrants out for their arrests, so their cases could be called again.

“Our priority is to uphold our legal and ethical responsibilities while ensuring fairness,” the office said.

Under the plea agreement, Kriv admitted that he repeatedly blamed a girlfriend for stealing his BMW to get his tickets dismissed. “Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv told one judge. He repeated similar stories again and again to get out of tickets for speeding, parking and red light camera violations involving his personal vehicles. Kriv also provided fraudulent police reports of car thefts as evidence. The judges then dismissed the tickets.

Kriv had been charged with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all of them felonies. Each of those offenses would have been punishable by up to five years in prison. 

Kriv’s attorney, Tim Grace, told ProPublica that he and Kriv would not comment. 

The executive director of the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago said the pension board will meet to decide if Kriv can continue to collect his pension benefits, given the felony conviction. Illinois law prohibits officers who are convicted of felonies related to their service from receiving pension benefits. Kriv’s pension payment is more than $6,000 a month.
        
    
                            
    
                    
In court last year, Kriv told a ProPublica reporter that he was innocent. “I am going to fight it,” he said at the time. “I don’t plan on taking any plea.” He complained that people accused of carjacking and gun offenses get probation, and he criticized prosecutors for treating him like a criminal. “I’m worse than a carjacker, allegedly,” he said.

He also said “it’s a shame” and “it’s terrible” that prosecutors have dropped cases against alleged drunken drivers and others because of concerns about his credibility. He said he wanted to testify in those cases and said prosecutors had sidelined him prematurely.

“You know how the system is: You are guilty until proven innocent,” he said. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/202305-Kriv-Chicago-Lead_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:58:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Chicago, Cop, Who, Falsely, Blamed, Ex-Girlfriend, for, Dozens, Traffic, Tickets, Pleads, Guilty, but, Avoids, Prison</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Purported dissident who monitored Chinese activists in Germany convicted of espionage </title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/purported-dissident-who-monitored-chinese-activists-in-germany-convicted-of-espionage</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/purported-dissident-who-monitored-chinese-activists-in-germany-convicted-of-espionage</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Jian Guo, a naturalized German citizen, featured in ICIJ’s China Targets investigation that revealed how Beijing uses civilians to spy on regime critics around the world. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/06/Blurred-cropped-_-2015-Frankfurt_Tiananmen-Square-protest-commemoration-copy.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:58:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Purported, dissident, who, monitored, Chinese, activists, Germany, convicted, espionage </media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Trading on Tom Homan: Inside the Push to Cash in on the Trump Administration’s Deportation Campaign</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/trading-on-tom-homan-inside-the-push-to-cash-in-on-the-trump-administrations-deportation-campaign</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/trading-on-tom-homan-inside-the-push-to-cash-in-on-the-trump-administrations-deportation-campaign</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Jeff Ernsthausen and Mica Rosenberg                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
The first time a Pennsylvania consultant named Charles Sowell connected with border czar Tom Homan was when Sowell reached out on LinkedIn in 2021, looking for advice about border contracting work. Homan had finished a stint as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, capping a three-decade career in federal government. He and Sowell built a rapport, based partly on their shared criticisms of then-President Joe Biden’s border policies.

By 2023, the men had gone into business together. Sowell was paying Homan as a consultant to his boutique firm, SE&amp;M Solutions, which advised companies — in some cases for a fee of $20,000 a month — seeking contracts from the agencies where Homan had once worked. In 2024, Sowell became chair of the board of Homan’s foundation, Border911, which championed tougher border security.

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that if he won reelection he would appoint Homan to oversee the sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration that he’d promised his supporters, which would likely involve billions of dollars in new contracts for private companies. At the Republican National Convention speech in which Trump accepted his party’s nomination in July, he said Homan would have a role in launching “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

“Put him in charge,” Trump said, “and just sit back and watch.”

After Trump won and formally announced Homan would be returning with him to the White House, Sowell kept Homan on his payroll until the end of the year. Once named as the border czar, Homan said he would recuse himself from contracting, saying he would have no “involvement, discussion, input, or decision of any future government contracts.”

But several industry executives who spoke with ProPublica said at least half a dozen companies vying for a slice of the $45 billion Congress has allocated for immigration detention work had hired Sowell because he had led them to believe his connections to Homan would help their chances of winning government work.

Homan&#039;s business relationships are under greater scrutiny after MSNBC reported an FBI sting that allegedly caught him on tape accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover agents posing as would-be government contractors before he took the border czar post.
        
    
                    
His relationship with Sowell raises fresh questions about the integrity of the billion-dollar contracting process for immigration enforcement, ethics experts say.

Just last month, Sowell and Homan’s senior adviser Mark Hall visited one of Sowell’s clients seeking to cash in on an unprecedented plan by the Trump administration to build temporary immigrant detention camps on military bases, sources told ProPublica. As recently as February, Hall too had been paid by Sowell’s firm, records show. At the same time, the extent of Homan’s recusal has been called into question: Records of internal meetings obtained by ProPublica showed that over the summer Homan was in conversation with industry executives about the government’s contracting plans.

ProPublica gleaned more details than previously reported by examining federal disclosure forms, government documents and internal communications from firms in the Homeland Security industry, and from interviews with Sowell and several current and former government officials, as well as executives at companies seeking contracts in the burgeoning detention sector. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because of their ongoing work in the sector.

Government officials in Homan’s position are required to steer clear of any activity that could impact their former business associates for a year after entering government. Discussing immigration-related contracts with industry players would represent a “clear-cut violation” of federal ethics regulations, said Don Fox, the former general counsel for the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency in the executive branch.

“You shouldn’t be in those briefings,” Fox said. “You are either recused or you are not.”

It’s common for companies looking to land federal contracts to hire consultants and seek expertise of former government employees. Those relationships are subject to federal ethics rules designed to guard against conflicts of interest. The White House and DHS did not provide requested copies of Homan’s formal recusal documents, which might outline exactly what kinds of activities government lawyers told Homan should be off limits.

Homan and Hall did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview, Sowell said he and Homan no longer have a financial relationship. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Homan has “no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract.”

In his role as border czar, Homan “occasionally meets with a variety of people to learn about new developments and capabilities to serve the needs of the American people,” she said.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in government ethics, said, however, “It’s not just about tainted awards. If the industry believes the system is corrupt, then the public is harmed. And the damage has already been done.”

Growing Wealth
Homan spent more than 30 years in public service, eventually rising to become a senior figure at ICE, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, during the administration of President Barack Obama. He was acting ICE director during Trump’s first term until he left government seven years ago.

While out of public office, Homan was highly critical of Biden’s border policies and formed the nonprofit Border911 to “educate Americans on what it means to have a secure, well-managed border.”

Homan’s private-sector work before he returned to government transformed his finances. In 2017, he declared assets totaling a maximum of just $250,000 on his ethics disclosures following a career in federal service, a figure that excludes certain government retirement accounts.

By 2025, his net worth had grown to between $3 million to $9 million, the disclosure documents show. (The forms list assets in ranges, and a portion of his net worth may come from money he had saved in government retirement accounts.)

In his years out of government, Homan became a household name in conservative circles as a frequent contributor on Fox News. He started a consulting firm and was paid for public speaking engagements around the country, raising alarms about the record number of border crossings during the Biden administration. The dire situation at the border, he said, could require the intervention of the U.S. military and the hiring of private companies to carry out a mass deportation campaign. “We’re going to contract as much work out as we can, work that doesn’t require a badge and a gun,” Homan told Fox News in 2024.

After Trump made clear his intentions to tap Homan as border czar, Sowell reached out to government contracting experts, saying he was working with Homan’s Border911 Foundation to help streamline procurement for the incoming administration’s mass deportation policy, said two people who spoke with him.

Sowell, sources in the industry said, made it known he was bringing together a group of companies that could be in line for lucrative contracts building detention camps for the Trump administration.

In an interview with ProPublica in June, Sowell said when his clients wanted to understand DHS better, he would bring in Homan to get his perspective as a former senior ICE leader. Bloomberg recently reported about aspects of Homan’s business dealings with Sowell.

Hints of Homan’s financial relationship with Sowell can be found in Homan’s federally required financial disclosure forms, which contain limited information. The forms report that Sowell’s firm paid Homan some sum of money — more than $5,000 — sometime between 2023 and early 2025. They do not say how much or exactly when he was paid, but Sowell told ProPublica their financial relationship ended last November or December.

Separately, Hall disclosed he was paid $50,000 by Sowell for consulting in January and February before he entered government in February. Hall also was a part-time board member at the Border911 foundation from April 2024 to February, according to his LinkedIn page.

Sowell made public his affinity for Homan at an industry conference in April, where many major players were present: He spent $20,000 at a charity auction to purchase a commemorative quilt made from Border Patrol agent vests. It was signed by Homan.

Sowell did not name his clients, but ProPublica learned several are companies that build temporary shelters, staffing agencies that supply security guards and medical companies that provide health care services, though they did not have direct expertise in immigration detention. Sowell said he couldn’t comment on his conversations with Homan since Homan went back into government. “I don’t have a lot of opportunities to chat with him anymore, even as a friend,” he said.

“Tom is an exceptionally ethical person,” Sowell said in the June interview, adding that his and Homan’s work steered clear of any real or perceived conflicts of interest. “I’m exceptionally proud of this administration for not doing that type of ‘it’s who you know’ versus ‘what you can do’ type of contracting.”

Asked about additional details in this story before publication, Sowell declined to comment.

Sowell appears to still be in contact — at least to some extent — with the border czar’s office. Last month, he and Hall flew to visit the Houston offices of Industrial Tent Systems, a family-owned company that specializes in quickly building temporary structures. ProPublica learned that Industrial Tent Systems is one of Sowell’s clients. Hall was there that day to hear the company’s leaders pitch their plan to use their tents and services for immigration detention, even sampling some of the tacos they were hoping to serve detainees, according to two sources with knowledge of the meeting.

Industrial Tent Systems did not respond to a request for comment.

The White House said Hall has never been authorized by Homan to represent him.

“It is unusual,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who served as drug czar for Obama, when asked about the meeting. “As an adviser this would be totally inappropriate to meet with potential contractors.” Generally, he said, a top decision-maker would not meet with a potential contractor, who would typically have to go through “numerous hoops” to even request a meeting that may well be denied.

Another one of the companies seeking expertise from Sowell and Homan was USA Up Star, an Indiana-based company that specializes in building temporary facilities.

Homan and Sowell were both on the payroll of USA Up Star before Homan was named border czar, according to several industry sources with direct knowledge of the relationship and government documents.

Homan’s disclosures show only that USA Up Star paid him as a consultant sometime between 2023 and early 2025, but do not detail how much or when. During this time, a picture of Homan and the company’s owner and founder, Klay South, standing in front of a private jet was posted on social media. South said he had no comment.

Military Contracting
Sowell’s clients have been trying to navigate a byzantine but highly lucrative contracting landscape, as the Trump administration has pledged to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day and is seeking to double the number of detention beds.

Early this year, the Trump administration drew up plans to build a series of massive detention camps on military bases to hold immigrants as part of a deportation effort, the first of which was planned for Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            An ICE detention facility under construction in August at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas
    
            (Paul Ratje/Reuters)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The administration came up with a novel way to fund that camp, drawing on a contracting process run by the U.S. military known as the WEXMAC (which stands for Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract). Homan spoke to companies in the industry about those plans.

Records obtained by ProPublica show a contracting officer at the Department of Defense, which the administration now calls the Department of War, saying in a meeting that Homan had been talking to companies about the WEXMAC. “Border czar has been briefed by industry,” the official informed his colleagues. ”Border czar is most likely going to say something to SECDEF,” the official continued, referring to Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth. Bloomberg also reported on the June meeting.

Inquiries into Homan’s previous work in the private sector and his business relationships are likely to ramp up following the reports of the $50,000 undercover sting. That federal investigation into Homan was launched after the subject of another inquiry — not Sowell — claimed the border czar was soliciting payments in exchange for the promise of future contracts should Trump return to power, a person familiar with the closed investigation said.

“This matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors,” FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a joint statement. “They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing. The Department’s resources must remain focused on real threats to the American people, not baseless investigations. As a result, the investigation has been closed.”

The White House press secretary denied that Homan received the money, and Homan has said he has done nothing illegal. He has not been charged with any offense, and neither Hall nor Sowell has been accused of wrongdoing.

Democratic lawmakers are seeking audio and video evidence from the closed FBI case and have also raised questions about Homan’s financial ties to The Geo Group, a private prison firm he previously consulted for that has won lucrative contracts in recent months. The Geo Group did not reply to a request for comment.

Tens of billions of dollars of additional funding for immigration enforcement have yet to be spent. The detention camp contract at Fort Bliss, which could eventually hold 5,000 people, was awarded to a consortium of firms led by a company on the military contracting list for over $1 billion. It is the first of several such facilities planned in coming years.

A number of Sowell’s clients — including Industrial Tent Systems and USA Up Star — were among the close to 60 companies recently added to the WEXMAC. That makes them eligible to bid on those future immigration detention camp contracts.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Kirsten Berg and Al Shaw contributed research. Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/Border-Czar-Contracts-OG.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2025 03:04:55 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Trading, Tom, Homan:, Inside, the, Push, Cash, the, Trump, Administration’s, Deportation, Campaign</media:keywords>
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<title>Lawmakers Across the Country This Year Blocked Ethics Reforms Meant to Increase Public Trust</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/lawmakers-across-the-country-this-year-blocked-ethics-reforms-meant-to-increase-public-trust</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/lawmakers-across-the-country-this-year-blocked-ethics-reforms-meant-to-increase-public-trust</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica, with additional reporting by Nick Reynolds and Anna Wilder, The Post and Courier; Yasmeen Khan, The Maine Monitor; Lauren Dake, Oregon Public Broadcasting; Marjorie Childress, New Mexico In Depth; Louis Hansen, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO; Mary Steurer and Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor; Kate McGee, The Texas Tribune; Alyse Pfeil, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune;  and Shauna Sowersby, The Seattle Times                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
In Virginia this year, a legislative committee killed a bill that would have required lawmakers to disclose any crypto holdings. In New Mexico, the Democratic governor vetoed legislation that would have required lobbyists to be more transparent about what bills they were trying to kill or pass. And in North Dakota, where voters who were galvanized by a group called BadAss Grandmas for Democracy established a state ethics commission nearly seven years ago, lawmakers continued a pattern of limiting the panel’s power.

At a time when the bounds of government ethics are being stretched in Washington, D.C., hundreds of ethics-related bills were introduced this year in state legislatures, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures’ ethics legislation database. While legislation strengthening ethics oversight did pass in some places, a ProPublica analysis found lawmakers across multiple states targeted or thwarted reforms designed to keep the public and elected officials accountable to the people they serve.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers tried to push through bills to tighten gift limits, toughen conflict-of-interest provisions or expand financial disclosure reporting requirements. Time and again, the bills were derailed.

With the help of local newsrooms, many of which have been part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, we reviewed a range of legislation that sought to weaken or stymie ethics regulations in 2025. We also spoke to experts for an overview of trends nationwide. Their take: The threats to ethics standards and their enforcement have been growing.
        
    
                    
“Donald Trump has been ushering a new cultural standard, in which ethics is no longer significant,” said Craig Holman, a veteran government ethics specialist with the progressive watchdog nonprofit Public Citizen. He pointed to Trump’s private dinner with top buyers of his cryptocurrency and the administration’s tariff deal with Vietnam after it greenlit the Trump Organization’s $1.5 billion golf resort complex; and he said in an email it was “most revealing” that the White House “for the first time in over 16 years has no ethics policy. Trump 2.0 simply repealed Biden’s ethics Executive Order and replaced it with nothing.”

The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that pushes for ethics enforcement, documented the risks and challenges that specifically confront state ethics commissions across the country. Such commissions have a range of mandates, but they often enforce lobbying, campaign finance and conflicts of interest laws. In the center’s 2024 Threat Assessment report, it warned that “those who want to weaken ethics commissions are becoming more creative with how they approach their attacks, and all commissions should be battle ready.”

Delaney Marsco, the center’s director of ethics and the report’s lead author, told ProPublica, “Any attempts to chip away at ethics commission authority is actually just chipping away at the public’s right to know what’s actually going on in their government.”

Louisiana passed a law significantly weakening ethics standards by making it harder for the state Board of Ethics to launch and conduct investigations. The law raised the bar on when the 15-member board could launch its own investigation from “reason to believe” to “probable cause.” And where the board had been required to investigate any sworn complaint it received, now two-thirds of its members must agree probable cause exists before opening an inquiry.

The law, which had overwhelming bipartisan support, targets the processes that resulted in ethics charges against then-Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is now the governor; the private lawyer defending him against those charges helped craft the legislation. The ethics commission dropped the charges last month as part of a settlement deal.

Sponsoring Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican, said that checks on the board’s power were needed in response to overzealous enforcement actions. 

But more often, legislators stood in the way of ethics reforms.

In South Carolina, a sweeping Statehouse corruption probe during the 2010s led to the convictions of several legislative leaders and to the passage of a number of ethics reforms. “It’s been radio silent ever since,” Sen. Sean Bennett, a Summerville Republican who chairs the chamber’s Ethics Committee, told The Post and Courier. “There’s been attempts to do things, but they just have not gotten a lot of traction.”

And this year, legislators there moved in the other direction, introducing a bill that would have exempted government appointees from having to file statements of economic interest. These statements, required for all elected officials, most candidates for elected office and certain high-profile public figures like commission members or school district employees, include the disclosure of everything from an individual’s income sources and gifts received from special interests to any property or business interests in their name.

Sponsoring Rep. Mike Burns, a conservative Republican from the college town of Tigerville, argued the bill would help protect nonpaid appointees, who he said end up with fines because they often don’t know how to correctly file.

But in an interview with The Post and Courier, Rep. Roger Kirby, a Democrat from Lake City, pushed back. “Transparency is what the goal is, right? Why would we try to back away from that?”

South Carolina has two-year sessions, and the bill remains stalled in committee.

And in another example of legislation that sought to weaken reform, the leader of Oregon’s Senate Republicans at the time, Daniel Bonham, made a Hail-Mary effort and introduced a measure to dissolve the state’s ethics commission and allow state agencies to police themselves. The measure didn’t get out of committee, which, Bonham acknowledged in an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, was what he expected. Still, Bonham said he believes the ethics commission is “feckless” and its effectiveness and purpose merit “robust public debate.”

Across the country, even when some legislators did attempt to push forward ethics reforms, their efforts were largely blocked:


Virginia: Office holders would have been required to disclose digital assets, specifically defined as cryptocurrency, on their state ethics submissions. The disclosure would have been mandatory for any employee or elected official required to file a statement of economic interests with the Virginia Conflict of Interest and Ethics Advisory Council. Among those covered: the governor, cabinet members, General Assembly members, state officers and employees, judges and constitutional officers. The bill’s sponsor argued that without public disclosure, Virginia lawmakers, cabinet officials and judges who own digital currency could have potential conflicts of interest in creating new laws and regulating the industry. But the bill failed amid bipartisan opposition. Several lawmakers questioned whether it would open the door to further disclosure requirements.
Texas: Multiple state lawmakers filed legislation to combat misinformation and disinformation in political ads and to make it clearer who was paying for ads that might contain altered images or audio. The legislation followed a bruising 2024 primary campaign in which former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, faced a barrage of false and misleading ads. One featured Phelan’s face superimposed over that of U.S. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who was shown hugging former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Related bills failed in both the House and Senate, where opponents dismissed arguments that voters were struggling to determine fact from misinformation. Conservative critics of the measure cited free speech concerns, among others.
North Dakota: Legislators stopped efforts to give more power and resources to the state’s ethics commission, which a successful ballot initiative created nearly seven years ago. The commission sought more freedom over how and when it conducts investigations, including the ability to carry out investigations even when no formal complaint was filed. Commission staff said the requirement for formal complaints dissuades some people from coming forward. But opposing lawmakers, nearly all of them Republican, said the measure lacked sufficient checks and balances on the commission’s power, echoing strong opposition from the governor and attorney general.
New Mexico: Democratic legislators made two runs at transparency. The first required lobbyists to disclose bills and their position on those bills within 48 hours of starting that lobbying or changing position. The legislation passed but was vetoed by the Democratic governor, who said the bill lacked clarity and the reporting window was too restrictive. Another ethics bill aimed to prevent nonprofits making independent political expenditures from exploiting a loophole in a 2019 campaign finance law requiring them to publicly disclose donor names, addresses and contribution amounts. That bill was ultimately killed under pressure from nonprofits that feared its effects.
Connecticut: The Office of State Ethics sought to expand conflict-of-interest provisions to prevent state officials and employees from taking official actions, such as awarding contracts, that would benefit their private employers or the private employers of their spouses. The bill also would have required public officials to recuse themselves if they have “actual knowledge” that the companies for which they or their spouses work would benefit. The legislation stalled, as it has repeatedly over the last decade and a half. This time, the office’s executive director, Peter Lewandowski, said objections came from those who argued that requiring lawmakers to recuse themselves because a vote might benefit a spouse’s private employer was too punitive.
Maine: A bill died in committee that would have required state legislators to disclose donations made to an organization by lobbyists or lobbyist associates on behalf of a legislator. Supporters, including sponsoring Sen. David Haggan, a Republican, said the bill would have increased transparency and also would have allowed the public to determine how prevalent the practice is. Critics called it impractical and questioned its necessity. The bill “adds a level of complexity that is not warranted by any behavior that anyone has been able to cite specifically,” said Sen. Jill Duson, a Democrat, who voted against it. 

But ProPublica’s analysis did find some states, both red and blue, that had successfully enacted reforms. For example, in Maine, a bipartisan push for a waiting period of one year for legislative staff who want to become lobbyists won overwhelming support. Rhode Island’s Democratic legislative supermajority and its Democratic governor agreed on a prohibition against bid-rigging for state contracts. And in Oklahoma, lawmakers went so far as to overturn the governor’s veto to make self-dealing by government officials a felony offense, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison. The governor said in his veto message the legislation would “create excessive bureaucracy with little meaningful impact.”

In Washington, legislators put into law a preexisting state requirement that lawmakers report on their financial disclosure forms any interest greater than 10% in a company or property. Though the bill was framed as a cleanup measure, critics pointed out that local officials are held to a much stricter standard. Local officials must disclose any financial interest greater than 1% when voting on a public contract and must recuse themselves.

What if “a real estate company offers a legislator a 5% interest in property that might benefit from a state project such as a highway interchange?” Rep. Gerry Pollet, a Seattle Democrat, asked in an example reported by The Seattle Times.

The 10% standard, he said, “undermines trust in the Legislature.” ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20250930-ethics-lead_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2025 03:04:55 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Lawmakers, Across, the, Country, This, Year, Blocked, Ethics, Reforms, Meant, Increase, Public, Trust</media:keywords>
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<title>An American Friend: The Trump&#45;Appointed Diplomat Accused of Shielding El Salvador’s President From Law Enforcement</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/an-american-friend-the-trump-appointed-diplomat-accused-of-shielding-el-salvadors-president-from-law-enforcement</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/an-american-friend-the-trump-appointed-diplomat-accused-of-shielding-el-salvadors-president-from-law-enforcement</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, Kirsten Berg and Brett Murphy                
                                             

        
                        Leer en español.

        

    


                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
In August 2020, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, went to the U.S. ambassador with an extraordinary request. Salvadoran authorities had intercepted a conversation between a journalist and a U.S. embassy contractor about corruption among high-level aides to the president.

The contractor, a U.S. citizen, was no ordinary source. He collaborated with U.S. and Salvadoran investigators who were targeting the president’s inner circle. Over the previous year, he had helped an FBI-led task force uncover a suspected alliance between the Bukele government and the MS-13 street gang, which was responsible for murders, rapes and kidnappings in the United States. He had worked to gather evidence that the president’s aides had secretly met with gang bosses in prison and agreed to give them money and protection in exchange for a reduction in violence. The information posed a threat to the Bukele government.

Bukele wanted the contractor out of the country — and in Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson, he had a powerful American friend. Johnson was a former CIA officer and appointee of President Donald Trump serving in his first diplomatic post. He had cultivated a strikingly close relationship with the Salvadoran president. After Bukele provided Johnson with the recordings, the ambassador immediately ordered an investigation that resulted in the contractor’s dismissal.

It was not the only favor Johnson did for Bukele, according to a ProPublica investigation based on a previously undisclosed report by the State Department’s inspector general and interviews with U.S. and Salvadoran officials. The dismissal of the contractor was part of a pattern in which Johnson has been accused of shielding Bukele from U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement, ProPublica found. Johnson did little to pursue the extradition to the United States of an MS-13 boss who was a potential witness to the secret gang pact and a top target of the FBI-led task force, officials said.

After he stepped down as ambassador, Johnson continued his support for the Salvadoran president despite the Biden administration’s efforts to curb Bukele’s increasing authoritarianism. He also played a prominent role in making Bukele Trump’s favorite Latin American leader, according to interviews and public records.

Johnson’s tight friendship with Bukele troubled top State Department officials in the Biden administration, who asked his successor, Jean Manes, to look into the firing of the contractor. She reached a blunt conclusion, according to the inspector general’s report: “Bukele requested Johnson remove [the contractor] and that was what happened.”

“Manes explained that [the contractor] was working on anti-corruption cases against individuals close to El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Manes believed removing [him] was a way to ensure the investigations stopped,” the report said.
        
    
                    
ProPublica has also learned that Manes’ review led to an extreme measure: She forced the ouster of the CIA station chief, a longtime friend of Johnson, because she felt he was “too close” to Bukele, according to the inspector general report. Senior State Department and White House officials said they suspected that Johnson’s continuing relationships with the station chief and Bukele fomented resistance within the embassy to the new U.S. policy confronting the Salvadoran president over corruption and democracy issues, according to interviews.

“Manes would go see Bukele to convey U.S. concerns about some of his policies. Then the station chief would go see him and say the opposite,” said Juan Sebastian Gonzalez, who received regular briefings about the embassy as the former senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

ProPublica is not identifying the former station chief or the contractor to protect their safety.

After battling Bukele in public and her own embassy in private, Manes announced a pause in diplomatic relations and left El Salvador in late 2021. Days later, Johnson posted a photo on LinkedIn that sent a defiant message to the Biden administration: It showed him and Bukele smiling with their families in front of a Christmas tree at the Johnson home in Miami.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            “It was great to spend some time in our Miami home with El Salvadoran President Bukele,” Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson, left, wrote in a Nov. 30, 2021, post on LinkedIn.
    
            (Ronald Johnson via LinkedIn)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The bond between the two men was at the center of a fierce political conflict that spread in Washington, San Salvador and Miami. Today, Johnson and Bukele — once minor players in U.S. foreign affairs — have emerged from the fray triumphant. On April 9, the Senate confirmed Johnson as ambassador to Mexico, arguably the most important U.S. embassy in Latin America. On April 14, Trump met with Bukele in the White House to celebrate an agreement that would allow the U.S. to deport hundreds of immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison, elevating the global stature of the leader of one of the hemisphere’s smallest and poorest countries.

Johnson’s detractors accuse him of championing Bukele despite his increasing abuses of power.

“We didn’t have a credible or effective U.S. representative in that country. We had a mouthpiece for the government of El Salvador,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime foreign policy aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.

Johnson’s defenders argue that his strong ties to the Salvadoran president benefited U.S. policy objectives. Upon arriving in El Salvador, Johnson told his staff that he wanted Bukele’s support in reducing U.S.-bound immigration, the Trump administration’s top priority with the country.

“During Trump and Johnson’s time, the thinking was let El Salvador be El Salvador,” said Carlos Ortiz, the former attache for the Department of Homeland Security at the embassy, who describes himself as a friend and admirer of Johnson. “Let them deal with their own corruption. The U.S. focus was migration.”

A State Department spokesperson said it was “false” that Johnson had blocked or impeded any law enforcement efforts in order to protect Bukele or his allies and that the allegations made by Manes in the inspector general report were untrue.

In addition, Tommy Pigott, the department’s principal deputy spokesperson, praised Johnson for having “always prioritized our national interests and the safety of the American people above all else.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s and President Bukele’s strong leadership, we are ensuring our region is safer from the menace of vicious criminal gangs,” Pigott said. “Secretary Rubio looks forward to continuing to work with regional allies, including the Salvadoran government, in our joint efforts to counter illegal immigration and to advance mutual interests.”

The department provided a written statement from Johnson highlighting the Salvadoran president’s achievements.

“Our cordial relationship was based on honest and frank dialogue to advance issues of mutual benefit for both of our nations,” Johnson said. “President Bukele has continued to maintain widespread popularity and high approval ratings in his homeland. He transformed El Salvador from the murder capital of the world to one of the safest countries worldwide.”

Spokespeople for the CIA and Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred questions to the State Department. The Salvadoran government did not respond to requests for comment.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Johnson arrives as the new U.S. ambassador to El Salvador in September 2019 and presents Bukele with his credentials during a visit to the Casa Presidencial.
    
            (Camilo Freedman/APHOTOGRAFIA/Getty Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The Gang Pact
Manes had the unusual distinction of serving as the top U.S. diplomat in El Salvador twice — once before Johnson and once after.

She first arrived in El Salvador in 2016, as an appointee of President Barack Obama. It was her first ambassadorship. Manes earned a degree in foreign policy from Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell, the television preacher and activist, and a master’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C. She joined the State Department in 1992 and served in cultural, educational and public affairs posts in several Latin American countries as well as in Afghanistan and Syria. Although more politically conservative than many of her diplomatic colleagues, she developed a reputation as a nonpartisan, hard-edged professional. Manes declined to comment for this article.

When Manes arrived, Bukele, the son of a wealthy executive of Palestinian descent, was mayor of San Salvador. Manes and Bukele got along well. In 2019, the 37-year-old Bukele ran for president as a populist outsider promising to defeat crime and corruption in a nation with one of the world’s worst homicide rates and a history of former presidents being charged with crimes. His political coalition defeated the traditional power blocs of left and right. The most dangerous national security threat that the new president faced was the MS-13 street gang, which the U.S. government had designated as a transnational criminal organization and the Salvadoran government as a terrorist group.

Manes admired Bukele’s reformist zeal, former colleagues said. During conversations after his election victory, Bukele assured her that he was devoted to rooting out lawlessness, even in his own party, and asked for the embassy’s support.

“Go after my people first, crack down on anyone who is corrupt, and on MS-13,” he said, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the conversations.

Bukele, though, had already been publicly accused of cutting deals with MS-13 and another gang while he was mayor. U.S. and Salvadoran investigators soon learned that the new president’s senior aides had entered into secret negotiations with the leaders of MS-13 who were imprisoned in El Salvador, according to U.S. court records, Treasury Department sanctions, interviews and news accounts.

Osiris Luna, Bukele’s prison director, and Carlos Marroquin, a presidential ally in charge of social welfare programs, reached an agreement with the gang’s ruling council, known as the Ranfla, according to U.S. court documents and interviews with U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement officials. It was a more expansive deal than those struck by previous Salvadoran governments, which had offered the gang jailhouse perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions. Marroquin and Luna have not responded to requests for comment.

The council, which controlled tens of thousands of MS-13 members across the U.S., Mexico and Central America from prison, agreed to decrease killings and provide votes for Bukele’s party in exchange for financial incentives and political influence. According to court documents, the gang chiefs also asked the president’s men for an important guarantee: protection from extradition to the United States.

Homicide rates soon plummeted. Today, El Salvador is one of the safest countries in the Americas, and Bukele is one of the region’s most popular politicians. But the secret truce with the gangs made his government a target of the FBI-led multi-agency team, which was known as Joint Task Force Vulcan.

Trump had vowed to defeat MS-13 during his campaign and, in August 2019, created Vulcan to dismantle the gang. Its strategy was similar to the fight against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerillas. Led by a Justice Department prosecutor in New York, the team combined agents from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and other agencies based around the United States and operating in El Salvador and neighboring countries.

The initial focus was to build cases against gang bosses on racketeering, terrorism and drug charges and extradite them to the United States. Soon, though, leads from informants and wiretaps spurred federal agents to expand their investigation to examine the deals between the gang and top Bukele officials, according to interviews and U.S. court records. As ProPublica has previously reported, Vulcan agents even filed a request with the Treasury Department to canvass U.S. banks for any signs that Bukele and other Salvadoran political figures close to him had laundered U.S. Agency for International Development funds as part of the deal with MS-13. The result of that request is unclear.

Vulcan also cooperated with a team of Salvadoran prosecutors who were accumulating their own evidence about the gang pact and a network of suspected graft that allegedly included the president’s inner circle.

The potential revelation of a secret deal posed a threat to Bukele because it could undermine his reputation as a crimefighter and expose him to possible criminal charges in the U.S. and El Salvador.

The Friendship
A month after the launch of the task force, Johnson succeeded Manes as ambassador.

He knew El Salvador, having led combat operations there as an Army Green Beret — one of 55 U.S. military advisers to the Salvadoran armed forces in the bloody civil war against leftist rebels in the 1980s, according to former U.S. officials and an online biography of Johnson.

“One of my specific tasks was to teach the soldiers respect for human rights,” Johnson said in his written response to ProPublica.

After rising to the rank of colonel, Johnson left the Army in 1998 and joined the CIA for a second career that included assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and at U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Special Operations Command in Florida.

Johnson and Bukele came from different worlds. Johnson, now 73, grew up in Alabama. He was a devout Christian, favored suits and ties, and spoke with a Southern drawl. “I was raised in a small town and I was honored to work in the military as well as the CIA,” Johnson said in his statement to ProPublica.

Photos from early in his career show Johnson posing with weapons and fellow commandos in Latin America and other locales. As ambassador, he once parachuted out of a plane at a Salvadoran airshow.

Bukele was more than 20 years younger. He cultivated a hip image, wearing jeans, colorful socks and an assortment of sunglasses. He was adept at communicating on social media and posted frequently on X. He talked about reinventing his strife-torn nation as a mecca for bitcoin, surfing and tourism.

Almost immediately, though, it became clear the two had buena onda — a good vibe. Soon after his arrival, Johnson posted an X message quoting Bukele.

“I believe that with the United States, we have an alliance,” it read. “But I believe that with Ambassador Johnson and his wife, Alina, we will have a personal friendship.” Johnson shared the sentiment. In a recent interview, he recalled that he had “developed a very close personal relationship” with the president.

About three weeks after Johnson became ambassador, Bukele visited Trump in New York — the first Latin American leader to hold an official one-on-one meeting with the president in his first term. Trump lauded Bukele for being an enthusiastic ally in fighting MS-13 and in containing illegal immigration flows in Central America. In a post on X, Johnson declared, “If this isn’t a demonstration of the strength of our bilateral relationship, I don’t know what is.”

“Johnson was very successful in El Salvador, in developing a relationship with Bukele, in convincing Trump that El Salvador mattered,” said Thomas Shannon Jr., a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat who has worked in Washington as a lobbyist for the Bukele government.

Johnson and Bukele documented their growing friendship on social media. One post showed Johnson and his wife boating with Bukele and his family on an estuary in El Salvador. Another showed the ambassador and president eating cracked stone crab claws at a restaurant. They held joint press conferences and often dined together, according to interviews. Johnson’s embrace of the president struck some of his critics in El Salvador and Washington as excessive for a diplomat.

“Johnson insinuated himself into Bukele’s family and circle in a way that made some people in the U.S. government at the time uncomfortable,” Shannon said.

Others, however, believed that Johnson used his access as leverage in dealing with Bukele.

“He was trying to use his relationship in order to advance U.S. policy and U.S. objectives,” said a former embassy employee who served during Johnson’s ambassadorship. “He did so in a much more personal way.”

Johnson’s approach reflected his experience cultivating sources as a former intelligence officer, but that did not mean he was always in control, said a former Trump administration official familiar with the matter.

“Johnson wasn’t just recruiting Bukele. What’s remarkable is that Bukele was recruiting him,” the official said. “They were recruiting each other. It was a relationship in which Bukele had power.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Bukele speaks during the opening ceremony in El Salvador for the 2021 International Surfing Association World Surfing Games.
    
            (Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The Dismissal
As the friendship blossomed, U.S. embassy officers kept Johnson informed about the increasing evidence of the gang pact and high-level corruption, according to former U.S. officials. Officers in law enforcement and intelligence briefed the ambassador regularly, the officials said.

In mid-2020, investigators had a major breakthrough.

Luna, the president’s national director of prisons, made contact with U.S. embassy law enforcement officials, according to former U.S. officials familiar with the case. During a meeting at a discreet site, he admitted that he was part of talks with the gang but said that he was following Bukele’s orders, the officials said. He discussed the possibility of giving testimony as a protected witness in exchange for him and his family being brought to the United States.

Luna’s reluctance to testify against Bukele in a U.S. court caused the deal to fall through, but Vulcan investigators now had an insider account implicating the president, officials said.

“It was huge,” said a former official familiar with the case. “One of the strongest keys was when Osiris tells us, ‘I want you to know this isn’t me negotiating with gangs. This is Bukele’ — and other top aides — ‘and I don’t want to be the fall guy for them.’”

Bukele has publicly denied such allegations and has not been charged.

That August, a reporter for El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, was chasing an exclusive story to expose the gang pact. The story would feature voluminous evidence, including Salvadoran intelligence reports, government documents and even prison logs recording the visits of Luna and other Bukele aides to MS-13 leaders.

Bukele had been waging a harassment campaign against El Faro, which had aggressively covered corruption in his government. His security forces had installed Pegasus, the Israeli spyware, on the phones of some reporters, according to interviews and an investigation by researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

One of the intercepted conversations was between the journalist and the U.S. embassy contractor. Well respected at the embassy and among Salvadoran officials, the contractor oversaw U.S.-funded cooperation programs for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The American was working closely with the Vulcan investigators in the U.S. and El Salvador as well as the Salvadoran prosecutors collaborating with the task force. The intercepts indicated that he was providing information to the reporter, according to the inspector general report and interviews. ProPublica has learned that the contractor relayed information including handwritten Salvadoran documents about the gang negotiations.

After Bukele asked for the contractor’s removal, Johnson ordered an investigation by embassy security officials. They determined that the contractor had unauthorized contact with the El Faro reporter and that he had misled them about the contact, according to the inspector general’s report.

But there was something else: The U.S. security officials also worried about possible retaliation against the contractor. It was a remarkable acknowledgement that the Bukele government might resort to harming an American working for the embassy, especially given the president’s friendship with Johnson, according to the report and interviews.

The embassy security office’s “biggest concern, though, was [the contractor’s] safety because” his “statements to the press upset the El Salvadoran government and there was concern that [he] became a target of the El Salvadoran government,” the report said.

As a result of the investigation, embassy officials decided not to renew the employee’s contract, effectively dismissing him. He left the country at the direction of his supervisors in Washington within weeks of Bukele’s conversation with Johnson. The contractor retained a good reputation in Washington and has continued to work for the State Department on overseas assignments.

News of the case ricocheted among Latin America experts working in the White House, Capitol Hill and think tanks.

“It is highly, highly abnormal for an ambassador to dismiss an embassy staffer at the request of a foreign president,” said a former Hill staffer.

Senior U.S. officials questioned Johnson’s handling of the incident.

“Johnson’s reaction should have been, why are you spying on my staff? That’s the right answer for any U.S. ambassador,” said a former State Department official familiar with embassy operations in El Salvador.

In response to questions about the incident, the State Department said the “surveillance of U.S. personnel is not tolerated.”

In her review of the case, Manes would later express concern about “the issue of a foreign president requesting the removal of an embassy employee,” according to the inspector general report. She said the employee spoke regularly with the press as part of his job, “so that was not a deal-breaker,” according to the report. She was “not convinced [he] provided false statements” during the inquiry ordered by Johnson.

Manes wondered whether the contractor “had been let go appropriately, or had been unjustifiably removed at the request of Bukele.” She said she was unable to answer that question “with the information provided to her,” according to the report.

Johnson commented about the matter this year during his Senate confirmation hearing. Questioned by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he defended himself but made no mention of Bukele’s role in the contractor’s departure.

“I was a little surprised when I heard that he had had an unauthorized meeting with a member of the press,” Johnson testified, “and I did what I think any manager would do at that point. I called in his department heads and I called in security and I said, ‘We need to investigate this and determine whether or not these accusations are true. And if they are true, I think we need to determine what kind of information might have been passed.’ And I deferred to his boss, really, as to what the final disposition should be in that case.”

The contractor’s removal led to a decline in U.S. embassy cooperation with Salvadoran anti-corruption prosecutors who were funded, trained and assisted by the State Department and other agencies, a former Salvadoran official told ProPublica.

“Nobody really replaced him,” the former law enforcement official said. “He was the most active of the Americans working with us.”

“El Salvador’s Battles”
Other events deepened concerns about whether Johnson was shielding Bukele and his allies from U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement.

Johnson made clear to embassy staff that the Trump administration’s top issue in El Salvador was cooperation on immigration. In 2018, Trump had accused the Salvadoran government of letting MS-13 “killers” return to the United States after their deportation.

“El Salvador just takes our money,” Trump had declared in a post on X.

After Bukele became president, the governments signed an agreement allowing the U.S. to send refugees seeking asylum to El Salvador to await the outcome of their cases there. The Bukele government also deployed more than 1,000 officers to the border with Guatemala to prevent the smuggling of U.S.-bound migrants. And Salvadoran authorities permitted the continued arrival of U.S. deportation flights during the pandemic.

As a result, Bukele’s standing at the White House increased. During the early days of COVID-19, Trump told Bukele in a phone call that the U.S. would donate hundreds of ventilators to El Salvador. Trump said on X, “They have worked well with us on immigration at the Southern Border!”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Bukele posted this photo with Johnson speaking to President Donald Trump in April 2020 about El Salvador’s request for help with ventilators during the pandemic.
    
            (Nayib Bukele via X)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Johnson seemed to show less interest in the Vulcan investigation, former U.S. officials said. “We are not here to fight El Salvador’s battles,” Johnson would tell embassy employees.

“His general demeanor was do not push things that upset Bukele — he is our No. 1 ally on migration,” a former U.S. official said.

One of Vulcan’s early accomplishments was the first use of terrorism charges against an MS-13 leader. The allegations against Armando Melgar Díaz, alias Blue, included kidnapping, drug trafficking and approving the murder of U.S. citizens. Trump even had a press conference to announce the indictment. Prosecutors sent the Bukele government an extradition request for Melgar, who was jailed in El Salvador at the time, according to Salvadoran court records.

In a post on X from his official embassy account, Johnson promised that Melgar was going to “face justice thanks to cooperation between authorities.”

Despite that pledge, months passed without progress. U.S. and Salvadoran officials worried that Johnson was not applying pressure on Bukele about a request that Vulcan investigators expected to be an “easy win.”

“Ron Johnson didn’t do much to extradite Blue,” said a former State Department official with knowledge of the embassy. The Bukele government eventually denied the request. U.S. law enforcement officials suspected that Melgar knew inside details about the secret gang pact. He is believed to remain in a Salvadoran prison.

Johnson was also not entirely forthcoming in communications back to Washington, D.C., according to the former official, who said embassy staff told him that the ambassador blocked information in diplomatic cables about the pact between Bukele and MS-13.

“It was pretty clear that Ronald Johnson was so close that he absolutely did protect Bukele from allegations that Bukele was negotiating with the gangs,” the former official said.

Ortiz, the former DHS attache, defended Johnson. “Ambassador Johnson wouldn’t shelter Bukele,” he said. As “a former CIA officer, he knew how to navigate where he was close to someone but not cover for them. His interest was the interest of the United States, and the U.S. had a great relationship with El Salvador.”

Critics said Johnson’s hands-off approach was evident in his response to the biggest political crisis of his tenure. In February 2020, the Salvadoran legislature resisted Bukele’s proposal to seek a $109 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration for new vehicles and equipment for the police and military. The president responded by calling a special session and flooding the assembly with armed troops.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Following orders from Bukele, Salvadoran army soldiers occupy the Legislative Assembly in February 2020.
    
            (Salvador Melendez/AP Images)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Many Salvadorans and human rights advocates were aghast at the sight of soldiers trying to pressure the lawmakers. It evoked Latin America’s bleak history of dictatorial rule. At the time, the U.S. Embassy denied any role.

“Neither Ambassador Johnson nor any Embassy official had prior knowledge of what was to happen,” the embassy said in a statement to El Faro after the incident.

During his Senate hearing this year, though, Johnson admitted that he had talked with Bukele just before he sent in the troops. Johnson testified that he privately urged the president to refrain from the military show of force.

“Something that few people know is that I was in contact with him moments before he made the decision, and I was telling him not to go. ‘Do not do this,’” he told lawmakers. He also testified that he had criticized Bukele in public.

For human rights advocates, Johnson’s reluctance to forcefully criticize Bukele at the time was a sign of his undue deference to the Salvadoran leader.

“Johnson was an ally of the president and not civil society, not the democratic forces in the country,” said Noah Bullock, the executive director of Cristosal, a leading human rights organization. “There was no distance between him and Bukele.”

Johnson’s term ended after only 17 months, when President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. Before Johnson left, Bukele created El Salvador’s highest honor and made the ambassador the first recipient of the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán.

“A great friend is leaving,” Bukele declared at the ambassador’s farewell ceremony.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Johnson receives the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán from Bukele before departing El Salvador in 2021.
    
            (Gobierno de El Salvador via YouTube)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Manes Returns
A little more than three months after Johnson’s departure, Bukele unleashed an assault on the judiciary. The Salvadoran legislature, dominated by the president’s ruling coalition, removed five Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. At least eight Salvadoran officials who had been investigating MS-13 and corruption, including some who had worked with Vulcan agents, fled the country after threats, harassment, and searches of their homes and offices.

Critics in El Salvador declared that the president had engineered a “self-coup.” Bukele began calling himself the “world’s coolest dictator.”

Newly installed Biden administration officials watched the crisis with alarm. Concerned that Bukele was turning El Salvador into an autocracy, they broke with Trump’s policy.

Soon after the purge of the judiciary, State Department officials announced they were sending Manes back to El Salvador as the interim chargé d’affaires, the term for a temporary ambassador. They directed her to stand up to Bukele, according to the inspector general’s report and interviews. Her superiors saw her as a natural choice because of her constructive relationship with Bukele during her term as ambassador.

“She was brought back as a message that we won’t have business as had been conducted,” said a former high-ranking State Department official.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Jean Manes, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, in her office in San Salvador on April 23, 2019.
    
            (Daniele Volpe/The New York Times)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
A top State Department official asked her to conduct an “assessment” of the embassy, including the contractor’s dismissal, according to the inspector general report and interviews. The official told her he had concerns “about the dynamics” at the embassy, the report said. Gonzalez, the former National Security Council official, said senior policymakers thought that embassy staff were showing favoritism to Bukele, sending reports that minimized the growing crisis of democracy in El Salvador.

Upon arriving at the embassy, Manes ran up against a group of senior staff, mostly law enforcement and intelligence officials who were not members of the Vulcan task force. She accused them of undercutting her leadership because of their loyalty to Johnson and rapport with Bukele, according to the report and interviews.

Manes laid out her findings about Johnson “loyalists” in a memo and other written communications, former officials said. To regain control, she issued a drastic order: Embassy personnel “were not to have communications with Bukele government officials,” the inspector general report said. In practice, that meant the staff stopped meeting with senior Salvadoran officials and had to get approval from Manes and her top deputies to engage with others, according to former senior embassy officials.

A former senior embassy official criticized Manes’ handling of the feud. “It got pretty ugly,” the official said in an interview. “She wanted to micromanage everything.”

One opponent was especially nettlesome: the CIA station chief. Early in his tenure as ambassador, Johnson had helped secure his appointment to head the CIA station, former officials said. Like Johnson, he had served as a military adviser in El Salvador years earlier. Also, like Johnson, the station chief had an unusually friendly relationship with Bukele. Manes learned that he was meeting with Bukele on a regular basis, often having breakfast with him. Bukele would also visit the station chief’s home, according to a former U.S. official.

“Former Ambassador Johnson and the section chief were close friends and were close to Bukele and members of Bukele’s government,” an embassy employee later told an investigator, according to the inspector general report.

Rather than support the new mission to confront Bukele over backsliding on human rights and democracy, the CIA officer defended the president, former U.S. officials said.

“He tried very hard to undermine the notion that Bukele was consolidating and centralizing power or acting to dismantle Salvadoran institutions,” said the former State Department official familiar with the embassy.

The interlocking friendships among Johnson, the station chief and Bukele led Biden administration officials to believe the former ambassador was influencing opposition to the new U.S. policy — though they did not have concrete proof, former officials said.

“We knew that Johnson and Bukele continued to talk,” Gonzalez said. “The suspicion was that Johnson played a role in the dissidence at the embassy opposing Manes and favoring Bukele.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            After he stepped down as ambassador to El Salvador, Johnson made numerous posts praising Bukele, including this one from August 2024.
    
            (Ronald Johnson on Linkedin)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Manes decided to demand that the CIA remove the station chief — an unusual move, but it was within her power to withdraw approval for anyone assigned to the embassy. A senior CIA official questioned the decision, but Manes’ superiors held firm. The station chief was transferred to another country and has since retired, former officials said.

The station chief filed a complaint with the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General, charging that Manes had unfairly dismissed him, among other allegations.

The resulting report cleared Manes of wrongdoing. The former station chief did not respond to a list of questions sent by ProPublica.

As the fight escalated within the embassy, Manes engaged in an increasingly open clash with Bukele. She criticized the replacement of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. She warned that the government was weakening democracy and human rights. And she called for the extraditions of Melgar and other MS-13 senior leaders indicted by the Vulcan task force.

“Extradition is something very important for the United States,” she told the press.

As ProPublica has previously reported, the Bukele administration systematically interfered with extradition efforts and has not sent to the U.S. any of the 27 MS-13 gang chiefs charged by Vulcan prosecutors in indictments in 2021 and 2023.

Top State Department officials traveled to El Salvador to urge Bukele to reverse course. USAID cut funding. Luna, Marroquin and other high-level Salvadoran officials were hit with State Department sanctions that blocked their travel to the U.S.

Bukele did not budge. On X, he blasted Manes for interfering with his country’s internal politics. He published a string of personal WhatsApp messages between them, accusing Manes of asking him to free a politician jailed on corruption charges.

In November 2021, Manes declared a “pause” in Washington’s relations with the Bukele administration and announced that she was leaving her post.

El Salvador and the U.S. had reached a diplomatic nadir. More than a year would pass before a new ambassador was named.

“It’s impossible to think that someone has an interest in our relationship when they’re using their paid media machine to attack the United States every day,” Manes told the press.

The Rehabilitation
A week after Manes’ departure, Johnson posted the image of himself posing with Bukele and their families in front of a Christmas tree.

“It was great to spend some time in our Miami home with El Salvadoran President Bukele,” Johnson wrote on a photo he posted to his LinkedIn account.

On Christmas Eve, Johnson posted holiday wishes to Bukele and his family. The Salvadoran president responded with a jab at Manes and the Biden administration: “Those were the times when ambassadors were sent to strengthen relations between nations.”

The exchange was an early salvo in a campaign not just to rehabilitate Bukele’s reputation in the United States but to make him a MAGA icon. Johnson helped lead this effort, which involved legislators and lobbyists working in Washington, Florida and El Salvador.

It occurred as the Biden administration stepped up its confrontation with the Salvadoran president. In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued more sanctions against Luna and Marroquin, alleging that the Bukele aides negotiated the secret agreement with the MS-13 gang. They also accused Luna and the president’s chief of staff of corruption. Neither responded to requests for comment.

In a criminal indictment, Vulcan prosecutors detailed alleged wrongdoing by senior Bukele officials and the gang’s promise to turn out support for the president’s party in exchange for financial benefits and protection.

In March 2022, for reasons that still remain unclear, the truce between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 fell apart. During a three-day rampage of gang violence, some 80 people died — the deadliest days in El Salvador since its civil war. Bukele struck back with a policy of mano dura — an iron fist. He suspended constitutional protections and rounded up accused gang members without due process. The security forces arrested 70,000 people over the next several years, locking up many of them in CECOT, the maximum-security prison.

The crackdown made Bukele enormously popular in El Salvador. But senior Biden administration officials saw it as a further step toward the dismantling of the nation’s constitutional democracy. Even some in the GOP had misgivings. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who was influential on Latin American issues, expressed ambivalence about Bukele’s actions.

“I’m not a big fan of everything that’s been done out there,” he said during a Senate hearing in 2022. “I’m hoping that we can still have a relationship in El Salvador that’s pragmatic. We don&#039;t have to clap or celebrate all the stuff people do that we don’t necessarily think is good. But I also think we have a national interest concern there that needs to be balanced.”

By then, Johnson and others were already deeply engaged in promoting Bukele. Johnson praised the president’s campaign advising Salvadorans on how to stay healthy during COVID-19. At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, he met with El Salvador’s ambassador to the U.S., former beauty queen Milena Mayorga. He continued posting about his visits with Bukele and his family.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Damian Merlo, a lobbyist for Bukele, posted this photo of himself and Johnson at Mar-a-Lago in November 2024.
    
            (Damian Merlo on X)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Bukele enlisted Damian Merlo, a well-known lobbyist for Latin American countries and leaders, eventually paying his firm more than $2 million, according to lobbying records. Merlo set up meetings with Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, contacted State Department officials, and spoke to reporters at The New York Times, Fox News and other outlets, lobbying records show. Bukele appeared on “Tucker Carlson Today.” Time magazine featured him on its cover, calling him “the world’s most popular authoritarian.” He spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of the country’s most influential conservative politicians. Johnson attended, posting afterwards that Bukele had delivered “an incredible speech.”

“Johnson’s credibility and Merlo’s instincts helped Bukele connect with MAGA world,” said Shannon, the former diplomat and lobbyist. Merlo did not respond to a detailed set of questions from ProPublica.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            First image: Johnson at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2024 with his wife and Bukele. Second image: Johnson posted that it was a “wonderful surprise to spend some time with President Nayib Bukele and the 1st family of El Salvador,” in August 2024.
    
            (Ronald Johnson on LinkedIn)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
A turning point came in March 2023, when Rubio paid an official visit to El Salvador. Whatever uncertainty he may have had about the Salvadoran leader vanished after his return. Rubio lauded Bukele and mocked the Biden administration’s attempts to pressure him.

“All of a sudden, the crime rate has plummeted. All of sudden, the murder rate has plummeted. All of a sudden, for the first time in decades, people can go out at night,” Rubio said in a video posted online. “So how has the Biden administration reacted to this? By badmouthing the guy, by sanctioning people in the government, by going after them because they’re being too tough and too harsh.”

Johnson hailed Rubio’s newfound admiration.

“I want to thank my friend, Senator Marco Rubio, for going there to visit and for recognizing the progress made by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

In September 2022, Bukele announced his candidacy for reelection. The Salvadoran constitution had limited presidents to a single five-year term, but the Supreme Court, packed with Bukele allies, had allowed him to run again. The decision set off a new round of protests.

Johnson defended the reelection bid during a fireside chat at a conference at Florida International University, where he applauded El Salvador’s progress on security.

“In some recent discussions that I had with people in Washington, D.C., we talked about a second term for President Bukele,” Johnson said. “I said, ‘I think we’re focused on the wrong things. If he runs for a second term in a free and fair election and the people of El Salvador select him for a second term, then isn’t that we do here?’”

Bukele won with 85% of the vote.

The guest list for Bukele’s inauguration on June 1, 2024, illustrated his growing popularity with Republicans. Conservative luminaries including Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Carlson showed up. So did Democratic Reps. Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Lou Correa of California. Also in attendance were Johnson and the former CIA station chief.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            Johnson posted these photos of him with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle at events related to Bukele’s second inauguration in June 2024.
    
            (Ronald Johnson on LinkedIn)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
Afterward, Johnson and Merlo helped arrange a private meeting with Bukele for Sara A. Carter, a former Fox news contributor whom Trump has since nominated to serve as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In a video podcast, Carter recounted a late-night meal of sushi with the Salvadoran president.

“We had the opportunity to meet with Bukele privately, our group, and I want to thank Ambassador Ron Johnson for that and Damian Merlo for that, for making that happen,” she said.

Epilogue
This April, Trump and Bukele met to celebrate a partnership.

“It’s an honor to be here in the Oval Office with the president and leader of the free world,” the Salvadoran president said as they shook hands. “We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem that you need help with, and we’re a small country, but if we can help, we will do it.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Bukele meets with Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials at the White House in April.
    
            (American Photo Archive/Alamy)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Rubio, now secretary of state, and Bukele had reached an agreement in which the Trump administration would send more than 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants to be detained in CECOT. (The Venezuelans were returned to their country in July.)

Bukele’s administration asked for the return to El Salvador of some of the MS-13 gang leaders who had been arrested in Mexico and imprisoned in the United States. The federal prosecutors who had worked to bring the bosses to justice asked a judge to release two of them. Former Vulcan investigators said they believe both have information tying Bukele aides to the gang pact.

A few days before Bukele’s Oval Office meeting with Trump, the Senate approved Johnson on a party-line 49-46 vote as the ambassador to Mexico. He stepped into the job at a time when the Trump administration’s hardline policies — notably the prospect of unleashing U.S. military might against drug cartels — have strained the always complex relationship with Mexico.

“I’m eager to meet Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and ready to work with her administration on issues that are mutually beneficial to both our nations,” Johnson wrote on social media.

Manes’ career has not fared as well. In 2023, the Biden administration nominated her as ambassador to Colombia, one of the top diplomatic posts in Latin America. She seemed a strong candidate until Rubio and other Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced their opposition. Sen. James E. Risch of Idaho cited the inspector general investigation of Manes’ conflict with the station chief as a reason.

“Staff on our side has received complaints about Ms. Manes’ leadership ability, interagency management style and judgment while serving as ambassador in charge in El Salvador,” Risch said at a hearing.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Manes’ defenders pointed out she had been cleared by the internal inquiry and was implementing a policy dictated from Washington.

“She was following a policy that was clearly the guidance of the administration,” a former senior State Department official said in an interview. “It has become very difficult for career officers when their loyal service is seen in the political arena as unacceptable. It’s ironic, given her political views.”

Instead, Manes was named the U.S. representative to UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization in Paris that promotes science and the arts.

This July, Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw its participation in the organization.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/Johnson-Bukele-Social.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2025 04:43:26 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>American, Friend:, The, Trump-Appointed, Diplomat, Accused, Shielding, Salvador’s, President, From, Law, Enforcement</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Millions Could Lose Housing Aid Under Trump Plan</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/millions-could-lose-housing-aid-under-trump-plan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/millions-could-lose-housing-aid-under-trump-plan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Jesse Coburn                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Some 4 million people could lose federal housing assistance under new plans from the Trump administration, according to experts who reviewed drafts of two unpublished rules obtained by ProPublica. The rules would pave the way for a host of restrictions long sought by conservatives, including time limits on living in public housing, work requirements for many people receiving federal housing assistance and the stripping of aid from entire families if one member of the household is in the country illegally.

The first Trump administration tried and failed to implement similar policies, and renewed efforts have been in the works since early in the president’s second term. Now, the documents obtained by ProPublica lay out how the administration intends to overhaul major housing programs that serve some of the nation’s poorest residents, with sweeping reforms that experts and advocates warn will weaken the social safety net amid historically high rents, home prices and homelessness.

“These are rules that are going to cause an enormous amount of hardship for millions of people in communities across the country,” said Will Fischer, director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s going to cause people to become homeless, kids to be pulled out of their schools, people to lose their jobs.”
        
    
                    
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which drafted the rules, declined to comment.

The two rules obtained by ProPublica are labeled as drafts and could change before they are officially proposed. At a meeting at HUD headquarters this month, Ben Hobbs, who heads the agency’s public housing office, said the rules were under review at the Office of Management and Budget, according to a HUD official in attendance. (OMB typically reviews proposed rules for compliance with federal standards and consistency with the president’s policies.)

The push to adopt the rules is part of a broad effort to roll back federal housing programs under the current administration. Trump’s budget proposal called for cutting funding for public housing, housing vouchers and other rental assistance by 43%. In March, HUD and the Department of Homeland Security announced a data-sharing agreement targeting so-called mixed-status families, in which some family members are eligible for housing assistance and others are not because they are in the country illegally or have another immigration status that makes them ineligible. More recently, HUD reportedly planned to require all local public housing authorities to identify such families to the federal agency.

Work requirements impart a “renewed sense of purpose for millions of Americans,” in the view of HUD Secretary Scott Turner. Calling welfare a “lifelong trap of dependency” for many, Turner and other senior Trump officials wrote in a joint op-ed, “for able-bodied adults, welfare should be a short-term hand-up, not a lifetime handout.”

Federal housing assistance programs support more than 8 million people by providing units in public housing or subsidies that help cover the cost of rentals on the private market. Under these programs, participants pay a percentage of the rent — generally 30% of their adjusted income — and the government covers the rest. Most of those assisted are elderly, disabled or children. The average family that lives in public housing or receives housing vouchers makes less than $20,000 annually and receives benefits for 10 to 12 years, although non-elderly, non-disabled families typically stay far shorter, according to HUD data.

The first rule would not mandate work requirements and time limits; instead, it permits local housing authorities and landlords to implement them. Hobbs originally wanted the rule to require those policies, but career staffers at HUD persuaded him to make them voluntary, according to a HUD official familiar with the matter. The rule would allow local housing authorities and private landlords to impose work requirements and time limits in four major federal housing programs: public housing, Housing Choice Vouchers, Project-Based Vouchers and Project-Based Rental Assistance (the latter three are part of what is commonly called Section 8). Residents, including both parents in two-parent households, could be required to work up to 40 hours a week. The time limits could be as short as two years, after which residents would lose assistance.

The time limits would apply to any family in which the household heads are not elderly or disabled, with few exceptions. Similarly, the work requirements would apply to residents ages 18 to 61 who are not disabled, pregnant, primary caretakers of young children, college students or in other exempted categories. Housing providers may allow them to perform job training or community service instead of traditional work. Housing providers implementing work requirements would have to offer support services to residents, but what those services are would be up to the providers. HUD expects 750 public housing authorities and 3,500 landlords to implement work requirements or term limits in response to the new rule. Such provisions will likely be adopted first in more conservative parts of the country, Fischer said.

The new regulation asserts that it will promote economic self-sufficiency and free up subsidized housing for millions of people who qualify for assistance but cannot receive it because of the limited amount of housing aid that the government provides.

Housing advocates and researchers expressed a different view. “It’s disguised as work requirements and term limits, but in reality it’s a way to strip families of their benefits,” said Deborah Thrope, deputy director of the National Housing Law Project, an advocacy group. “This is a huge departure from how the HUD programs have been run since their inception.”

Some 4 million people could lose housing assistance, estimated Fischer, Thrope and Katherine O’Regan, a former HUD official and now a professor at New York University. Many of those people could become homeless as a result.

Fischer noted that most non-elderly, non-disabled households receiving assistance already include one or more people who work. But their jobs often come with limited hours and pay, so even working families could lose their assistance as a result of the rule.

There is little evidence that work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency among recipients of housing assistance, according to researchers at NYU. Studies of other welfare policies such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have largely found that work requirements do not notably increase employment but do cause people to lose assistance.

The second proposed rule targets mixed-status households. Under long-standing HUD regulations, such families are permitted to live in public housing or receive vouchers, but their benefits are prorated so that the ineligible members receive no assistance and the family pays a greater share of the rent. The proposed rule would change that by making mixed-status families ineligible for assistance, with few exceptions. It would also require U.S. citizens applying for or currently receiving housing assistance to provide documents proving their citizenship, such as birth or naturalization certificates. The authors of the rule argue that it would bring HUD regulations into “greater alignment” with federal law.

The rule could affect 20,000 mixed-status families that receive housing assistance, according to a HUD analysis of the rule obtained by ProPublica; 16,000 of those families include children. They live mainly in California, Texas and New York; the average income of a mixed family of four is below the federal poverty line of $32,000.

The rule would allow the families to keep their assistance if the ineligible member moves out. But, as most of them are families with children, HUD expects virtually all of them to give up assistance out of “fear of the family being separated,” the analysis reads.

HUD’s analysis anticipates that public housing units may initially be left vacant as a result of the proposed rule. Because the regulations would kick out households receiving prorated assistance and replace them with fully eligible households, it will increase the government’s rental assistance costs by up to $370 million each year, according to the analysis. But HUD will not initially increase funding to the local public housing authorities that distribute assistance, so those authorities may have to offer fewer vouchers or leave units unoccupied, HUD expects.

The requirement that residents and applicants prove their citizenship — and that housing providers verify it — could create $100 million in new costs, HUD expects. This new obligation will be especially difficult for homeless and low-income people to fulfill even if they are eligible for assistance, said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It is very likely that people who need assistance the most are not going to be able to receive it because of these additional documentation barriers,” she said.

The first Trump administration proposed a similar rule in 2019 but then received more than 30,000 comments in response, the vast majority in opposition. HUD ultimately did not complete the adoption process before Trump left office. The administration of President Joe Biden withdrew that rule proposal in 2021.

When, or if, HUD publishes the proposed rules, they would then be subject to public comments, which the agency must consider before adopting them — a process that can take months or years. The HUD spokesperson did not respond to questions about when the agency expects to publish and adopt the rules. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/HUD-Cuts-OG.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 16:19:42 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Millions, Could, Lose, Housing, Aid, Under, Trump, Plan</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Arduous and Unequal: The Fight to Get FEMA Housing Assistance After Helene</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/arduous-and-unequal-the-fight-to-get-fema-housing-assistance-after-helene</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/arduous-and-unequal-the-fight-to-get-fema-housing-assistance-after-helene</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica, and Ren Larson, The Assembly                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
Slogging through a thick slop of mud and rock, Brian Hill passed the roof that Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters had just ripped off someone’s barn and dumped into his yard. Then he peered into the unrecognizable chaos inside what had been his family’s dream home. 

The century-old white farmhouse, surrounded by the rugged peaks of western North Carolina, sat less than 15 yards from the normally tranquil Cattail Creek. As Helene’s rainfall barrelled down the Black Mountains last September, the creek swelled into a raging river that encircled the house. Its waves pounded the walls, tore off doors, smashed windows and devoured the front and back porches. 

Brian and his wife, Susie, had just bought the house a year earlier. They had a 30-year mortgage — and, now, no house to live in. Because their home didn’t sit in the 100-year floodplain, they had not purchased flood insurance.

Across Helene’s devastating path through the Southeast, people like the Hills turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA doles out financial help after a major disaster for everything from home repairs to rental assistance. Once she could get a cell signal, Susie applied.

It took months of persistence, but eventually the Hills were among the lucky ones. They received close to $40,000, just shy of the maximum amount FEMA provides for rebuilding and repairs.

But farther up Cattail Creek, a man whose wife was killed in floodwaters said he checked his FEMA application one day and noticed it was marked “withdrawn,” a surprise since he’d received no explanation. Elsewhere in Yancey, another man said he realized FEMA had denied him aid because his birthdate was a year off on his application. A third man said his application — which he filled out just days after hiking down a mountain severely injured — seemingly vanished from the system.
        
    
                    
FEMA’s application process can be onerous, particularly for people who’ve lost their homes. And it can be especially daunting for those with lower incomes who may have fewer resources.

An analysis by ProPublica and The Assembly found that among the more rural counties hardest hit by Helene, the households that got the most housing assistance tended to have the highest incomes. The income disparity is especially stark in Yancey County, where the Hills live.
        
    
                    

    
            In North Carolina’s Hardest-Hit Rural Counties, the Highest-Income Homeowners Typically Received the Most FEMA Housing Assistance
        

                        
                    
                

            Notes: Applicant income is self-reported to FEMA. Charts depict the median amount of assistance. The hardest-hit counties are the 10 counties with the highest per-capita rates of homeowners receiving housing assistance. The more rural counties are Ashe, Avery, Haywood, Henderson, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Watauga and Yancey. The chart does not include Buncombe County, which is classified as urban, is the area’s most densely populated county, and is home to many regional and local nonprofits that assisted with FEMA applications and appeals.
    
            (Chart: Ren Larson, The Assembly. Sources: Federal Emergency Management Agency Individuals and Households Program, U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Classifications.)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
A ProPublica investigation earlier this year found that despite dire warnings from the National Weather Service, many people in Yancey were unaware of the enormity of danger Helene posed. The storm killed 11 people there, the highest per-capita loss of life for any county in North Carolina. 

The Hills, who are both public school teachers, do not fall in the highest-income brackets FEMA identified. Households in the middle range tended to get about as much FEMA housing assistance money as the lower-income ones, or even a little less. But experts say the Hills did have something in common with the highest-income households: They had the luxury of time to pursue every dollar of federal aid that they were qualified to receive. That’s because they received full pay for seven weeks while schools were closed. That allowed them to navigate FEMA’s bureaucracy during a crucial time when, for many others, pursuing the aid felt insurmountable.

Our analysis looked at counties with the highest per-capita rate of households receiving FEMA aid for housing assistance, an indicator of where Helene hit people the hardest. Housing assistance includes separate buckets of money that cover both rental assistance and home repairs and rebuilding. Apart from Buncombe County — home to Asheville and by far the most urban county in the region — lower- and middle-income households overall got lower amounts of this aid compared to the highest-income earners.

In some counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much housing assistance as those with lower incomes. 

Yet income isn’t supposed to play a role. FEMA aid for home repairs and rebuilding is intended to help begin replacing a primary home or make it safe and habitable again, not restore one to its prior state. In theory, a couple living in a million-dollar home and another in a starter house should be eligible for the same level of assistance. For instance, couples who live alone generally would qualify for aid to cover one bedroom, one bathroom and one refrigerator, even if they had three of each.
        
    
                    
FEMA did not respond to ProPublica and The Assembly’s requests for comment. The agency previously told the Government Accountability Office, according to a 2020 report, that it encourages all survivors with property damage to apply, and those with minimal damage are “driving down the average award amount.”

Disparities in who receives FEMA aid have long been known to researchers, including Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies and writes about disasters and publishes the Disaster Dollar Database. 

“Disasters pull back the curtain on inequity,” Labowitz said. “It’s a vicious combination of things that make it so much harder for people without a lot of money to get what they need from FEMA.” She pointed to FEMA inspectors who undervalue damage to more modest homes, FEMA’s onerous documentation requirements and a “brutal and discouraging” appeals process.

The agency itself has also known about the problems. Several years ago, NPR obtained an internal FEMA analysis showing that the poorest homeowners received about half as much to rebuild their homes compared with higher-income homeowners. The 2020 GAO report noted that homeowners in communities with the most socioeconomic vulnerabilities, like being below the poverty line and not having a high school diploma, received significantly less assistance than those in less vulnerable communities.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            The Hills’ home was destroyed outside, first image, and inside, second image.
    
            (Courtesy of the Hills)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
The disparity we found in Yancey was equally striking in Haywood County, where water flows down 13 peaks towering above 6,000 feet. Households there making more than $175,000 typically received $11,000 in housing assistance; households below that threshold received about $5,000. 

Michelle and Jeff Parker, who live about 70 miles southwest of the Hills, in Haywood, had evacuated during the storm. Like the Hills, they returned to find their house had been filled with water. They too had lost virtually everything, down to their wedding photographs.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Michelle Parker has struggled to get FEMA to cover her rent after her home was flooded by Helene.
    
            (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
But the Parkers had been here before. In 2023, they finished repairing their 936-square-foot home after Tropical Storm Fred’s floodwaters filled it with 4 feet of water in 2021. That time, their house had been rebuilt by a state-run program. They received $50,000 from their flood insurance and just $1,644 from FEMA for rental assistance.

When Helene hit just a year after they got back into their home, they decided the risk of rebuilding was too great. Jeff, a former wastewater treatment plant operator, was on disability. Michelle was working as a medical assistant and could take only a couple of weeks off after Helene. They applied for a hazard mitigation buyout, another program offered through FEMA, instead. It would pay them the property’s appraised value before the storm and turn it into green space.

But that process could take years, and their home was unlivable. They figured they would at least get rental assistance from FEMA in the meantime. 

The couples’ situations diverged in important ways, and they applied for different pots of FEMA housing assistance. But their journeys underscore how disaster survivors with varying resources are able to navigate FEMA’s application process. 

Susie and Michelle spent hours plodding through FEMA’s online system, uploading documents, deciphering bureaucratic letters and making myriad phone calls to the agency. 

After weeks of pestering FEMA, the Hills received just under the maximum $42,500 for home repair and rebuild assistance for damage to things like the home’s walls, windows and doors, plus about $9,000 from other FEMA aid programs. The money played a critical role in helping them start rebuilding.

The Parkers received $2,210 for the first two months of rental assistance to help pay for temporary housing. Michelle continued to nag FEMA for months seeking longer-term help; the agency will pay rental assistance for up to 18 months, which could translate to an additional $7,500. 

Then Jeff died from cardiac arrest in June at age 56. Michelle felt like she was operating in a fog. She couldn’t handle another stressor. 

So when FEMA’s call wait times soared to two to three hours after the deadly Texas floods on July 4, she gave up on pursuing additional rental assistance from FEMA. 

“I got tired of calling,” she said.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            First image: Michelle’s husband, Jeff, with their Chihuahuas, Cloey and Sweet Pea. Second image: Inside Michelle’s camper.
    
            (First image: Courtesy of Michelle Parker. Second image: Jesse Barber for ProPublica.)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Michelle’s memorial to her husband and their Chihuahua, Sweet Pea, includes a stuffed animal that plays a recording of Jeff’s voice, a box with the Corvette emblem containing Jeff’s ashes and a box with Sweet Pea’s ashes.
    
            (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
The Daunting Process
After disasters strike, households with lower incomes can face major challenges, beginning with the early steps of the rebuilding process, which include finding temporary housing and transportation. Some residents lack reliable internet access or cell service. They have less money to pay professionals for estimates or attorneys for advice. Throw in the added hurdles of rugged topography, and western North Carolina posed particular challenges to those faced with rebuilding after Helene.

Alicia Edwards, who directs the Disaster Relief Project for Legal Aid of North Carolina, said she wasn’t surprised by our analysis, which found that in six of the 10 counties most impacted by Helene, the lowest-income households got less in FEMA’s housing assistance than those at the highest income level. 

“People with lower incomes are at a huge disadvantage,” Edwards said. 

The application process can be onerous and overwhelming, particularly for people who just survived raging floodwaters and the destruction of their homes and communities. And it can feel downright impossible to navigate for those with less money or other resources.

In Buncombe County, our analysis found the opposite trend. The lowest-income families there typically received more housing assistance than those with higher incomes. It’s also where residents tend to have better access to resources, as many regional nonprofits are based there. Pisgah Legal Services has had an office in Asheville for decades. 

Several of the counties with pronounced income disparities are among the most rural counties heavily impacted by Helene. Yancey, Mitchell and Polk all have populations under 21,000. 

The region also is home to both higher-income retirees, who can have more free time and more experience navigating complicated finances, and lower-income multigenerational families. In more rural areas, many of the latter tend to distrust the federal government and are reluctant to pursue assistance, said Morgan Monshaugen, disaster recovery program director with the Housing Assistance Corp., a nonprofit that serves Henderson, Polk and Transylvania counties.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            A vacant apartment complex, first image, and a mobile home park, second image, in Haywood County, North Carolina, that were damaged by Helene.
    
            (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
The month before Helene struck, Tulane University researchers released a literature review of 25 years of research on barriers to equitable disaster recovery. They noted common themes, including the confusing aid process and challenges navigating bureaucracies. They also pointed to research that shows inspectors’ biases and time pressures can play a role. 

Before 2020, inspectors would go through a long checklist of items that could qualify for repair or replacement money. Someone with more things could therefore get more aid. 

After FEMA changed that system, inspectors now record notes about standardized factors such as roof damage and the height of flood marks inside. The amount of damage puts a household into one of several levels, each of which determines how much and what type of repair and rebuild assistance it can get. Some households get additional money for things like heating, venting and air conditioning or septic systems. 

“It shouldn’t have to do with anything other than what was damaged and what was repaired,” Edwards said. But she worries biases can still creep in. “If they feel you are a credible person, they could give you a little more assistance, even subconsciously,” she said.

The agency’s decisions come in the form of mailed letters, each regarding a different pot of money. Some letters might have a dollar amount granted. Others might announce denials. It isn’t always obvious that survivors can appeal — an even more arduous process for many. 

“It makes it impossibly hard for people to navigate,” Edwards said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Four months after Helene hit western North Carolina, debris still remained in Yancey County.
    
            (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Hills of Challenge
Susie Hill knew her family would need every dollar they could get to rebuild. So she filled out a FEMA application online and talked to someone at the agency by phone. 

Slowly, aid from FEMA started arriving in their bank account — $3,514 first, a set amount for people displaced, then an initial $13,687 for home repair. In October, it reached about $22,000, roughly half of the $42,500 maximum in 2024 for home repair and replacement. 

Then the money stopped. 

As hope for more aid began to fizzle, Susie pestered FEMA. “I was anxious about getting lost in the mix of so many people across the region in need,” she said. The Hills’ application was one of nearly 1.5 million that FEMA received across the six-state region devastated by Helene. 

The Hills got more estimates, uploaded more documents. They set up a GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $53,000. And finally, in late November, they came close to reaching the maximum $42,500 payout from FEMA for home repairs, along with smaller amounts from the agency’s other aid buckets.

“Unfortunately,” Susie said, “I think it is a bit of a socioeconomic situation where we have jobs, where we know people that know people, that maybe have money or that are able to help us, or that have the skills to help us, where other people are just trying to make it day to day.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Susie Hill
    
            (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Yancey is home to the most families per capita — about 175, or roughly 1 in 36 homeowners — who got the top amount of FEMA home rebuild and repair assistance. Our analysis of more than 75,000 North Carolina homeowners who applied for the assistance in the counties hardest hit by Helene found roughly 1,300 homeowners, or just 1.7%, received the maximum payout. 

The Hills had decided to relocate their historic house to a spot on their property farther back from the creek. The FEMA money would cover most of that cost, a critical first step toward gutting it and rebuilding.  

On an icy cold day in mid-January, house movers put I-beams underneath the water-damaged structure and used hydraulic lifts to raise it. Then, they hauled it to safer ground.

A family in Tennessee donated a camper for the Hills to live in. After three months of bouncing around, they parked it near the shell of their house. Standing at the front door, to the right, they could see the vast destruction along Cattail Creek. To the left, they could watch their home slowly come back to life.

Susie had to wash their clothes at the elementary school where she works. For other things, they used water carried from a neighbor’s well. Brian had to haul the contents of the toilet to the septic tank. But it was a home.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Cattail Creek, now calm, flooded during Helene and destroyed the Hills’ home.
    
            (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
An hour’s drive away, the Parkers had sought refuge during the storm at Michelle’s mother’s house. Jeff had fractured his ankle two months before the storm and used a wheelchair. They weren’t taking chances after fleeing their home under darkness — Michelle carrying their two Chihuahuas, one under each arm — when Tropical Storm Fred hit three years earlier. 

When they returned home after Helene, their shed was gone. Instead, other people’s structures lay in their yard. Inside, the contents looked like everything had been spun around. Their refrigerator lay on its side. The washing machine sat wedged on top of the dryer. 

“It ruined everything — everything,” Michelle said. “I was ready to just die right there. I was like, I can’t go through this again.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

    

        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            First and second images: Michelle’s home shows signs of destruction from Helene almost a year later. Third image: A vacant house near Michelle’s home.
    
            (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
A friend set up a GoFundMe, which raised $1,875. The Parkers’ flood insurance paid out $80,000, far below the $209,000 the home had been appraised for a year before. Michelle remembers FEMA offering a free hotel, more than 60 miles away in Tennessee, a distance made farther as Helene’s waters took out parts of Interstate 40. Michelle and Jeff were grateful to receive a donated camper to live in. But their property still had no water or electricity, and they had to rent a place to park it.

The rent for that gravel parking space is $900 a month. Donors paid half, but Michelle has to come up with the rest. 

Michelle turned to FEMA. She requested more rental assistance and uploaded an employer letter, a rental agreement, utility bills and a rent receipt. She called FEMA repeatedly.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Michelle and her friend Krista Shalda outside Michelle’s camper. Michelle has struggled to pay the rent for the lot where the camper is parked.
    
            (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“They Are All Gone”
FEMA has faced years of criticism from people applying for assistance. Chief among their complaints: inconsistent payouts, the onerous application process, incomprehensible communication and confusing rules.

Jeremiah Isom lost his home and work tools in the Yancey County floodwaters and has since been living here and there. He’s struggled to find a job and has grappled with a FEMA application, complicated by deaths in his family and property ownership issues. It doesn’t help that he’s reluctant to ask for help, much less aggressively seek it from the federal government. Just plowing through each day is hard enough.

“Everyone is so eaten up with PTSD,” Isom said. “It’s got your head so scrambled.”

FEMA has been working on improving its application process. From 2021 to 2024, it announced changes aimed at improving access and equity, including making home repair money available to underinsured households. Another change cut an onerous rule requiring applicants to first apply for a U.S. Small Business Administration loan, which approved less than 4% of all applicants from 2016 to 2018.   

Before President Donald Trump took office in January, FEMA also had spent more than a year hiring a team of engineers, designers and product managers to help modernize the online application process. They faced a key challenge: The back-end system that runs much of the process at disasterassistance.gov is 27 years old. 

A key problem is that when survivors check their application status, they often see simply that it’s pending. They get no indication of where the application is in the process or why. The FEMA team was working to change that.

Michael Coen, the agency’s chief of staff when the team was formed, noted that people are used to going on Amazon and getting updates about when their order is out for delivery and when it’s about to arrive. Coen said survivors wonder, “Why can’t FEMA do that?”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Volunteers cut firewood in Swannanoa, North Carolina, four months after Helene hit the region.
    
            (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Yet since the Trump administration began slashing the agency’s workforce, the team focusing on improvements to the online application process has disintegrated. In January, the team had at least 10 people. Now, it’s down to two. The rest took the deferred resignation offer or were pushed from their posts, current and former FEMA employees told ProPublica and The Assembly. 

“They all are gone,” said Alexandra Ferčak, who until May was chief of service delivery enhancement, part of a relatively new office at FEMA. Her team worked closely with the digital team. “We had so much knowledge and expertise, it was unprecedented,” she said. 

Without that in-house expertise, major changes are “not going to be effective,” said a FEMA employee who worked with the team but asked not to be named out of fear of retribution. 

FEMA did not respond to questions about the team. But in late August, more than 180 current and former FEMA employees signed a public letter to Congress warning that cuts to the agency’s full-time staff risk kneecapping its disaster response capabilities. 

In response, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, said she is working hard to “streamline this bloated organization into a tool that actually benefits Americans in crisis.” The agency then suspended most who had signed their names to the letter.

One Year Later
The Hills had their house moved back from Cattail Creek and temporarily propped up until they could get a new foundation laid. But the foundation work depended on the weather, which was varying degrees of terrible all winter. 

Heavy rain triggered flashbacks to Helene, and in February it poured. But one Sunday morning, the Hills turned on the gas fireplace in their camper as the temperatures plummeted and the gray rain turned to snowflakes. Despite the gloom outside, they were gleeful. 

A retired contractor from Texas volunteering his skills had become the guiding force in their rebuilding. Volunteers from other states also showed up to help. A group from a church in Georgia who work in construction had just visited. They asked what the Hills wanted in their house. 

The Hills mostly wanted to add a bathroom so that their daughter, Lucy, who was 9 at the time, would have her own. The men would try to add one. When they left, the Hills went out to dinner using a gift card and declared it the best day ever, or at least something that had been hard to come by since the storm: a great day.

A few months later, a feeling of hope spread across western North Carolina as the dogwoods and redbuds bloomed in puffs of purple and white. Dandelions dotted patches of grass amid the persistent brown muck of mud and fallen trees. Friends and volunteers became fixtures at the Hills’ house. They depended on so much kindness from people. Brian spent every spare minute working on repairs as well.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            
                    
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            With help from FEMA and their community, the Hills are rebuilding their home. Signs of normalcy have slowly returned, including a neighbor’s horses coming by to graze.
    
            (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Without that initial FEMA money, the Hills’ wrecked house might still be sitting in the moonscape of mud and destruction that persists along Cattail Creek. Instead, as summer waned, the house had electricity, siding, floors, insulation, drywall — and a bathroom for Lucy. 

On this one-year anniversary of Helene’s destruction, the Hills expect to move back in any day. Thousands of others aren’t even close.

Michelle now lives alone in the camper. For the past year, donors have been paying half the rent for the lot where she parks the camper. In November, that assistance will come to an end. Michelle has a job working with autistic children but cannot afford the $900 a month on her own.

“It’s just a gravel spot,” she said. 

Like the Hills, Michelle credits friends and nonprofits for getting her through the last year. “They just swarmed in and started helping — and lots of them,” she said.
        
    
                            
    
                    
In the spring, Mountain Projects, a local nonprofit that provided the camper, offered her a discounted modular home and a plot of land. Other nonprofits like United Way and Salvation Army have offered to help cover some of the home’s expenses, but Michelle still must come up with $81,000 not yet covered by her insurance or donations.  

The buyout program she applied for would pay her the fair market value of her home before the storm, minus her insurance payout. But if she is approved, it could be years before she sees that money. “I’m worried,” she said.

She and Jeff were preapproved for a mortgage loan, but without his income, she isn’t sure she will still qualify. Michelle is thankful for so much help. But a year after Helene, moving into a permanent home feels more unreachable than ever.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            The home offered to Michelle by Mountain Projects
    
            (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
             

                                    
        
                        ProPublica and The Assembly know recovery in western North Carolina is far from over, and so is our reporting. If you have applied or thought about applying to the state housing recovery program, RenewNC, fill out this form. You can reach us with questions or other stories at helenetips@propublica.org.

        

    


                                    
        
                        Mollie Simon contributed research, and Nadia Sussman and Cassandra Garibay contributed reporting.

        

    
          
                
            Correction
            Sept. 27, 2025: A video with this story originally misidentified the subject Brian Hill teaches. Hill teaches high school math, not history. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:19:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Arduous, and, Unequal:, The, Fight, Get, FEMA, Housing, Assistance, After, Helene</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>This Family Will Return Home After Helene. Their Onerous Journey to Rebuild Shows Why Many Others Won’t.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/this-family-will-return-home-after-helene-their-onerous-journey-to-rebuild-shows-why-many-others-wont</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/this-family-will-return-home-after-helene-their-onerous-journey-to-rebuild-shows-why-many-others-wont</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Nadia Sussman                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
When Brian and Susie Hill bought a historic house on Cattail Creek in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 2023, they planned to stay forever. Their daughter, Lucy, would chase fireflies in the evenings across their wide expanse of grass.

“It’s that feeling that you always wanted of going home,” Susie said. “Your little family and your little dog and your big yard and the chickens.”

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene upended their lives. After days of rain that saturated the mountains, Helene arrived, turning little streams into raging rivers hundreds of miles inland. The swollen Cattail Creek churned through the Hills’ home, leaving logs in place of furniture and taking porches, doors, windows, appliances and parts of the floor with it.

The Hills watched it all, huddled in their truck parked up a gentle slope. When the water receded, they found the house was uninhabitable.

Suddenly displaced, the Hills began the arduous process of seeking disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The almost $40,000 in federal aid they received allowed them to take critical first steps toward rebuilding. It wasn’t nearly enough money to complete the enormous project. The rest would have to come from their own efforts and an outpouring of community support. Yet it was more than most others in their community managed to muster from the federal disaster aid system.

ProPublica and The Assembly examined federal data, looking at the 10 counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene. We found income disparities in the way the agency had distributed housing assistance, even though that aid is supposed to be independent of income. Among the more rural counties hardest hit by Helene, households that got the most FEMA aid tended to be the highest-income ones. In some counties, including Yancey, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money to repair and rebuild their homes as those with lower incomes.

In rural areas, residents can face barriers to seeking assistance ranging from poor access to cellphone and internet service to rugged topography to a lack of money to pay for services.
        
    
                    
The reverse was true in urban Buncombe County, home of Asheville, where lower-income homeowners typically received higher FEMA awards for housing assistance. Buncombe is also home to many of the region’s nonprofits that helped low-income residents navigate the FEMA application and appeals process.

For the Hills, it’s been an exhausting year. They’ve been camped in a trailer since January with a view of their former home, working on the house until dark after days of teaching public school. They long for simple comforts of their former life — just sitting in their living room as a family and watching a movie. As the Hills prepare to move back in, we learn in their journey why so many other families may never be able to do so.

Watch the short documentary “Rebuilding After Helene” here.
        
    
                            
                       
                
            Correction
            Sept. 27, 2025: A video with this story originally misidentified the subject Brian Hill teaches. Hill teaches high school math, not history. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:19:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>This, Family, Will, Return, Home, After, Helene., Their, Onerous, Journey, Rebuild, Shows, Why, Many, Others, Won’t.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Are You Still Rebuilding After Hurricane Helene? We Want to Hear From You.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/are-you-still-rebuilding-after-hurricane-helene-we-want-to-hear-from-you</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/are-you-still-rebuilding-after-hurricane-helene-we-want-to-hear-from-you</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Ren Larson, The Assembly, and Cassandra Garibay, ProPublica                
                                          

        
	ProPublica and The Assembly have been reporting on the impact of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, and we know recovery is far from over.
            
	We want to hear from North Carolinians whose homes were damaged or destroyed to better understand how well the state housing recovery program, RenewNC, is working for those who need it. If you’ve applied for funding to repair or rebuild your home, let us know what the process has been like, the challenges you’ve experienced and the impact that’s had on your life. We&#039;d also like to hear from you if your home was damaged but you haven’t applied to understand why.
            
	Filling out the form below is the easiest way to share information with us. If you have anything else you would like to share, let us know at helenetips@propublica.org. After you submit your response, Assembly reporter Ren Larson or ProPublica reporter Cassandra Garibay may follow up for more details. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:19:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Are, You, Still, Rebuilding, After, Hurricane, Helene, Want, Hear, From, You.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Astro catat keuntungan bersih lebih rendah RM16.39 juta pada suku kedua</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/astro-catat-keuntungan-bersih-lebih-rendah-rm1639-juta-pada-suku-kedua</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/astro-catat-keuntungan-bersih-lebih-rendah-rm1639-juta-pada-suku-kedua</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR, 27 Sept – Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd merekodkan keuntungan bersih RM16.39 juta bagi suku kedua berakhir ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sat, 27 Sep 2025 10:57:44 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Astro, catat, keuntungan, bersih, lebih, rendah, RM16.39, juta, pada, suku, kedua</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Kristi Noem Fast&#45;Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/kristi-noem-fast-tracked-millions-in-disaster-aid-to-florida-tourist-attraction-after-campaign-donor-intervened</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/kristi-noem-fast-tracked-millions-in-disaster-aid-to-florida-tourist-attraction-after-campaign-donor-intervened</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
For months, the complaints have rolled in from parts of the country hit by natural disasters: The Federal Emergency Management Agency was moving far too slowly in sending aid to communities ravaged by floods and hurricanes, including in central Texas and North Carolina. Many officials were blaming Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, whose agency oversees FEMA.

“I can’t get phone calls back,” Ted Budd, the Republican senator from North Carolina, told a newspaper this month, describing his attempts to reach Noem’s office. “I can’t get them to initiate the money. It’s just a quagmire.” The delays were caused in part by a new policy announced by DHS that requires Noem’s personal sign-off on expenses over $100,000, several news outlets reported.

But records obtained by ProPublica show how one locality found a way to get FEMA aid more quickly: It asked one of Noem’s political donors for help.

The records show that Noem quickly expedited more than $11 million of federal money to rebuild a historic pier in Naples, Florida, after she was contacted by a major financial supporter last month. The pier is a tourist attraction in the wealthy Gulf Coast enclave and was badly damaged by Hurricane Ian in 2022.
        
    
                    
Frustrated city officials had been laboring for months, without success, to get disaster assistance. But just two weeks after the donor stepped in, they were celebrating their sudden change of fortune. “We are now at warp speed with FEMA,” one city official wrote in an email. A FEMA representative wrote: “Per leadership instruction, pushing project immediately.”

Along with fast-tracking the money, Noem flew to Naples on a government plane to tour the pier herself. She then stayed for the weekend and got dinner with the donor, local cardiologist Sinan Gursoy, at the French restaurant Bleu Provence, according to records and an interview with the Naples mayor. This account is based on text messages and emails ProPublica obtained through public records requests.

Noem’s actions in Naples suggest the injection of political favoritism into an agency tasked with saving lives and rebuilding communities wiped out by disaster. It also heightens concerns about the discretion Noem has given herself by personally handling all six-figure expenses at the agency, consolidating her power over who wins and loses in the pursuit of federal relief dollars, experts said.

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, said that politics has long been a factor in federal disaster relief — one study found that swing states are more likely to get federal help, for example. But “I’ve not heard of anything this egregious — a donor calling up and saying I need help and getting it,” he said, “while others may be getting denied assistance or otherwise waiting in line for help that may or may not come.”

In a statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “This has nothing to do with politics: Secretary Noem also visited Ruidoso, NM” — where floods killed three people in July — “at the request of a Democrat governor and has been integral in supporting and speeding up their recovery efforts.”

“Your criticizing the Secretary’s visit to the Pier is bizarre as she works to fix this issue for more than 1 million visitors that used to visit the pier,” McLaughlin added. She did not answer questions about the donor’s role in expediting the funding or Noem’s relationship with him. Reached by phone, Gursoy said “get lost” and hung up. He did not respond to detailed follow up questions.

Noem has been criticized for creating a bottleneck at FEMA. When the floods hit Texas this summer — ultimately killing over 100 people — it took days to deploy critical search-and-rescue teams because Noem hadn’t signed off on them, according to CNN. Budd, the Republican senator, said this month: “Pretty much everything Helene-related is over $100,000. So they’re stacking up on her desk waiting for her signature.”

Noem has denied there were delays in the Texas flood response and has defended her expense policy, saying it has saved billions of dollars. “Every day I get up and I think, the American people are paying for this, should they?” she recently said. “And are these dollars doing what the law says they should be doing? I’m going to make sure that they go there.”

Once a sleepy fishing town, Naples is now home to CEOs and billionaires (a property listed for $295 million recently made headlines as the most expensive home in the U.S.). The city is known as an important stop for Republican politicians raising money, and Noem has held multiple fundraisers in the area. State credit card records suggest she visited Naples at least 10 times during her last four years as South Dakota governor.

Noem’s top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, also appears to own a home in Naples near the city’s pier, according to property tax records. Lewandowski is an unpaid staffer at DHS serving as Noem’s de facto chief of staff. (Media reports have alleged the two are romantically involved, which they have both denied.) Lewandowski told ProPublica that he was not involved in the pier decision and that he was not in Naples during Noem’s visit.

For the first seven months of the Trump administration, the pier reconstruction was in bureaucratic purgatory. The city had long been struggling to secure the regulatory approvals it needed to start building, and emails suggest Trump’s wave of federal layoffs had made the process even slower. “These agencies are undergoing significant reorganizations and staff reductions,” a city official told a frustrated constituent in early August. That “sometimes means starting over with new reviewers — something we’ve faced more than once.”

McLaughlin said “both past FEMA and the City bear responsibility” for the delays. She listed “several failures” since the process started in 2023, including “FEMA staff changing up” and indecision by the city government.

By this summer, Naples officials were getting desperate. In June, one tried to enlist Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., to press FEMA to move ahead. “We were told yesterday that Secretary Noem would have to ‘personally’ approve the Pier project before FEMA funding would be obligated,” the city official wrote to the senator’s staff. The Naples mayor, Teresa Heitmann, also personally wrote to FEMA. Heitmann said she was “perplexed” by the delays and begged the agency for guidance.

Heitmann had long been paying expensive Washington consultants to help her city navigate the process. But she was “feeling increasingly helpless,” she later said, until she had the idea that would finally put her project on the fast track. On July 18, the mayor emailed a Google search to herself: “Who is the head of Homeland security?” She was going to go straight to Noem.

Heitmann determined that her best bet for getting Noem’s attention was Gursoy. A Naples cardiologist, Gursoy has no obvious experience working with the federal government; much of his online footprint centers on his enthusiasm for pinball. But Gursoy gave Noem at least $25,000 to support her campaign for governor in 2022. That was enough to put him near the top of Noem’s disclosed donor list. (In South Dakota, campaign contributions remain relatively small.)

On planning documents for the 2024 Republican National Convention obtained by ProPublica, the Florida doctor is listed as an attendee affiliated with the delegation from South Dakota, a state he has no apparent connection to besides his support for Noem. Heitmann told ProPublica that Gursoy introduced her to Noem at a political event at a private home in Naples while Noem was governor.

“Hello it’s Teresa,” the mayor texted Gursoy in early August. “I really need your help.” She explained the tangle of bureaucracy she’d been contending with. “FEMA is holding us up,” Heitmann wrote. “Kristi Noem could put some fire under the FEMA employees slacking.”

Gursoy responded: “Okay. I will get on it.”

The next week, on Aug. 11, the doctor gave Heitmann an update. “Kristi was off for a few days for the first time in a long time, so I left her alone,” he said. “I just txted her now.” Within 24 hours, he had exciting news. He told the mayor to expect a call from Noem’s “FEMA fixer” shortly.

The identity of the “fixer” is not clear, but by Aug. 27, Naples officials were seeing a “flurry of activity” from Noem’s agency. That day, a FEMA staffer told the city that “FEMA is intending to expedite the funding” for the pier. “Secretary Noem took immediate action when I reached out to ask for help,” the mayor soon posted on Facebook.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Two days later, Noem flew to Naples. Her schedule listed a 30-minute walk-through at the pier with the mayor, followed by a nail salon appointment and dinner at Bleu Provence, which serves wagyu short ribs and seared foie gras. Noem then stayed through the weekend at the four-star Naples Bay Resort &amp; Marina. Heitmann told ProPublica she wasn’t at the French dinner but Gursoy was. “I didn’t ask her to come, but she showed up,” the mayor told the local news. “I was very impressed.”

Before she left town, Noem posted about the Naples pier on Instagram. She was finally getting the project back on track, she said. “Americans deserve better than years of red tape and failed disaster responses,” Noem wrote. “Under @POTUS Trump, this incompetency ends.”

DHS did not answer questions about whether the government paid for Noem’s weekend in Naples.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Do you have any information we should know about Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski or DHS? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:19:44 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Kristi, Noem, Fast-Tracked, Millions, Disaster, Aid, Florida, Tourist, Attraction, After, Campaign, Donor, Intervened</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Failed Root Canals, Lost Implants: How a Utah Dentist Accused of Substandard Care Was Allowed to Keep Practicing</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/failed-root-canals-lost-implants-how-a-utah-dentist-accused-of-substandard-care-was-allowed-to-keep-practicing</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/failed-root-canals-lost-implants-how-a-utah-dentist-accused-of-substandard-care-was-allowed-to-keep-practicing</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

        

    
      
  



                    
The patients kept coming to the Utah oral surgeon’s office — one after another, year after year — with dental work that the surgeon said had gone wrong. He later recounted in a letter to state licensors that he had seen dental implants that had been the wrong size, patients with chronic sinus infections and one person whose implant had become lost inside their sinus cavity. These patients, he said, had all been worked on by the same dentist: Dr. Nicholas LaFeber.

The surgeon, a 30-year veteran, wrote the letter in November 2022 after Utah’s licensing division asked for his opinion of work done by LaFeber, whose license was on probation after the agency determined he had provided substandard care to more than a dozen patients. His warning was blunt: He believed LaFeber wouldn’t improve as a dentist and should not be performing dental implant procedures. He had seen LaFeber make the same mistakes in patients for years, he wrote, causing “severe” and sometimes life-changing complications.

“I believe that he is not competent to place implants,” the oral surgeon, Dr. Creed Haymond, concluded. “I give this opinion with soberness and sadness, but I feel I have a duty to aid the board in protecting the public from what appears to be an incompetent practitioner.” 

His assessment of LaFeber’s skills in restorative dentistry was also mentioned in a February 2023 order regarding agency action on LaFeber’s license. Haymond did not respond to interview requests.

This was the second letter that Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing had received recommending that LaFeber be stopped or limited from practicing after more than a decade of dentistry in Utah, according to records obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica. The agency licenses Utah dentists and other professionals and investigates allegations of misconduct.

Two years prior, another dentist who had considered buying one of LaFeber’s practices recommended LaFeber’s license be revoked after looking through patient files: “As I started going through charts, as well as seeing the previous work, I began to realize how poor he treated these individuals,” wrote Dr. Brandon McKee. “Patients with failed implants are put on antibiotics and told to wait while the implant is continuing to heal. Some of these are for nine months.” 

This letter was discussed in a September 2020 public dentistry board meeting. McKee did not respond to interview requests. 

The licensing division’s dentistry board — whose members are mostly dentists and hygienists — recommended to Utah licensing director Mark Steinagel in December 2022 that LaFeber’s license be revoked after reviewing additional evidence suggesting his skills had not improved. 

But despite this recommendation and the letters of warning from his colleagues, Steinagel reinstated LaFeber’s license in May 2023 after the dentist completed three years of probation, which included taking remedial classes.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Mark Steinagel, director of the state agency that licenses Utah professionals, reinstated Nicholas LaFeber’s license even though the agency’s dentistry board recommended that it be revoked.
    
            (Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Since LaFeber’s license was reinstated, new patients say they’ve been hurt. The Tribune and ProPublica spoke with two patients who say they saw the dentist within the last year for what they believed would be routine cavity fillings. Instead, they say they left in pain that became prolonged and ultimately required the procedures to be redone by other dentists. Neither knew when they sought dental care that LaFeber had nearly lost his license after regulators determined his work fell below the standard of care. 

“I had never had this done before, so I didn’t know what’s normal,” said one patient, Michelle Lipsey. “I was just like, ‘He’s an adult, male dentist. He probably knows what he’s doing.’”

Lipsey filed a complaint against LaFeber with licensors in July detailing her experience, but the agency closed the case a month later and took no disciplinary action. 

LaFeber said he would not discuss individual patients because they did not grant him permission to do so. He told The Tribune and ProPublica that he has always tried to keep his patients’ best interests in mind. “I had a few outcomes from dental work that had complications and needed further treatment,” he wrote in an email in response to questions.

“I assume every dentist encounters some percentage of negative patient outcomes and I have no reason to believe that my practice had a higher percentage than others.”

Melanie Hall, a spokesperson for Steinagel and the Division of Professional Licensing, said in response to questions that the division only revokes someone’s license when their conduct has been “especially egregious” because doing so “ends a career.” 

The agency’s top priority, she said, is keeping Utahns safe — but she added that it also wants to ensure that licensees have a chance at “professional rehabilitation” and, when appropriate, can continue to work and earn money.

The state has revoked two dental licenses since June 2015, according to a Tribune and ProPublica examination of a decade’s worth of publicly available licensing division records.

Hall said that LaFeber’s license was reinstated despite the dental board’s recommendation because the dentist had finished the remedial courses that the board required him to take and his probationary period was ending. She noted that no other patients filed a complaint during that three-year period and that the dental board’s role was to only make recommendations to Steinagel and his staff.

That decision bothered some of those who served on the dental board during that time. Two former board members told The Tribune and ProPublica that they were frustrated state licensing division leaders did not listen to them and that they felt LaFeber should not practice dentistry given his record. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because of potential professional repercussions.

“You hate to take somebody’s livelihood away from them when they’ve gone through years of dental school and had a practice,” one of the former board members said. “But the board’s job is to protect the public.” 

In LaFeber’s case, the former board member said, “the public was not well-served.”

LaFeber, without knowing the identities of the board members, suggested that some might have been biased against him.
        
    
                    
“Every One of These Cases Was Alarming”
LaFeber said in public dentistry board meetings that he came to the attention of the licensing division in late 2019 after one of his former employees filed a complaint. He said the employee, who he said he had previously fired, directed licensors to more than a dozen cases in which he admitted during a board meeting that he had provided “poor patient care.” 

State licensing officials could have suspended or revoked LaFeber’s license, but instead, in early 2020, they struck an agreement with LaFeber — a common outcome in license discipline cases. According to the agreement, investigators found that some of the patients in those cases had had root canals that resulted in infections or needed to be redone. Licensors also determined that LaFeber had improperly placed permanent replacement teeth in other patients, including one whose implant extended into the sinus cavity, the document said.

LaFeber agreed to spend three years on professional probation, during which he would be under the supervision of another dentist whose time he was required to pay for. He was still allowed to perform dental work during that period, according to the stipulation, but agreed not to do implant procedures or root canals. 

He was not required to tell his current or future patients about this discipline. Like most other states, Utah has no law requiring patient disclosure when a licensed professional is disciplined, and a review of more than 3,200 filings from the licensing division’s website shows the state has rarely required disclosure of unprofessional conduct to patients. 

The Utah regulators who discipline licensed professionals act only when someone files a complaint, like what happened in LaFeber’s case. “We don’t have manpower or staffing for proactive investigations,” Larry Marx, the state’s health care licensing bureau manager, explained to the dental board in a 2020 public meeting.

Once LaFeber was on probation, oversight of his progress moved to the dental board, an advisory group whose role it is to interview probationers in quarterly public meetings and make recommendations to Steinagel about whether the professionals completed their probation and if they should have their licenses reinstated.

In these interviews with the dental board, LaFeber admitted his mistakes. He blamed bad outcomes on being burned out from owning four dental clinics, and he said he had done procedures on friends and acquaintances who actually needed more specialized care but didn’t have the money. 

“Some of it I will just admit was a poor, poor choice on my part,” he told the board, according to a recording of the meeting. “And I can also say for some of them, they are very dear friends of mine, that I have either coached their kids or helped them in Scouts or something else, single moms, and trying to help them out.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Dr. Nicholas LaFeber’s profile on the website of his practice, Sandy Center Dental
    
            (Screenshot by ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
In addition to the problems that the former employee initially reported to the state licensing division, one dental board member, Dr. Ruedi Tillmann, looked at more than a dozen other files of LaFeber’s during the first few months of his probation and found other cases in which Tillmann saw indications that patients had poor outcomes, according to a December 2020 board meeting.

Tillmann, a dentist, said during the online meeting that he saw “a number of cases” where LaFeber did four or five implants on a single patient and none of them properly integrated into the patient’s jawbone. “Poor margins, open margins, implant crowns not sitting on implants correctly,” he said about patient files he reviewed. “I’m sorry to be harsh. It’s just that every one of these cases was alarming to me.” 

Dr. Daniel Poulson, another dentist on the board, questioned why LaFeber would do substandard work on his patients, including people he said he knew and cared about.

“With 30 cases, what that communicates to me is you didn’t learn. You just kept doing it,” Poulson said during the same meeting. “And to blame that on being stressed or overworked — we’re all stressed. Dentistry is an incredibly stressful profession. But that shouldn’t, in my mind, make an excuse for ill-treating a patient. Using a lot of antibiotics to cover infections that last years is just out of bounds.”

LaFeber told the board during this meeting that he was confident he could improve his dentistry by taking continuing education courses and by being more selective about patients and referring them more often to specialists instead of trying to do the work himself. 

He also downsized to just one clinic, Sandy Center Dental, a wood-trimmed office suite in a large, tan stucco building located in a Salt Lake City suburb at the base of the Wasatch Mountains.

“They Were So Disgusted With All the Problems”
LaFeber met with the dental board 11 times during his probation in public meetings that were often conducted on video calls because of the coronavirus pandemic. He was cheerful and agreeable during meetings, even at times when board members asked him pointed, critical questions about his work.

His polite nature was noted several times in records reviewed by The Tribune and ProPublica. For example, McKee, the dentist who had considered buying LaFeber’s practice, wrote in his letter to the board that LaFeber came across as a “humble,” “very nice guy” who patients trusted. A dentist who leads a dental examination agency wrote in his summary of an exam that LaFeber took that he was “overly pleasant to the extreme.”

Members of the dental board remarked during public meetings about how “unique” LaFeber’s case was, and they questioned what the right metric would be to determine whether his dentistry had improved and he was safe to work with patients. 

Utah licensors rarely discipline dentists over whether they are competent to do their jobs, an analysis by The Tribune and ProPublica found. A review of disciplinary records from the last decade shows dentists most often getting in trouble for drug or alcohol use or for overprescribing or diverting prescriptions.

Hall, the licensing division spokesperson, said the agency does not track how many standard-of-care complaints it receives, but acknowledged that proving those types of cases tends to be difficult.

“As a result, they are less likely to lead to disciplinary actions compared to cases involving drug use, unlawful behavior, or practicing outside one’s scope of practice,” she said.

But tension was growing between LaFeber and the dental board: While LaFeber had taken a few online, self-paced courses, board members felt he needed more intensive, hands-on classes to improve. 

A breaking point between LaFeber and the board occurred near the end of LaFeber’s probation. At the December 2022 dental board meeting, LaFeber peppered members with questions about the board’s role governing probationers and implied that a board member had acted improperly by soliciting complaints about him.

The board seemed equally frustrated; LaFeber still hadn’t enrolled in the hands-on courses they had required him to take, programs that could have cost up to $50,000. LaFeber had instead taken a licensure exam and failed several sections, according to a copy of the exam results obtained by The Tribune and ProPublica, which was also referenced in the 2023 agency order.

LaFeber did not respond on the record to questions about these test results.

Given the test results, Poulson, who had become board chair, said in the public meeting that he worried whether LaFeber would be able to practice dentistry safely by the following February, when his probation period would end. 

“I have two doctors that once tried to buy your practice. They gave it back because they were so disgusted with all the problems they were having with patients,” Tillmann, one of the board members, said in that same meeting, recalling previous conversations he had.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            LaFeber’s practice, Sandy Center Dental. LeFeber was not required to tell his current or future patients about his probation.
    
            (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Poulson suggested that the group make a motion recommending that the state licensing division either revoke or suspend LaFeber’s license, saying that the action would be “protecting the public from inferior care.” The board unanimously voted to recommend revocation.

A few months later, Marx issued the agency order stating that LaFeber’s license should be suspended until he could demonstrate he could practice dentistry “with reasonable skill and safety.” 

LaFeber, though, had one more chance to respond before the suspension would take effect. Soon after the agency order, LaFeber enrolled in and completed his remedial training. He also hired an attorney who signaled his intent to fight the agency’s action, according to public records.

In response, Marx requested that the agency’s move to suspend LaFeber’s license be dismissed, noting that LaFeber said he had delayed complying with the dental board’s requirement that he complete further training because of “financial limitations.” Then, Steinagel reinstated LaFeber’s license.

By this point, Steinagel’s agency knew not only about the reports of patients with improper tooth implants and the failed root canals that led to LaFeber’s probation, it also knew the state dental board had recommended that LaFeber’s license be revoked. 

In addition, the agency was aware LaFeber had been sued three times for medical malpractice — including by a patient who alleged he had implants placed in his sinuses, which caused sepsis, and another patient who said in her lawsuit that, after months of painful infections, she went to another dentist who found a broken dental instrument lodged in her gums. (LaFeber told The Tribune and ProPublica these lawsuits were settled by his medical malpractice insurance carrier and there was never any determination made that his treatment fell below the standard of care.)

LaFeber said in response to questions that he was not aware of any recommendation from the board to revoke his license — though according to recordings and minutes of the public dentistry board meetings, he was present when the dentistry board took its vote. The board’s revocation recommendation is also referenced in the agency order he received, which The Tribune and ProPublica obtained through a public records request.

The dentist said he felt he was treated fairly by licensors and most members of the dentistry board, but added that he felt one board member did not disclose a conflict of interest and had a “personal vendetta” against him. LaFeber did not respond on the record to follow-up questions asking for further details. He said he complied with every request by licensors and its dentistry board and “even went above and beyond” by taking additional continuing education. He noted that he passed the remediation courses and related tests that the board had requested.

“I also worked with a supervising dentist, at significant expense, who reviewed my work and provided mentoring for 3 years between 2020 and 2023,” LaFeber wrote.

After taking these courses, he said, he has been able to incorporate new technology in his practices that has improved patient outcomes. “Dentistry is an area that is constantly evolving with so much new technology,” he said, “and I welcome all information sources that can help me improve my practice.” 

The Tribune and ProPublica asked the two former board members who spoke to the news organizations whether their vote to recommend LaFeber’s license be revoked would have changed if they had the opportunity to weigh in again after he had completed his remedial training. 

One former board member said they didn’t think the training completed to satisfy the state was enough to overcome years of poor dentistry. Another said that nothing seems to have changed given new patient complaints. Three board members who were involved in LaFeber’s case declined to comment for this story, and four others could not be reached.

New Patients Say They Were Harmed
With his license restored, LaFeber started to once again grow his business. Public records show he still owns Sandy Center Dental, and in July 2024 he got a business license for a second clinic about 10 miles to the west. (An online ad this summer indicated LaFeber was trying to sell his second practice.) 

LaFeber is referenced as the sole dentist on websites for both of these businesses. In his response to The Tribune and ProPublica, he said he owns and operates a single office, Sandy Center Dental, where he works four days a week. A Sept. 23 search of public business records show he is still listed as the registered agent and principal for both practices. LaFeber said he helped start the second office, Parkway Smile Center, but said it is now “entirely owned and managed by another dentist.” The new owner could not be reached for comment.

In the nearly two years since LaFeber’s full return to practice, at least two more patients have publicly complained they were harmed under his care, both of whom The Tribune and ProPublica contacted after they left negative online reviews.

Michelle Lipsey had been a patient at Sandy Center Dental for nearly eight years, but she said in an interview that she hadn’t been to the dentist for a couple years after her second child was born. She said LaFeber told her during an October 2024 appointment that she needed five cavities filled. She returned a week later for the procedures.

For weeks after, Lipsey was in pain, and she returned to Sandy Center Dental later that month, complaining that she couldn’t sleep and was only able to eat soft food, according to her medical records. LaFeber redid some of the fillings, medical records show, but Lipsey said the pain persisted. She said a second dentist told her that LaFeber hadn’t properly sealed the fillings and had drilled far deeper than he needed to.

LaFeber noted in her medical records that he tried to call and text Lipsey after she left a negative review online. “Remember patient was very nervous,” her patient file reads. “We tried our best to help calm but at no point had the appointment gone as she described in the post.”

Haley Stafford described a similar experience earlier this year. She said that, based on what LeFeber told her, she was expecting to have two cavities filled during a March appointment; instead, he put fillings in seven teeth. She recalled in an interview that his hands shook when he gave her numbing shots. (The testing exam results reviewed by The Tribune and ProPublica also noted LaFeber’s unsteady hands.)

“That was the first time he actually did work on me,” she said. “And it was completely botched.”

She’s been in near-daily pain since, she said, and has needed more dental work on her affected teeth, including two root canals. Stafford found a new dentist, but the repair work has cost her thousands of dollars.

Both Stafford and Lipsey said LaFeber contacted them about refunding their money.

LaFeber said he doesn’t recall refunding money to any patients after a complaint. He said he could not comment on specific cases to protect patient privacy, but said that sensitivity and pain can happen after a treatment.

“We try to do all we can to minimize it,” he said. “The presence of pain does not demonstrate treatment that fell below the standard of care.”

Lipsey filed a complaint with licensors in late July and said she was interviewed by an investigator and shared X-rays from before and after LaFeber filled her cavities. 

Licensors sent Lipsey an email in late August saying that they were closing the case and that “appropriate action was taken,” according to a screenshot of the email Lipsey shared with The Tribune and ProPublica. They would not tell her what that action was, saying the investigative record was considered private under Utah law. Licensing officials declined to comment on the outcome of Lipsey’s complaint.
        
    
                            
    
                    
If licensors had disciplined LaFeber, it would be considered a public record. The agency has the option to address a complaint informally by giving a verbal warning to a licensed professional or writing a letter of concern. Those measures typically are not disclosed to the public.

LaFeber told The Tribune and ProPublica that Lipsey’s complaint was dismissed and he did not receive any warnings or a letter of concern. Licensors “investigated it thoroughly and found it to be meritless,” he said.

LaFeber’s license remains in good standing, according to the state’s licensing database in September. 

Stafford hasn’t filed a complaint with the state and said she had no idea LaFeber had nearly lost his license until a reporter reached out to her. 

How does a dentist nearly “lose their license and get it back,” she asked, “and patients are not aware of that?” ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:19:44 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Failed, Root, Canals, Lost, Implants:, How, Utah, Dentist, Accused, Substandard, Care, Was, Allowed, Keep, Practicing</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>I Filmed the ICE Officer Who Shoved a Woman to the Floor Inside a New York Courthouse</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/i-filmed-the-ice-officer-who-shoved-a-woman-to-the-floor-inside-a-new-york-courthouse</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/i-filmed-the-ice-officer-who-shoved-a-woman-to-the-floor-inside-a-new-york-courthouse</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Till Eckert                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has taken one of its agents off the streets after he was caught on video throwing a distraught mother to the floor of a New York City courthouse in front of her two children on Thursday.

It wasn’t the first time videos have captured scenes of immigration agents using violent force to carry out the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. But the videos of this incident — one of which I filmed for ProPublica — seemed to stir something different. In a rare move, the government publicly reprimanded an officer for such conduct.

“The officer’s conduct in this video is unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE,” an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said. “Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards and this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation.”
        
    
                    

    
        

    
        
            
            
            

            A video filmed by Till Eckert shows the officer throwing Moreta-Galarza to the ground inside the courthouse.
    
            (Till Eckert/ProPublica. Edited for privacy by ProPublica.)
    
    
    

            Watch video ➜
        
    
    
        
    
                    
I’ve only been in the U.S. as a reporter for eight weeks — so I just barely arrived. I come from Germany and am on the staff at Correctiv, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. I’d been alarmed by videos of masked ICE agents sweeping immigrants off the street, scenes I never thought I’d see in the United States, and I came with the goal of witnessing what was going on for myself. I wanted to report on how the administration’s immigration crackdown was playing out from the front lines.

Since arriving, I’ve spent time reporting in immigrant neighborhoods, emergency rooms, churches, ICE field offices and, most recently, in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. I’ve gone there most every morning for the past two weeks.

During that time, I’d seen ICE drag several immigrants away from their families, all of them sobbing and pleading with the officers not to separate them from their loved ones.

But what happened Thursday was a shocking escalation.
        
    
                    
When I emerged from the elevator on the 14th floor, I heard a woman’s pleas. She sounded terrified. I walked around the corner to see what was happening. At the end of the hallway, I saw the woman, Monica Moreta-Galarza, standing in front of an agent. She was crying because her husband had been detained. She told the agent she was afraid her husband would be hurt. She wanted to go with him.

I began recording and captured the agent barking back at the woman. “Adios,” he said, over and over, pressing toward her as if warning her to back away. When she didn’t, he grabbed her. The rest — including her children’s screams — has been memorialized online.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            The federal agent yells and waves his finger at Moreta-Galarza after throwing her to the ground.
    
            (Graham Macindoe)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
I followed Moreta-Galarza to the hospital. She is an immigrant from Ecuador and has been living in Coney Island since last year. Speaking in Spanish, she said the government routinely beat people in her home country. “I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me.”

This morning, I went back to the courthouse with the goal of speaking to the agent who’d tackled Moreta-Galarza. I’d heard the other ICE agents call him Victor, though I can’t be sure that’s his real name. By the time I got there, however, he was gone. 

ProPublica’s mission is impact. I don’t think any of us expected we’d help bring it about with my video. The question now is what will the government do the next time something like this happens.

I asked DHS how many agents have been disciplined this year for misusing force. They did not answer that question.
        
             

                                    
        
                        If you have tips about new ICE enforcement tactics in courts, we want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal (tilleckert.90) or propublica.org/tips. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:19:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Filmed, the, ICE, Officer, Who, Shoved, Woman, the, Floor, Inside, New, York, Courthouse</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The Hidden Hand: How Business Associates&amp;apos; Influence Reached the Courtroom</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ranjeets-tentacles-reaching-judiciary</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ranjeets-tentacles-reaching-judiciary</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://icijnews.online/uploads/images/202509/image_870x580_68dc062e96a01.jpg" length="60995" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:58:22 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Syrian authorities arrest and briefly detain prominent activist as country’s president makes UN debut</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/syrian-authorities-arrest-and-briefly-detain-prominent-activist-as-countrys-president-makes-un-debut</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/syrian-authorities-arrest-and-briefly-detain-prominent-activist-as-countrys-president-makes-un-debut</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Amer Matar, the Syria Prisons Museum co-director and a former political prisoner whose testimony helped secure the first international war crimes conviction against a Syrian official, was held after attempting to leave the country. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/09/Amer-Matar-760x427.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:46:48 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Syrian, authorities, arrest, and, briefly, detain, prominent, activist, country’s, president, makes, debut</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Journalists in Peru seek protection from justice system amid rising threats, harassment by officials</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/journalists-in-peru-seek-protection-from-justice-system-amid-rising-threats-harassment-by-officials</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/journalists-in-peru-seek-protection-from-justice-system-amid-rising-threats-harassment-by-officials</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A verbal threat by Lima’s mayor against veteran reporter and ICIJ member Gustavo Gorriti rocked the journalism community. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/09/Untitled-design-11-760x427.png" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:46:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Journalists, Peru, seek, protection, from, justice, system, amid, rising, threats, harassment, officials</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>A New Lawsuit Alleges the Gun Industry Exploited Firearm Owners’ Data for Political Gain</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/a-new-lawsuit-alleges-the-gun-industry-exploited-firearm-owners-data-for-political-gain</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/a-new-lawsuit-alleges-the-gun-industry-exploited-firearm-owners-data-for-political-gain</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Corey G. Johnson                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Two major law firms accused the National Shooting Sports Foundation this week of violating the privacy rights of millions of gun owners by running a decades-long program that sent their information to political operatives without consent.

The allegations in a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court by Keller Rohrback of Seattle and Motley Rice of Connecticut closely mirror the findings of a ProPublica investigation that detailed the secret program operated by the gun industry’s largest trade group.

The 24-page complaint asks the court for approval of class-action status and requests financial damages against the NSSF, claiming the gun industry lobbyist enriched itself by exploiting valuable gun buyer information for political gain. It features the accounts of two gun owners, Daniel Cocanour and Dale Rimkus, both of whom assert they purchased rifles, pistols and handguns from the 1990s through the mid-2010s.
        
    
                    
ProPublica identified at least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith &amp; Wesson and Remington, that handed over hundreds of thousands of names and addresses, along with other private data, to the NSSF. The lobbying group then entered the details into what would become a massive database, which was used to rally gun owners’ electoral support for the industry’s preferred candidates running for the White House and Congress.

The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs. A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to help win elections.

Cocanour and Rimkus claimed to have regularly shared personal information when filling out warranty cards for Glock, Remington, Smith &amp; Wesson and other manufacturers thinking it was in their best interest. They say they weren’t told of the companies’ participation in the NSSF program, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Connecticut.

“Through the complaint, two brave plaintiffs have stepped forward to vindicate the rights of millions of their fellow firearms purchasers,” lead attorney Benjamin Gould of Keller Rohrback wrote in a statement to ProPublica. “We look forward to gathering evidence to prove the truth of our allegations and holding NSSF accountable for its actions.”

Keller Rohrback has a specialty in cybersecurity and data breach cases. The firm recently won a landmark $725 million class-action settlement from Facebook after accusing the company of allowing political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to obtain user information without consent. Motley Rice is one of the nation’s largest consumer protection law firms; its founder, Ron Motley, garnered fame for leading lawsuits against big tobacco companies during the 1990s.

Representatives from gun violence prevention groups called the lawsuit a major development in trying to hold the gun industry responsible for the data sharing.

“This is a hideous breach of privacy by the gun industry,” said Justin Wagner, senior director of investigations at Everytown for Gun Safety. “The NSSF must come clean and face accountability.”

Founded in 1961 and currently based in Shelton, Connecticut, the NSSF represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, retailers, publishers and shooting ranges. The trade group didn’t respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. The organization previously defended its data collection, saying its “activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”

The NSSF has faced criticism in the aftermath of ProPublica’s reporting. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, slammed the data sharing. And a prominent gun owner rights organization, Gun Owners for Safety, asked the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to investigate the NSSF. Gun Owners for Safety is operated by Giffords, which was co-founded by Gabby Giffords, the Arizona lawmaker who survived an attempted assassination in 2011, and it advocates for improved background checks and other measures aimed at reducing gun-related deaths. Chris Harris, a spokesperson for Giffords, said the FBI and ATF have not responded to the request for an inquiry into the NSSF.

Privacy experts previously told ProPublica that companies that shared information with the NSSF may have violated federal and state prohibitions against deceptive and unfair business practices. Under federal law, companies must comply with their own privacy policies and be clear about how they will use consumers’ information, privacy experts said.

Shani Henry, a member of Gun Owners for Safety, said ProPublica’s reporting showed the industry’s hypocrisy on the issue of privacy.

“They don’t care about our families’ safety or the rights of everyday gun owners, they’re more than happy to betray their own customers for political power and money,” Henry said. “Gun owners’ privacy was violated and we deserve a full accounting of what happened and who profited from it.”

The gun industry launched the data-sharing project approximately 17 months before the 2000 election as it grappled with a cascade of financial, legal and political threats. Within three years, the NSSF’s database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.

Most of the companies named in the NSSF documents, including Glock and Smith &amp; Wesson, previously declined to comment or did not respond to ProPublica. Remington has since been split into two companies and sold. RemArms, which owns the old firearms division, previously said it was unaware of the company’s workings at the time. The other portion of the company is now owned by Remington Ammunition, which said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.”

In 2016, as part of a push to get Donald Trump elected president for the first time and to help Republicans keep control of the Senate, the NSSF worked with Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge the information it had on potential voters. Cambridge matched up the people in the database with 5,000 additional facts about them that it drew from other sources. Along with the potential voters’ income, debts and religious affiliation, analysts collected information like whether they enjoyed the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:19:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>New, Lawsuit, Alleges, the, Gun, Industry, Exploited, Firearm, Owners’, Data, for, Political, Gain</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>NIH Launches New Multimillion&#45;Dollar Initiative to Reduce U.S. Stillbirth Rate</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/nih-launches-new-multimillion-dollar-initiative-to-reduce-us-stillbirth-rate</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/nih-launches-new-multimillion-dollar-initiative-to-reduce-us-stillbirth-rate</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Duaa Eldeib                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
The National Institutes of Health has launched a five-year, $37 million stillbirth consortium in a pivotal effort to reduce what it has called the country’s “unacceptably high” stillbirth rate.

The announcement last week thrilled doctors, researchers and families and represented a commitment by the agency to prioritize stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more.

“What we’re really excited about is not only the investment in trying to prevent stillbirth, but also continuing that work with the community to guide the research,” Alison Cernich, acting director of the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in an interview.
        
    
                    
Four clinical sites and one data coordinating center spanning the country — California, Oregon, Utah, New York and North Carolina — will come together to form the consortium, each bringing its own expertise. Most will focus on ways to predict and prevent stillbirths, though they also plan to address bereavement and mental health after a loss. Research shows that of the more than 20,000 stillbirths in the U.S. each year, as many as 25% may be prevented. For deliveries at 37 weeks or more, that figure jumps to nearly half.

The teams plan to meet for the first time on Friday to discuss possible research targets. Those include: understanding why some placentas fail and fetuses don’t grow properly; assessing decreased fetal movement; considering the best times for delivery and using advanced technology to explore how blood tests, biomarkers and ultrasounds may help predict a stillbirth. They also may evaluate how electronic medical records and artificial intelligence could help doctors and nurses identify early signs of stillbirth risk. While the announcement did not mention racial disparities, a representative said the consortium hopes to identify factors that determine who is at a higher risk of having a stillbirth.

For many families, the devastation of a stillbirth is followed by a lack of answers, including how and why the loss occurred. The teams will collaborate with the stillbirth community through advisory groups. The North Carolina team will oversee data collection and standardization. Incomplete, delayed and sometimes inaccurate stillbirth data has been an impediment to prevention efforts.

“If we could see the signs and deliver the baby earlier, so that the mom has a live baby, that’s I think what we’re all hoping for,” said Dr. Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, the chair and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California San Diego, who will co-lead the effort there.

The consortium follows a national shift in the conversation around stillbirth, which has long been a neglected public health concern. ProPublica began reporting on stillbirths in 2022 and, in 2025, the news organization released a documentary following the lives of three women trying to make pregnancy safer in America following their stillbirths.
        
    
                    
Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya, who was featured in the documentary, has spent years asking Congress to support stillbirth legislation and urging lawmakers to pass the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, named after her stillborn daughter Autumn Joy. Two days after that the NIH announced the consortium, Republican and Democratic members of Congress reintroduced the bill.

“I feel like our moment has finally arrived, and we are being included in all this tremendously important lifesaving work that’s being done,” she said.

Congress had previously mandated a stillbirth working group, which the NICHD formed in 2022, and heard directly from stillbirth families. The working group released a federal report calling the country’s stillbirth rate “unacceptably high.” The U.S. lags far behind other wealthy countries in reducing its stillbirth rate.

Dr. Bob Silver, a leading stillbirth expert at the University of Utah Health, has spent decades working on stillbirth prevention. He is the co-director of the University of Utah Stillbirth Center of Excellence, which focuses on both prevention and compassionate care after a loss, and will lead the consortium’s efforts in the state.

“There’s no question that the ProPublica reporting was intimately tied to this,” Silver said. “You can’t always draw a straight line between those things. But in this case, you can draw a very straight line.”

While some studies, including the NIH’s Human Placenta Project, have indirectly contributed to stillbirth research, the consortium is the first stillbirth-specific initiative of this scale since the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network more than a decade ago. Both Silver and Dr. Uma Reddy, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University, worked together on the research network and will again on the consortium.

“We need to be able to get our rates down to similar high-income countries,” Reddy said. “This initiative to really look at reducing the stillbirth rate and to look at preventing them is so important, and it’s really about time.”

Dr. Karen Gibbins, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health &amp; Science University, had just finished her morning clinic when she received the email a few days before the official announcement informing her that both she and OHSU had been selected as part of the consortium.

Gibbins, whom ProPublica wrote about for advocating for more autopsies following the stillbirth of her son Sebastian, almost couldn’t believe it. She logged on to a federal grant website to confirm, then she stepped outside her office and gave her division director a hug.

“Stillbirth is such a huge public health issue, and one that historically has not had as much attention,” Gibbins said. “The fact that we have this investment of centers that are going to be taking these different approaches to fight stillbirth and to prevent stillbirth, and also to provide better care to families who do experience stillbirth, it’s a piece of hope that I think we all needed.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
Gibbins and her team specialize in studying the role of chronic stress, nutrition and heart health.

The NIH has distributed the first year of funding, about $7.3 million, which includes $750,000 provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. Despite the cuts at NIH, officials said they are optimistic that they will be able to fund the project for the remaining four years.

“The reason that we are doing this is because stillbirth affects 1 in 160 deliveries in the United States a year, and it is really traumatic for families, and it is not talked about,” Cernich said. “We are in a great place to really try to tackle this preventable tragedy.” ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240527-Johnson-Stillbirths-21_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:19:44 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>NIH, Launches, New, Multimillion-Dollar, Initiative, Reduce, U.S., Stillbirth, Rate</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Cryptocurrency exchange Garantex lives on despite sanctions, new report unveils</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/cryptocurrency-exchange-garantex-lives-on-despite-sanctions-new-report-unveils</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/cryptocurrency-exchange-garantex-lives-on-despite-sanctions-new-report-unveils</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The ostensibly shuttered exchange continues to operate through Telegram-based services that facilitate crossborder payments, according to Transparency International Russia (in exile). ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/09/crypto_shutterstock_1156297972-760x427.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2025 03:09:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Cryptocurrency, exchange, Garantex, lives, despite, sanctions, new, report, unveils</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>“His Audience Was Really Trump”: How New FBI Lead Used His Missouri AG Role to Wage a Culture War</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/his-audience-was-really-trump-how-new-fbi-lead-used-his-missouri-ag-role-to-wage-a-culture-war</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/his-audience-was-really-trump-how-new-fbi-lead-used-his-missouri-ag-role-to-wage-a-culture-war</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Jeremy Kohler                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                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.

            

                

      
  



                    
After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from campus.

Bailey seized on the fight as evidence of what he called the Hazelwood School District’s misplaced priorities. He sent a letter to the superintendent demanding documents on the district’s diversity policies and accused leaders of “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.” Bailey argued that the district’s dispute with local police departments over its requirement that officers participate in diversity training — an impasse that resulted in some departments leaving schools without resource officers — had left students vulnerable. 

In response, the school board’s attorney said Bailey had misrepresented basic facts: The district employed dozens of security guards at schools where it could not assign resource officers, and even if it did have police officers stationed at the school, those officers would not have handled an after-hours, off-campus fight. Finally, police found no evidence that race played a role in the fight.

The attorney general’s office took no further action. 

“He was just trying to get attention,” said school board President Sylvester Taylor II. 

The legal skirmish was the kind of publicity-getting move that defined Bailey’s two years and eight months as Missouri’s attorney general before his surprise selection last month by President Donald Trump as a co-deputy director of the FBI, according to experts who study the work of attorneys general. 

As Missouri’s top law enforcement officer, Bailey repeatedly waded into fights over diversity, gender, abortion and other hot-button issues, while casting conservatives and Christians as under siege by the “woke” left. 

Bailey had pledged at the start of his tenure in early 2023 not to use the state’s open public records law “as an offensive tool” to demand bulk records from school districts in broad investigations — a tactic used by his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator. Still, he made frequent use of cease-and-desist letters, warning school districts that their diversity initiatives or handling of gender and sex-education issues violated the law.
        
    
                    
Some efforts, like his letter to the Hazelwood School District, amounted to little more than a press release. Others ended in defeat, with judges calling his arguments unpersuasive or “absurd” or, in one case, dismissing them without comment. One lawsuit, against China, ended in a judgment against the country that experts said will likely never be enforced.  

Bailey, who was sworn in to the FBI position on Sept. 15, did not respond to messages left with the FBI’s press office and with James Lawson, a longtime friend who managed his attorney general campaign and served in various roles on his staff.

Bailey’s actions as attorney general, according to legal observers, stood apart from the office’s core, nonpolitical duties: defending the state against lawsuits and handling felony criminal appeals. That work, by most accounts, continued as usual.

His Republican predecessors, Schmitt and, before him, Josh Hawley, also used the position to advance conservative causes, wage fights against progressive ones and raise their national profiles. 

During his stint as attorney general, Hawley — like Schmitt now in the U.S. Senate — delivered a speech in which he claimed the elimination of social stigmas to premarital sex and contraception during the 1960s had degraded the treatment of women and promoted sex trafficking. And he fought to uphold state restrictions that threatened to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics four years before Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey
    
            (Galen Bacharier/Springfield News-Leader/Imagn)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Schmitt was named to succeed Hawley in November 2018. During his four years in office, he defended Christian prayer in public schools and sued several local school districts that had enforced mask requirements during the pandemic.

In 2022, he joined a small group of conservative attorneys general in withdrawing from the National Association of Attorneys General, a bipartisan group that had long coordinated multistate investigations in cases against industries ranging from tobacco to opioids. In a letter posted to the social media platform now known as X, Schmitt joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen in arguing that NAAG had taken a sharp “leftward shift” and that continued membership was intolerable. Neither Hawley nor Schmitt, through their spokespeople, responded to requests for comment.

Chris Toth, the executive director of NAAG who retired from the organization weeks after the letter became public, said in an interview that the claims in the letter were “completely unsupported by facts.” Republicans, he added, were involved “in every facet of the organization.”

The move reflected a broader shift in how many attorneys general now use their offices — not only to defend their states in court, but to score political points on the national stage. Few have embodied that strategy more than Paxton, who has often been described as focusing on culture war issues as attorney general. 

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have reported how Paxton has transformed the attorney general’s office into an agency that seems less focused on traditional duties like representing other state offices in court to one preoccupied with fighting culture wars. His office has increasingly used the state’s powerful consumer protection laws to investigate organizations whose work conflicts with his political views. At the same, he&#039;s started increasingly outsourcing major cases to private law firms.

Paxton’s office has said most of the instances when it declined to represent a state agency were due to practical or legal limits — some agencies chose their own attorneys; others were barred by statute. He’s also argued that certain cases would have required reversing earlier positions or advancing claims he viewed as unconstitutional. He’s defended hiring outside law firms, saying his office lacks the resources to take on powerful industries like tech and pharmaceuticals. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.

Bailey, though far less prominent nationally, fit squarely within this mold. Before leaving for the FBI, he spoke openly about protecting Missourians from what he called “woke” ideology and lawlessness from the left. 

A former U.S. Army officer, he has often framed his mission in combat terms. In a podcast interview this year, he said that while conservative states generally try to limit the power of their attorneys general to “maximize freedom,” blue states have weaponized their offices.

“I mean, Letitia James in New York has every weapon in her arsenal that her general assembly can give her,” he said in the podcast interview. He said she uses them “to mess with people’s lives, to prosecute President Trump, take him to court in civil law to try to seize his assets and undervalue those assets.” 

“Missouri is uniquely positioned because we were so recently a blue state,” he said, “so it’s like a retreating army has left the battlefield and dropped their weapons and we’re picking them up and learning how to use them against them.”

A spokesperson for James’ office said that “any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American” and that it stood behind its litigation against Trump’s business and would continue to stand up for New Yorkers’ rights. 

Bailey said in the podcast interview that he supported all efforts to investigate President Joe Biden, his family and his administration, and to uncover what Bailey called the truth behind the COVID-19 vaccine, which he said “seems to not be a vaccine at all.”

Bailey used his office to investigate the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America after it reported that corporate ads were appearing next to extremist content on the social media platform X. 

Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump in his first administration, posted that conservative state attorneys general should investigate; Bailey quickly responded that his team was “looking into the matter.” Weeks later, he issued a “notice of pending investigation” to Media Matters and ordered it to preserve records. He later accused the group of using fraud to solicit donations from Missourians to bully advertisers out of pulling out of X, and demanded internal records and donor information under Missouri’s consumer protection law. In a June 2024 interview with Donald Trump Jr., Bailey described the probe as “a new front in the war against the First Amendment” and tied it directly to the 2024 election, accusing Media Matters of trying to silence conservative voices.

Media Matters sued and a federal judge blocked the investigation as likely retaliatory. In early 2025, Bailey dropped the case in a settlement and said he had not found evidence of financial or other misconduct by Media Matters. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.

When Trump was awaiting sentencing after being convicted in a New York court of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star, Bailey asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a gag order on the former president and delay his sentencing until after the 2024 election, arguing the restrictions kept Missouri voters from hearing Trump’s message. The Supreme Court rejected his request in an unsigned one-page order without explanation. A New York judge later postponed the sentencing until after the election, writing that he wanted to avoid the appearance, however unwarranted, of political influence. 

Trump could have faced up to four years in prison, but a judge issued an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction in place but sparing him any penalty or fine. Trump said the conviction was a “very terrible experience” and an embarrassment to New York. He is appealing. 

Bailey also fought to keep a woman in prison even after a state court judge declared her innocent. Even after the state Supreme Court ordered her release, Bailey’s office told the prison warden to ignore the court’s order. A state court overseeing the case scolded Bailey’s office in a hearing, saying, “I would suggest you never do that.” 

Legal experts and other observers of the office said state attorneys general traditionally didn’t act primarily as partisan warriors. Most were focused on defending the state in court and protecting consumers. 

Scott Holste, who served as a spokesperson for Jay Nixon, a moderate Democrat who served as the Missouri attorney general from 1993 to 2009, recalls a starkly different approach from Bailey’s. For example, in late September 2008, the top headlines on Nixon’s website focused on robocall rules, lawsuits over mortgage fraud and consumer tips for students.  

“We were stridently apolitical in our news releases and in the way we operated,” Holste said. “Our job was to serve all Missourians, not to make political points.”

In the days before the August 2024 Republican primary, two of the three stories featured on Bailey’s homepage targeted the Biden administration over immigration and protections for LGBTQ+ students. The third highlighted a consumer-fraud prosecution.

To his supporters, Bailey is fulfilling campaign promises — a conservative acting like a conservative, said state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson. 

Voters see a leader defending their freedoms by fighting policies such as diversity and equity, which they often equate with racism, and mask mandates, which they view as government overreach, Seitz said.  “And,” he added, “we have a populist president who appreciates that.”

Toth, the retired head of the national AGs association, traced the shift in how state attorneys general act to the 1998 multistate settlement with the tobacco industry, when nearly every state joined a landmark deal that required cigarette makers to pay more than $200 billion, curb advertising aimed at children and fund anti-smoking campaigns. It also showed attorneys general how much power they could wield. 

Over time, the newfound power has raised the profile of attorney general offices across the country, turning them into a springboard for higher office. That higher profile has fueled politicization. 

Democratic attorneys general are no strangers to using their offices to fight political battles. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, for example, has filed numerous lawsuits challenging policies of the Trump administration on immigration, environmental regulations and federal funding. While Bonta maintained these suits were based on the law, critics characterized the coordinated legal action as politically motivated resistance. 

Dan Ponder, a political science professor at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, said that as the state has shifted to the right, the GOP primary, rather than the general election, is now the real contest for statewide office.

He pointed to actions such as Schmitt opposing critical race theory and reviewing public school textbooks. “That would have been unheard of 20 years ago,” Ponder said, “but now you can’t lose because you’re fighting the quote-unquote good fight.” 

Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, said that from the time of Bailey’s appointment to the position in January 2023, he probably had only two audiences. The first were voters he needed to defeat Will Scharf, a candidate already in Trump’s orbit, in the 2024 Republican primary for attorney general.

“And then once he secured his election, then I think his audience was really Trump,” Squire said.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Former Missouri Republican Party Chair John Hancock said voters seemed to reward Bailey’s approach. Bailey got nearly as many votes as Trump and Gov. Mike Kehoe in the 2024 general election — and more than Hawley or any of the Republicans who won the offices of lieutenant governor, treasurer or secretary of state. 

“So obviously the work he was doing in that office was supported,” Hancock said. “I don’t take terrible shock when politicians do political things.”

Kehoe has appointed Catherine Hanaway, a former Missouri House speaker and U.S. attorney, to succeed Bailey as attorney general. Hanaway has said she intends to run the office in a different style. She told the Missouri Independent she had more interest in Medicaid fraud, consumer protection and violent crimes. 

Her office said she was not available for an interview with ProPublica. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“His, Audience, Was, Really, Trump”:, How, New, FBI, Lead, Used, His, Missouri, Role, Wage, Culture, War</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Nick McMillan Joins ProPublica as Computational Journalist</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/nick-mcmillan-joins-propublica-as-computational-journalist</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/nick-mcmillan-joins-propublica-as-computational-journalist</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by ProPublica                
                                          

        
	ProPublica has hired Nick McMillan as a computational journalist on our data and news apps team. In this role, McMillan will use technology and data in innovative ways to find and report stories that would otherwise be out of reach.
            
	“Nick has an impressive track record of using cutting-edge technology to unlock reporting paths,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “I’m excited for him to use those skills to hold power to account at ProPublica.”
            
	McMillan comes to ProPublica from NPR, where he was a data journalist on the investigations team. At NPR, he combined reporting with data analysis, building tools that transformed raw records into evidence for investigations. His work included developing a custom optical character recognition program to parse more than 7,000 government work task files, which helped to reveal how a federal program was killing thousands of wild animals with little accountability. He also co-reported a story revealing how power lines operated by Southern California Edison sparked new fires as crews battled existing ones, creating a tool that processed and transcribed more than 2,000 hours of first responder radio into searchable, time-stamped timelines. Before NPR, he worked on investigative documentaries at Newsy, contributing to reporting on white supremacists in the U.S. military and on the long-term effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rican schoolchildren.
            
	Stories that McMillan has worked on have been recognized nationwide with honors including the National Press Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award.
            
	“ProPublica has led the way for applying data and computational methodologies to uncover
abuses of power,” McMillan said. “I am excited to join the team and grateful for the opportunity to contribute to investigations that serve the public.” ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://assets.propublica.org/2017-pp-open-graph-1200x630.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:19:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Nick, McMillan, Joins, ProPublica, Computational, Journalist</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement Program Spent Twice as Much on Administrative Costs as on Health Care, GAO Says</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/georgias-medicaid-work-requirement-program-spent-twice-as-much-on-administrative-costs-as-on-health-care-gao-says</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/georgias-medicaid-work-requirement-program-spent-twice-as-much-on-administrative-costs-as-on-health-care-gao-says</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Margaret Coker, The Current                
                                             

        
                        This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Current. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

        

    


        
                        Update, Sept. 24, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect that on Sept. 23, 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services extended the Georgia Pathways program through 2026.

        

    
      
  



                    
Most of the tax dollars used to launch and implement the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program have gone toward paying administrative costs rather than covering health care for Georgians, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan agency that monitors federal programs and spending. 

The government report examined administrative expenses for Georgia Pathways to Coverage, the state’s experiment with work requirements. It follows previous reporting by The Current and ProPublica showing that the program has cost federal and state taxpayers more than $86.9 million while enrolling a tiny fraction of those eligible for free health care. 

The GAO analysis, which does not include all the Pathways administrative expenses detailed by the news outlets, shows that as of April the Georgia program had spent $54.2 million on administrative costs since 2021, compared to $26.1 million spent on health care costs. Nearly 90% of administrative expenditures came from the federal budget, the report concluded, meaning that Georgia’s experiment is being funded by taxpayers around the country. Federal spending will likely increase given that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has approved $6 million more in administrative costs not reflected in this report because it was published before the state submitted invoices. 

The spending watchdog agency echoed its 2019 criticism of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for a lack of oversight of administrative costs associated with state initiatives approved in the name of Medicaid reform. 

The September GAO report said the Medicaid agency never required Georgia to detail the costs of building and implementing the program. The federal approval process for states that want to experiment with their Medicaid systems “does not take into account the extent to which demonstrations will increase administrative costs,” the report said.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, promoted Pathways as an example of how fellow conservatives around the country could overhaul federal safety net benefits and end reliance on what critics deride as handouts to low-income Americans. Congressional Republicans cited Pathways as a model for the federal Medicaid work requirement law passed in July that will take effect in 2027. The Georgia Pathways program was slated to expire Oct. 1, but the Trump administration on Tuesday approved an extension of the experiment through Dec. 31, 2026.
        
    
                    
The Georgia program was supposed to expand free health care to a group the state had previously deemed ineligible for Medicaid: adults under 65 years old who earn less than the federal poverty line of $15,650 a year. To qualify, Georgians had to prove that they work, study or volunteer at least 80 hours a month. 

But enrollment in Georgia Pathways has remained low. The most recent state data shows that 9,175 of the nearly quarter-million low-income Georgians eligible for the program were enrolled as of Aug. 31. Previous reporting by The Current and ProPublica revealed that was due to glitches in the digital platform people must use to enroll, chronic understaffing in the state agency charged with enrollment help and a maze of bureaucratic red tape.

Georgia officials previously told The Current and ProPublica that Pathways was never designed to maximize enrollment. Carter Chapman, Kemp’s spokesperson, said Monday that the Kemp administration remains committed to Pathways and making refinements to meet the health care needs of Georgians.

In December Democratic senators critical of Medicaid work requirements, including Georgia’s Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, had asked the GAO to report on the administrative costs of implementing Pathways and verifying that recipients are working, studying or volunteering. 

“Administrative spending has outpaced spending for medical assistance (e.g., health care services)” for Georgia Pathways, the report said. “This was likely driven by the up-front administrative changes needed to implement the demonstration, the delayed start date for enrollment, and any duplication in administrative spending due to the delay.” 

Georgia officials told the GAO that the administrative costs associated with Pathways increased by 20% to 30% because of a two-year delay caused by legal battles with the Biden administration, which tried to end all Medicaid work requirement programs that had been approved before the Democratic president took office in 2021. State officials said the delay resulted in having to duplicate some spending, including IT system changes, staff training and other implementation costs, the report said. The report did not provide evidence to support the state’s assertion. 

“This report was requested by the same individuals who have no new or good ideas for addressing healthcare needs in Georgia,” Chapman said in a statement. “Now, as other states prepare to adopt our model and reject one-size-fits-none big government healthcare, Democrats like Senators Ossoff and Warnock are trying to rewrite history after four years of inaction and blame the State for costs associated with their own stonewalling.”

Warnock said the GAO’s findings reinforce his opposition to the Trump administration’s push to nationalize work requirements because of the amount of tax dollars going to expenses other than health care. 

“Now the entire country can see what we in Georgia already know: Georgia’s Medicaid work reporting requirement program is the real waste, fraud, and abuse,” Warnock said in a statement. “This report shows that Pathways is incredibly effective at barring working people from health coverage and making corporate consultants richer.” 

Ossoff called Georgia Pathways “a boondoggle that’s wasted tens of millions on pricey consultants while Georgia hospitals struggle and Georgians get sick without health insurance.”

The GAO report does not include the $27 million that Deloitte Consulting earned to market Pathways or the approximately $10 million that went toward additional consulting, including by other firms, and legal fees related to the state’s two-year court battle with the Biden administration.

Deloitte did not respond to a request for comment. The firm previously declined to answer questions about its Georgia Pathways work, referring requests for information to the state’s Department of Community Health. The agency did not respond to requests for comment but previously described Deloitte’s marketing and outreach work as “robust” and “comprehensive.” ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/GA-Gov-25_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:19:45 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Georgia’s, Medicaid, Work, Requirement, Program, Spent, Twice, Much, Administrative, Costs, Health, Care, GAO, Says</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>For&#45;Profit Corporations Are Buying Up More Psychiatric Hospitals. Some Flout Federal Law With Scarce Repercussions.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/for-profit-corporations-are-buying-up-more-psychiatric-hospitals-some-flout-federal-law-with-scarce-repercussions</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/for-profit-corporations-are-buying-up-more-psychiatric-hospitals-some-flout-federal-law-with-scarce-repercussions</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Eli Cahan for ProPublica                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
As the share of U.S. adults receiving mental health care treatment steadily grows, for-profit companies are playing an increasingly important role.

More than 40% of inpatient mental health beds were operated by for-profit entities as of 2021, according to unpublished data from Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies quality in behavioral health care. That’s up from about 13% in 2010. (The number of mental health beds held relatively constant during that time.)

Experts tie this growth to provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which made mental health care an essential health benefit that all insurance plans are required to cover.

Before the law, millions of Americans lacked meaningful mental health care coverage by their insurers — if they had any coverage at all. That changed with the law’s passage in 2010. Three years later, the Obama administration went further, issuing rules that require plans to pay more for mental health care, and to pay for it as long as patients need it. (Some plans had previously imposed hard caps on the number of days they would cover.)

Wider access to and increased reimbursement of mental health services piqued the interest of for-profit corporations, said Eileen O’Grady, who until recently served as program director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit organization that researches the industry.

“Investors in for-profit entities see that as an opportunity to make money,” she said, “in a space that had not historically been seen as super profitable.”

Shields and other researchers have repeatedly flagged concerns about lower quality of care at mental health facilities owned by for-profit corporations, in part due to efforts to cut staff and reduce costs. Companies have defended the quality of care they provide.
        
    
                    
ProPublica reported Monday that over 90 psychiatric hospitals across the country have violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act in the past 15 years. The vast majority of them — around 80% — are owned by for-profit corporations.

Yet only a handful have faced any consequences from either the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, both of which are responsible for regulating the law. In the rare cases when hospitals have faced fines, the penalties have been trivial compared to the earnings of each for-profit hospital chain, the investigation found.

According to ProPublica’s analysis of CMS data, about half of all the hospitals cited were owned by just two corporations — Universal Health Services and Acadia Healthcare — which together operate hundreds of inpatient and outpatient behavioral health facilities, in addition to psychiatric hospitals. (UHS made nearly $16 billion in revenue last year, and Acadia collected more than $3 billion.)

From 2010 through the second quarter of this year, 34 of UHS’ psychiatric hospitals had been cited with EMTALA violations. Two, Brentwood Behavioral Healthcare of Mississippi and Three Rivers Behavioral Health in South Carolina, settled with the HHS inspector general for a total of $375,000.

In its May 9 enforcement action against Brentwood, the inspector general of HHS found that, in June 2021, the hospital’s interim CEO directed staff to refuse to accept seven patients from other facilities under the pretense that the facility “did not have the capacity” to treat them. “In each instance, however, Brentwood had the capacity,” an inspector general press release accompanying the enforcement action said, “but refused the transfer because the individual needing treatment was uninsured.”

UHS spokesperson Jane Crawford said the company has 134 facilities that are subject to EMTALA. “While there have been isolated citations associated with technical EMTALA compliance over the 15-year time period in question at some of our facilities, over 75% of UHS Behavioral Health (BH) facilities did not have any EMTALA citations during this time period,” Crawford said. “As such, the narrative or belief that UHS’ facilities as a whole do not comply with EMTALA or attempts to circumvent its requirements is inaccurate and incorrect.”

In a separate statement, she said the company’s psychiatric hospitals “do not select patients based upon insurance status or ability to pay. All UHS facilities are committed to complying with their EMTALA obligations as applicable and provide the requisite care and treatment to all patients who present to the facility regardless of ability to pay.”

As for what happened at Brentwood, Crawford said that the hospital “inadvertently violated rules and regulations” due to “poor internal communication and process failure in a one-month period of time.” Brentwood “promptly revised its practices to address any such future concerns and has not had any EMTALA related issues since that time,” she added.

On the events at Three Rivers, Crawford said that of the 11 patients that CMS said it denied to accept for transfer, citations related to 10 of them were ultimately “rescinded as it was determined that EMTALA did not apply to those patients.” She added that “at no time did Three Rivers fail to respond or accept a fax request based upon any prospective patient’s insurance status or ability to pay.” CMS did not respond to requests to clarify whether the citations were rescinded, but they remain on its website.

Inspectors have cited 12 Acadia hospitals for EMTALA violations since 2010. However, only one — Park Royal Hospital in Florida — has been fined by the inspector general; in 2019, the agency fined the hospital just over $52,000.

“Our goal is always to provide the best quality care to anyone seeking treatment at one of our facilities, and we take our compliance obligations very seriously,” Acadia spokesperson Tim Blair said in an email. He did not respond to subsequent questions about quality of care at Park Royal.

Dr. Jane Zhu, an associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, said decisions made by for-profit psychiatric hospitals may be driven by financial interests. Denying care to patients without insurance or with lower-paying forms of insurance can help increase profits, Zhu said.

Those same financial incentives may drive for-profit hospitals to turn away more complicated patients — such as those who are aggressive or violent while in the throes of a mental health crisis, Zhu added. In these situations, hospitals can save on staffing and other costs if they admit healthier patients and avoid patients with the most severe psychiatric needs — a tactic she called “cream-skimming.”

Both CMS and the HHS inspector general declined to comment on why psychiatric hospitals owned by for-profit corporations have so infrequently faced consequences for EMTALA violations.

Federal law caps the amount that the HHS inspector general can fine for EMTALA violations, an agency spokesperson said. In 2024, that amount was about $66,000 per violation for hospitals with fewer than 100 beds, and $133,000 per violation for hospitals with more than 100 beds. (The figure increases annually for inflation.)

Since 2010, in four of the five cases in which the agency settled with psychiatric hospitals for EMTALA violations, the amounts were well below the maximum allowable. The inspector general’s office declined to comment why.

Former staffers from both CMS and the inspector general’s office said that the lack of consequences for EMTALA violations may be emboldening hospitals to turn away patients that could hurt their bottom line.

“There are a lot of CEOs who will take that risk — they say, ‘Yeah, we know we dumped that patient,’ or, ‘They’re not going to fine us anyhow,’” said a former CMS official focused on EMTALA who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing work in the industry.

And even in the cases when facilities do face fines, the sums have been minimal compared to chains’ bottom lines.

“Hospitals may see those small-dollar figures as just the cost of doing business,” said a former senior official in the HHS inspector general’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of affecting future job opportunities. “They weren’t seen as a particular deterrent.”

U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said ProPublica’s findings are cause for concern.

“In the face of a large mental health crisis, we should be doing more, not less, to ensure people have access to the care and treatment they need,” he said in a statement.

“Medicate Him and Ship Him Out”
Perimeter Healthcare is one such company whose growth came years after passage of the ACA. In September 2016, Perimeter — backed by $8 billion private equity firm Ridgemont Equity Partners — acquired another company and, with it, five residential treatment facilities and three psychiatric hospitals.

By May 2019, Perimeter acquired its six and seventh hospitals. The hospitals’ former parent company, SAS Healthcare, was indicted months earlier for violating the Texas mental health code. It later pleaded guilty to one count and paid a $200,000 fine; the county dropped the other charges.

The hospitals in Dallas and Arlington aimed to “serve as the gold standard for inpatient psychiatric care,” Rod Laughlin, Perimeter’s founder, said in a press release announcing the acquisition.

But within years of Perimeter taking over, the Dallas hospital again was in the spotlight.

In August 2023, CMS found that Perimeter Behavioral Hospital of Dallas violated EMTALA in four ways when staff refused to examine a patient who had tried to kill himself. (“If that is the patient I am thinking of, he can’t be here,” a hospital staff member told a police officer at the time, according to CMS records. “All we can do is medicate him and ship him out.”) Under the law, hospitals are required to screen and stabilize all emergency patients before discharging them.

And less than a year later, at the same hospital, staff pushed for another patient to be transferred elsewhere after he started flipping chairs.

That led to a standoff between staff and police as the patient slammed against the walls, trying to escape.

“Legally we can’t touch him because he is not our patient,” a hospital staff member told an officer during the exchange, according to CMS records.

With that, the officer called another officer, who asked hospital staff if there was “a particular reason” they were refusing to admit the patient.

“This individual here is beyond our ability to treat” due to his “extreme aggression,” a staff member responded. “We can’t manage him.”

“Under EMTALA since he is on your grounds EMTALA says you guys are responsible — so we are having a disagreement here,” the second officer responded. “I guess,” the officer added, “my next call is to CMS.”

“It is not even necessary to call CMS,” the hospital staff member said, “but feel free to do that.”

Eventually, CMS was called. And some two weeks after the incident, the agency found that the hospital had violated EMTALA in three ways, including failing to provide even the most basic care through a medical examination of the patient — beyond just eyeballing him.

When hospitals breach the law, they are required to send plans to CMS detailing how they will avoid violating EMTALA in the future. Plans of correction filed by Perimeter Behavioral Hospital of Dallas said the hospital would revise some of its materials, including training slides, a test, a self-attestation form used in staff training and a medical screening form for patients. Officials also said they would monitor compliance with the law by reviewing patient logs daily. But the hospital also noted multiple instances in which officials believed “no changes were needed” to its policies. 

Beyond responding to CMS with these plans, the hospital did not face consequences from the agency, or from the HHS inspector general for either set of findings. The agencies have not responded to questions about the lack of follow-up in the Perimeter Dallas cases.

Perimeter Healthcare and Ridgemont Equity Partners did not respond to requests for comment.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Lately, lawmakers and regulators have expressed particular alarm about health facilities owned by private-equity companies — like Ridgemont Equity Partners — which typically take control of a business for a relatively short time, restructure it, and resell it at a profit.

Data on for-profit health facilities, in general, shows worse results for both hospitals and nursing homes after they are acquired by private equity firms. A January report by HHS, before the end of the Biden administration, attributed quality differences in part to private-equity firms’ tendency to “dramatically reduce the operational costs” of health care facilities.

Recent research demonstrates that private equity is playing an increasing role in psychiatric hospitals, and that has some federal officials worried. In January, the Senate Budget Committee released a bipartisan congressional staff report investigating private equity’s growing presence in health care.

Officials from the Healthcare Private Equity Association, the trade group that represents medical facilities owned by over 100 investment firms, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Instead of helping families, billionaire corporations are denying sick patients legally protected emergency care to turn healthy profits,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement to ProPublica.

“This unchecked corporate greed is leading to worse outcomes for patients,” Merkley added, “particularly those who struggle with mental health crises.”
        
             

                                    
        
                        This reporting was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2025 16:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>For-Profit, Corporations, Are, Buying, More, Psychiatric, Hospitals., Some, Flout, Federal, Law, With, Scarce, Repercussions.</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>How Much European Real Estate is Owned by Russians? The EU has no Idea</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/how-much-european-real-estate-is-owned-by-russians-the-eu-has-no-idea</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/how-much-european-real-estate-is-owned-by-russians-the-eu-has-no-idea</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Despite sweeping sanctions, Russian nationals can still legally purchase property in the EU. Several member states view this as a major security risk. Our investigation reveals how an EU-wide ban collapsed due to the resistance of a single country. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://correctiv.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/immobilien-eu-russland-talinn-zypern-scaled.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:55:11 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>correctiv</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>How, Much, European, Real, Estate, Owned, Russians, The, has, Idea</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Psychiatric Hospitals Turn Away Patients Who Need Urgent Care. The Facilities Face Few Consequences.</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/psychiatric-hospitals-turn-away-patients-who-need-urgent-care-the-facilities-face-few-consequences</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/psychiatric-hospitals-turn-away-patients-who-need-urgent-care-the-facilities-face-few-consequences</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Eli Cahan for ProPublica                
                                             

        
                        This article describes attempted suicide.

        

    


                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Late one Saturday night in May 2023, Melissa Keele’s phone rang. Her son had been found alone in the desert of Colorado’s Grand Valley. He was naked; his clothes, phone, keys and car were nowhere to be found.

Keele rushed out to her own vehicle and floored it, her headlights piercing through the pitch black. For years, her son had been dealing with severe mental illness. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he hit a breaking point and attempted suicide by driving off a cliff on the highway. “God told him he needed to die,” Keele recalled him telling her.

Eventually, she picked him up — and he didn’t look good. Fearing for his safety, Keele immediately took her then-21-year-old son to West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction.
        
    
                    

    If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741




        
    
                    
The facility, which called itself “Colorado’s Best Psychiatric Hospital,” touted “exceptional psychiatric care in a world-class environment,” including a “state-of-the-art” 63,000-square-foot facility decked out with crafts areas, light therapy rooms and “cozy nooks.”

During the intake process, Keele said she told a nurse about her son’s yearslong battle with mental illness, how he had struggled to keep up with his treatments, hold down a job and keep a roof over his head. How he had stopped taking his psychiatric medications. How just before he left that night he had told his fiancee that he wanted “some alone time” in the valley’s rolling hills.

But 102 minutes after he arrived at West Springs, a nurse discharged him.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Back at home, he slipped out a few hours later while his fiancee was at work. Police found him and quickly called his mother. He again was naked; this time, he was also sunburned and dehydrated. He couldn’t explain what had happened, and he didn’t understand why he was there. Police took him to another emergency room, which deemed him “gravely disabled.”

That determination was critical. It meant that the doctors believed sending Keele’s son home could put him in imminent danger. And it meant, legally, that they could keep him against his will until he was safe. Ultimately, he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital 240 miles east in Denver, where he stayed for more than a week.

The speed with which West Springs released him prompted federal officials to investigate the hospital for failing to properly screen and stabilize him before his discharge. Within days, regulators determined the hospital had violated federal law.

The hospital had failed to comply with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, better known as EMTALA. The law, enacted in 1986, requires hospitals to screen and stabilize all emergency patients regardless of whether they have insurance. West Springs, the inspectors found, had missed key red flags related to Keele’s son’s grave disability, which could have left him seriously harmed.

It was the second time in a year that West Springs had violated EMTALA. In October 2022, inspectors declared that patients were in “immediate jeopardy” of harm or death because the hospital had failed to properly screen and treat 21 patients who showed up to its emergency room.

Two other times, it was cited for providing deficient emergency care in violation of other rules, according to federal regulators. Just one day after the October 2022 inspection report, regulators found that the hospital did not ensure that some low-level staff were “trained” or “qualified” to monitor patients being assessed for a crisis. And in February 2023, the hospital was hit with another violation for discharging suicidal patients without “evidence of being stabilized and deemed safe.”

In each instance, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency primarily responsible for enforcing EMTALA, asked West Springs to come up with a plan for how it would ensure the problems didn’t happen again. (ProPublica requested the plans of correction in May 2025 from CMS but has not yet received the records.) CMS could have terminated the hospital’s Medicare funding. Another arm of the federal government, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, could have imposed monetary penalties for the EMTALA violations.

But neither of those things happened, though the state of Colorado increased its own oversight of the hospital, mandating that it hire an outside management company in order to keep treating patients.
        
    
                        

    
        

                            
                                                        
                                                        
                                

            First image: A road near where Melissa Keele’s son attempted suicide during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Second image: West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, violated a federal law guaranteeing emergency treatment on two separate occasions in one year.
    
            (Rachel Woolf for ProPublica)
    
    
    

            
                    
    
                    
West Springs Hospital did not respond to repeated inquiries from ProPublica over a year of reporting about what actions it took to prevent future EMTALA violations. In public statements, it said it was committed to providing quality care and subsequently noted that the state restored its full unconditional license at the end of 2024. Keele’s son did not respond to multiple requests for comment and we are not publishing his name; this account is based on documents and interviews with his mother.

Over 90 psychiatric hospitals across the country have violated EMTALA in the past 15 years and almost all have faced the same lack of consequences, a ProPublica investigation has found.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Since 2019, the HHS inspector general has only issued three penalties involving EMTALA violations by psychiatric hospitals. Taken together, these penalties totalled $427,000. (The inspector general has levied additional fines against medical hospitals for inadequate care of patients with mental illness.)

CMS has pulled Medicare certification, and funding, from a handful of psychiatric hospitals, and a number of others have shut down after officials threatened to stop paying. But those cases have been the exception.

“Facilities are not facing consequences for providing poor quality of care,” said Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies the quality of care that behavioral health patients receive.

“The market isn’t punishing them and regulators are not punishing them,” Shields added. “That’s an excellent environment to make money.”

The HHS inspector general declined to comment.
        
    
                    
For its part, CMS said that West Springs “was given the opportunity to correct their deficiencies” and subsequently “was able to demonstrate compliance.” (CMS has an online portal to report suspected EMTALA violations.)

The widespread violations of EMTALA by psychiatric hospitals — and the lack of enforcement — come even as America’s mental health crisis is reaching a fever pitch, with suicide rates near record highs.

Democrats in Congress say they are concerned that budget cuts under the Trump administration may impair oversight further. In March, the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency announced that it was shuttering half of HHS’ 10 regional offices and purging 25% of the agency’s staff.

In recent months, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, and other members of the House and Senate have requested details on how cuts made by President Donald Trump may impact the core functions of HHS, such as ensuring compliance with regulations like EMTALA.

“The abrupt firing of so many dedicated public servants weakens the ability of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to conduct important oversight and enforcement work,” Doggett said in a statement responding to inquiries from ProPublica, meaning that “those who violate EMTALA and other federal health and safety laws will be able to continue avoiding accountability.”

As of yet, those requests for information have gone unanswered. “CMS will continue to enforce EMTALA,” an agency spokesperson said in response to inquiries from ProPublica. The White House did not respond to requests for comment about the impact of the DOGE cuts.
        
    
                    

    
            Numerous Psychiatric Hospitals Have Repeatedly Violated Emergency Care Regulations
                Psychiatric hospitals that have been cited for violating the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act since 2019.

    

                        
                    
                

            View the full table on ProPublica&#039;s site.
    
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
“More and More Cracks”
Nearly four decades ago, a group of doctors noticed a pattern among the patients transferred into Chicago’s largest public hospital from private facilities.

Of 467 patients transferred in, 87% were brought to Cook County Hospital “because they lacked adequate medical insurance.” Some 89% of these patients were Black or Hispanic; 81% were unemployed. Almost one-quarter of these patients were medically unstable at time of transfer, and they were more than twice as likely to die as patients who weren’t transferred.

The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, described that “strong economic incentives” raised serious questions about for-profit hospitals’ ability to “consider the condition and well being of patients objectively.”

Within months, Congress took action.
        
    
                            
    
                    
In April 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a law to prevent what became known as “patient dumping.” EMTALA is the only law that requires universal care for “emergency medical conditions” regardless of a person’s insurance status.

In the decades since, authorities have documented thousands of EMTALA violations by hospitals across the country.

In a number of cases, patients died just hours after failing to receive the care to which they were legally entitled.

Patients with mental health conditions have also been regularly denied emergency care, according to federal agencies. Since 2010, CMS has found more than 300 EMTALA violations by psychiatric hospitals specifically.

These include sending home gravely disabled patients like Keele’s son, turning away actively suicidal patients, screening out uninsured patients, and rejecting “frequent flyers,” those who return repeatedly, due to how they’ve interacted with staff in the past — among other issues. That’s despite the fact that, in some of these cases, patients met criteria for imminent risk of harm to themselves or others

“Most Americans take it as a given that they can get emergency health care when they go to a hospital, but that promise, enshrined in EMTALA, is showing more and more cracks,” Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement responding to inquiries from ProPublica.

“I Want Peace Again”
When hospitals release patients experiencing mental health crises prematurely or turn them away entirely, the consequences can be even more severe than what happened to Keele’s son in 2023.

Six years earlier and 1,500 miles to the southeast, Tom Swearengen was discharged from Lakeside Behavioral Health System in Memphis, Tennessee. Less than a week later, a neighbor in their leafy cul-de-sac noticed that “something seemed off” — Swearengen’s blinds had been open, for days, at all hours.

Upon entering the home, the neighbor found Tom’s body — and that of his wife, Margaret — on the living room floor. Margaret had sustained multiple gunshot wounds; Tom had suffered just one, in what police later classifed a murder-suicide.

It was a brutal end to a relationship that, in some ways, had seemed magical at the outset: A conversation kicked off at a Kroger butcher counter had blossomed, and Tom’s easygoing demeanor “put us at ease,” said Bret Boscaccy, Margaret’s son from a previous marriage, “because he seemed harmless.”

That perception changed when, one day, Margaret told Boscaccy and his brother that Tom was “losing his fight with alcoholism.” The news came as a surprise, Boscaccy recalled. “We didn’t see any of it,” he said.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            A family photo album shows images from early in Tom Swearengen’s marriage to Margaret.
    
            (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
On Valentine’s Day in 2017 — eight days after Tom cracked a couple ribs, split his right clavicle and bruised his lung amid a spate of drinking — he reached out for help. That’s when he and Margaret found themselves at Lakeside Behavioral.

In the ER that day, Tom’s pain was overwhelming.

“I don’t want to be here,” Tom told the Lakeside Behavioral clinician, according to a government inspection report. “I just wish something would take me. … I want peace again.” At one point in the interview, he said he wanted to hurt himself. At another, Tom described a desire to “die right now.” At a third, he shared that they had guns at home.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Under the “Suicide and Homicide/Violence Risk Factors” section of the assessment, Lakeside Behavioral’s intake clinician noted 10 distinct concerns. Tom also scored three times the threshold for hospitalization based on his recent drinking habits.

But Tom’s insurance wouldn’t cover psychiatric hospitalization, the inspection report said.

So the intake clinician called a psychiatrist, who was home, and got permission to discharge him. She characterized him as “low to no risk” of suicide or homicide. Make an appointment with your old psychiatrist, she told him. And go to Alcoholics Anonymous.

After the murder-suicide, inspectors visited the hospital and determined that the care Swearengen received violated EMTALA: There was no evidence that Lakeside Behavioral helped him in a meaningful way or that he was safe to go home.

Since August 2000, Lakeside has been owned by Universal Health Services, a for-profit corporation that operates hundreds of inpatient and outpatient behavioral health facilities, in addition to psychiatric hospitals, and made $16 billion in revenues last year. In response to inquiries about decisions made by Lakeside staff in Swearengen’s case, Universal Health Services spokesperson Jane Crawford said the company “was not going to get into details” but that it “contested the findings from CMS,” maintaining that Swearengen’s insurance status was reviewed after the medical screening exam was performed and that all EMTALA obligations were satisfied. CMS did not respond to Lakeside’s contention that its report was inaccurate, though the findings remain on the agency’s website.

The hospital did not face financial penalties after the incident and has not violated EMTALA since, according to federal inspection records. Both CMS and the HHS inspector general declined to comment on why no further action was taken against Lakeside.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Lakeside Behavioral Health
    
            (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
About six years ago, in the effort to resolve confusion about the scope of EMTALA, federal regulators sought to make explicit that the law applies to psychiatric hospitals, even if they don’t have ERs.

“The hospital is expected to … address any immediate needs,” the July 2019 guidance from CMS read, and to “keep the patient safe and as stable as possible.”

But since the clarification, violations have continued.

The inspector general declined to comment on why so few enforcement actions have been taken since the clarification, even though CMS has cited 37 psychiatric hospitals for EMTALA violations since then. (Federal watchdogs have long said the law receives only limited enforcement. In a 2001 report, the Government Accountability Office described that “the numbers of EMTALA violations and fines have been relatively small,” and highlighted the need for “effective enforcement.”)

“The law is clear: if you want to accept taxpayer money, you must see any patient who shows up to the emergency room — regardless of their ability to pay,” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, in a statement to ProPublica. “CMS should investigate these troubling allegations and hold accountable any hospitals that have violated the law.”

Boscaccy still remembers how he learned about his mother’s death. Five days after his stepfather was discharged by Lakeside, two unmarked police cars pulled up at Boscaccy’s home. The detectives knocked and asked if he knew who Margaret Swearengen was.

“As soon as they said that,” Boscaccy said, “I knew something bad happened.”

And when he learned from a reporter years later that Lakeside Behavioral never faced any consequences from the government, Boscaccy was at a loss.

“I’m kind of shocked that nothing happened,” he said. “You would think at least something — some kind of, something, would happen.”
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            Bret Boscaccy at his home. Boscaccy’s stepfather murdered his mother before killing himself, according to police.
    
            (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                            
    
                    
“A Totally Different Place”
In December 2023, six months after he was found naked in the desert, Keele’s son hit another rough patch.

During a mental health crisis that brought him to a different emergency room, he became physically aggressive toward staffers. (After their experiences with West Springs the preceding May, Keele and her son had avoided going back.)

In June 2024, her son was arrested on a warrant for assaulting the staff and brought to jail. Since then, he’s been in and out of jail. Then the hospital. Then jail again.

“‘Spiral’ is a great word for it,” Keele said. “All this stuff ripples.”

On May 16, Keele’s son was sentenced on felony charges to three years in community corrections. Keele worries that his tumble into the criminal-legal system has “just kind of compounded” his mental illness — “It’s been a long, frustrating decline,” she said.

After the incident, West Springs experienced a period of instability.

The same month as her son was discharged prematurely, the state of Colorado put West Springs under a conditional license for a series of problematic inspections, according to reporting from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. Amid the scrutiny, the hospital’s parent company was required to contract with another health provider to help run it for a year. Then, in November 2024, the company’s board of directors announced a “significant new chapter”: the hospital and the organization that owns it was ceding control to Larkin Health System — a for-profit that owns three hospitals in South Florida. A month later, the state restored the hospital’s full license.

In February, however, West Springs announced that it was closing. The hospital’s parent organization cited low patient volume as one key driver of financial pressures. In March, the hospital officially shut its doors. “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the upcoming closure of West Springs Hospital,” the hospital’s parent organization wrote in a press release. “This decision was not made lightly, and we understand the profound impact it will have on our patients, staff, and community.”

Hospital officials did not respond to multiple inquiries from ProPublica for further details about the decision. Officials from Larkin Health System also declined to comment.

Keele, for her part, wonders how her son’s life might be different had he gotten the care he needed before things turned for the worse.

“I just wish I could have gotten people to work with me when this all started,” she said “We’d be in a totally different place if we had a plan — before it got so out of control.”

Keele had hoped that West Springs, under Larkin, could “turn things around.” Given that suicide rates in the Western Slope of Colorado remain well above those in the rest of the state and the U.S., their community needed to hang on to the only psychiatric facility in the region, she said. The alternative — nothing — would certainly be worse.

Now, with West Springs’ closure, that’s their reality, Keele said. And she isn’t sure what comes next. But she does know one thing.

“For those who need care,” she said, “Denver is pretty far away.”
        
             

                                    
        
                        This reporting was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the City University of New York’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/20250407-Woolf-Mental-Health-EMTALA-01-OG.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Psychiatric, Hospitals, Turn, Away, Patients, Who, Need, Urgent, Care., The, Facilities, Face, Few, Consequences.</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Solitary confinement in ICE detention spiked during early months of the Trump administration, report finds</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/solitary-confinement-in-ice-detention-spiked-during-early-months-of-the-trump-administration-report-finds</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/solitary-confinement-in-ice-detention-spiked-during-early-months-of-the-trump-administration-report-finds</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Six years after ICIJ’s Solitary Voices investigation, Physicians for Human Rights found over 10,000 people were placed in solitary confinement over a 14-month period. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/09/2221602767-Edited-760x427.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Sep 2025 19:32:35 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Solitary, confinement, ICE, detention, spiked, during, early, months, the, Trump, administration, report, finds</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Red flags raised as ABC NEWS Verify analyses ocularist Jack McDonald&amp;apos;s online presence</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/red-flags-raised-as-abc-news-verify-analyses-ocularist-jack-mcdonalds-online-presence</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/red-flags-raised-as-abc-news-verify-analyses-ocularist-jack-mcdonalds-online-presence</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Ocularist Jack McDonald has been ordered to temporarily stop operating while the Victorian Health Complaints Commissioner continues an investigation into his work.The ABC has heard from several of Mr McDonald&#039;s clients who are unhappy with the prosthetic eyes he has made for them, which they have described as ill-fitting and unrealistic. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/34c85a1e23ec582b79880f1eb4fac522" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Sep 2025 17:34:05 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>abc.net.au</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Red, flags, raised, ABC, NEWS, Verify, analyses, ocularist, Jack, McDonalds, online, presence</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Pentagon Bans Tech Vendors From Using China&#45;Based Personnel After ProPublica Investigation</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/pentagon-bans-tech-vendors-from-using-china-based-personnel-after-propublica-investigation</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/pentagon-bans-tech-vendors-from-using-china-based-personnel-after-propublica-investigation</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Renee Dudley                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
What Happened
The Defense Department has tightened cybersecurity requirements for tech companies that sell cloud computing services to the Pentagon.

The updates, issued this month, ban IT vendors from using China-based personnel to work on department computer systems and require companies to maintain a digital paper trail of maintenance performed by their foreign engineers.
        
    
                    
Background
The changes follow a ProPublica investigation that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to maintain government computer systems for nearly a decade — a practice that left some of the country’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

U.S.-based supervisors, known as “digital escorts,” were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills.
        
    
                            
    
                    
What They Said
The Defense Department now says in its “Security Requirements Guide” that only “personnel from non-adversarial countries” may work on its cloud systems and that the escorts supervising those foreign workers “must be technically qualified in the code/system or technology they are providing access to.”

In addition, cloud providers must maintain detailed audit logs, a digital trail of actions in computer systems. The logs “must include identification of the escort and escorted,” including country of origin, as well as details of commands executed and settings changed.

Why It Matters
Until our reporting, top Pentagon officials said they had been unaware of Microsoft’s digital escort system, which the company developed as a work-around to a Defense Department requirement that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement poses major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data. Leading members of Congress, in turn, have called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called “a national betrayal.”

The Pentagon is now conducting an investigation into the digital escort program, with a focus on Microsoft’s China-based engineers.
        
    
                            
    
                    
Response
Following ProPublica’s reporting, Microsoft announced in July that it would stop using China-based engineers to service Defense Department cloud systems. In a statement for this article, a spokesperson said the company was committed to implementing the department’s new requirements.

“Our commitment to national security is foundational, and we remain focused on providing the most secure services possible to the US government,” the spokesperson said. “We recently implemented changes to our Department support model, and will continue to work with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols in light of the new directives.”
        
    
                            
             

                                    
        
                        Doris Burke contributed research. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/tech-project-dod-impact-FINAL.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2025 16:23:37 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Pentagon, Bans, Tech, Vendors, From, Using, China-Based, Personnel, After, ProPublica, Investigation</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Ohio Chaplain Freed From Jail as DHS Drops Deportation Case</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ohio-chaplain-freed-from-jail-as-dhs-drops-deportation-case</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ohio-chaplain-freed-from-jail-as-dhs-drops-deportation-case</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Hannah Allam                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
An Egyptian chaplain whose detention sparked a community uproar and became a test of counterterrorism powers in immigration court was released from an Ohio jail on Friday as the Department of Homeland Security abruptly withdrew its case against him.

The outcome is a victory for 51-year-old Ayman Soliman, a popular Muslim cleric whose hundreds of supporters include families he counseled at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The DHS move to restore his asylum status and drop deportation efforts comes after court filings documented errors and inconsistencies in the government’s evidence portraying him as a terrorist.

Just before 1 p.m., Soliman walked out of Butler County Jail with a broad smile and a plastic bag containing his belongings, a moment filmed by his friends and advocates. He had been scheduled for an immigration trial next week and faced deportation to Egypt, which he fled in 2014 because of political persecution.

“This is beyond my dreams,” Soliman told ProPublica in a call minutes after he was freed. “I’m still overwhelmed by the surprise.”

Soliman’s asylum status was reinstated and his application for a green card has been revived, said Robert Ratliff, one of his attorneys. Early Friday, Ratliff had filed documents showing wording discrepancies in what should have been identical asylum termination notices to Soliman. One version called him a “member” of a terrorist group and the other accused him of providing illegal aid to a terrorist group. Soliman has denied both contentions.

The filing on Friday documented the latest in a series of inconsistencies in the government’s evidence, which ProPublica reported this month.

“From the beginning, everything was flawed,” Ratliff said. “This is certainly a victory for him, and it’s huge. Unfortunately, he had to spend approximately 70 days in jail to get to this point.”
        
    
                            
    
                    
A DHS official said immigration authorities “cannot discuss the details of individual immigration cases and adjudication decisions.” But the official added, “An alien — even with a pending application or lawful status — is not shielded from immigration enforcement action.” The agency is “responsible for administering America’s lawful immigration system, ensuring the integrity of the immigration process.”

After leaving the jail, Soliman joined Friday communal prayers at a local mosque, where an imam welcomed his release as a godsend and celebrated his friend as “a free man, as he always should be.”

Flanked by supporters at a news conference Friday evening, Soliman said he was still in disbelief that his day had begun in custody. He’d just come from a restaurant where he enjoyed “salad and fruit and meat” after weeks of jail food. He said he was “out of words” for the support system that sprang to his defense. He said he received 760 letters while in jail from people he’d never met.

“I’m free today because of this advocacy,” Soliman said. “Don’t underestimate your voice.”
        
    
                    

    
            Ayman Soliman Is Free
        

    
        
            
            
            

            Soliman is greeted as he exits Butler County Jail in Ohio.
    
            (Courtesy of Ahmed Elkady)
    
    
    

            Watch video ➜
        
    
    
        
    
                    
Soliman’s ordeal, which spanned two administrations, is more complex than most targets of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

After fleeing persecution over his journalistic and protest activities in Egypt, Soliman had been granted asylum in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Then, in the last month of the presidency of Joe Biden, immigration authorities moved to revoke the status based on sharply disputed claims of fraud and aid to a terrorist group. Once Trump returned to office weeks later, court records show, immigration officials bumped up the terrorism claims and formalized the asylum termination on June 3.

DHS had built the case on allegations that Soliman’s involvement with an Islamic charity provided illegal aid, or “material support,” to the Muslim Brotherhood. But neither the charity nor the Brotherhood is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and an Egyptian court found no official ties between the groups.

Material support laws ban almost any type of aid to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups. Prosecutors describe the laws as an invaluable tool against would-be attackers, but civil liberties groups have long complained of overreach.

The Biden-era DHS, which first flagged the charity issue, said it would revoke Soliman’s asylum if “a preponderance of the evidence supports termination” after a hearing, according to the December 2024 notice. At the time, court records show, the material support allegation was listed as a secondary concern after more common asylum questions about the veracity of official documents and Soliman’s claims of persecution in Egypt.

Once Trump came to power weeks later, Soliman’s attorneys said, the material support claims metastasized, with U.S. authorities declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a Tier III, or undesignated, terrorist group and adding new arguments about ties to Hamas. The Brotherhood, a nearly century-old Islamist political movement, renounced violence in the 1970s, though Hamas and other spinoffs are on the U.S. blacklist.

Court filings show DHS attorneys introducing, then withdrawing or amending, materials to build a case linking Soliman to the Brotherhood through the charity. Almost immediately, the evidence began unraveling.

Among the supporting documents filed by the government were three academic reports by scholars with deep knowledge of Islamic charities in Egypt. Soliman’s legal team filed statements from all three balking at how DHS had cherry-picked their research. The scholars described “important mistakes of fact and interpretation,” “a mischaracterization” and “a dishonest manipulation of my text.”

Separate from U.S. attempts to tie Soliman to the Brotherhood was a puzzling footnote in which DHS attorneys alluded to warrants for “murder and terrorism” in Iraq, a country Soliman has never visited. DHS acknowledged in court that the line had been an error — after it had been included in the government’s successful argument for keeping him in custody.

Legal scholars specializing in national security were monitoring the case as a gauge of how much power the Trump administration could wield at the intersection of counterterrorism and immigration.

Ratliff said that the win was important but that he didn’t think the outcome would deter DHS from invoking similar arguments in other immigration cases, especially involving cartels, which the Trump administration designated as terrorist organizations, unlocking material support powers.

“The connections in this case were always going to be too tenuous to withstand scrutiny,” Ratliff said. “I think, though, that this format is still the format we’re going to see DHS take.”

Soliman’s supporters — from religious leaders to university students to parents he met at the hospital — welcomed his release.

“I know tomorrow he’ll get right back to the work he does, of caring for his community,” said Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, one of the advocacy groups that pushed for his release. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/Ohio-Imam-Folo_2025-09-19-202911_ewhp.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2025 16:19:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ohio, Chaplain, Freed, From, Jail, DHS, Drops, Deportation, Case</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>“Unacceptable”: Prominent U.S. Senators Demand FDA Provide Names of Troubled Foreign Drugmakers Skirting Import Bans</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/unacceptable-prominent-us-senators-demand-fda-provide-names-of-troubled-foreign-drugmakers-skirting-import-bans</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/unacceptable-prominent-us-senators-demand-fda-provide-names-of-troubled-foreign-drugmakers-skirting-import-bans</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose, ProPublica, and Katherine Dailey, Medill Investigative Lab                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Two prominent U.S. senators are demanding the Food and Drug Administration provide an immediate accounting of the foreign generic drugmakers allowed to skirt bans meant to keep dangerous medication out of the United States.

The top members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging cited a recent ProPublica investigation that exposed how the FDA quietly awarded special passes to troubled manufacturers so they could continue shipping medication to Americans even after the agency barred their factories because of serious quality concerns.

“These exemptions undermine the goals of U.S. policy, threaten the safety of drugs, and place Americans’ health at risk,” the senators wrote in a bipartisan letter to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. 

Committee Chair Rick Scott, R-Fla., and ranking member Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., described “urgent concerns” about the FDA’s oversight of foreign drugmakers and whether medication coming into the United States was safe.

ProPublica found the agency granted exemptions from import bans to more than 20 foreign factories since 2013, including a Sun Pharma plant in India where quality breaches repeatedly risked the contamination of sterile injectable drugs. All told, ProPublica found, the FDA allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients into the United States from banned factories, including antibiotics, anti-seizure drugs and chemotherapy treatments.

The FDA said the exemptions were used to prevent shortages of essential medication. The practice, however, was largely kept hidden from doctors, pharmacists, consumers and lawmakers. Despite a 2012 law requiring the FDA to describe all the ways it was dealing with drug shortages, the agency didn’t mention the practice to Congress until 2024 — and even then, only in a single footnote of a 25-page report. 

Scott said he fears for patient safety.
        
    
                    
“We’ve seen the FDA impose import bans on foreign drug manufacturing facilities for violating basic quality and safety standards, only to later issue exemptions … that allow drugs from those same facilities to still be imported simply because they’re on a shortage list,” he said in a statement to ProPublica. “That means the FDA may be allowing potentially unsafe, low-quality drugs into American homes, and our seniors are especially at risk. That’s unacceptable.”

Sun Pharma has said it maintains “a relentless focus on quality” and is working with the FDA to resolve regulatory issues. The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency previously said that companies receiving exemptions from import bans were required to conduct extra drug quality testing with third-party oversight to “help assure consumer safety.”

Makary is new at the FDA: He took the helm of the agency earlier this year after he was appointed by President Donald Trump and has called for “radical transparency” in agency decision-making.

The letter from Scott and Gillibrand comes on the heels of a Senate hearing on drug safety, where a former FDA inspector who spent years in India and China said he repeatedly found “shortcuts and fraud” at substandard factories and feared bad medicine was being shipped en masse to the United States.

“What we found was terrifying,” said Peter Baker, who reported a series of failures overseas from 2012 to 2018.

Baker said his findings and those of other inspectors were undermined by the exemptions from import bans.

Inspectors over the years have uncovered filthy water, vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” at foreign factories, government records show. Documents on drug quality testing have been destroyed, and in one case, workers poured acid on some that had been stuffed in a trash bag. 

ProPublica found the decisions to override those findings and exempt drugs from import bans were made by a small, secretive group of agency insiders who reported to the longtime head of drug safety, Janet Woodcock.

In an interview, Woodcock told ProPublica that the FDA believed the exempted drugs were safe. “We felt we didn’t have to make it a public thing,” she said.

Woodcock retired in 2024 after nearly four decades at the agency.

In their letter to Makary, the senators asked the FDA to explain how it defines a drug shortage and provide market share data for all drugs exempted from import bans since 2020. They also asked for a complete list of those drugs.

The FDA has never released such a list. ProPublica published one in August after a yearlong investigation. Reporters harnessed artificial intelligence and wrote code that used keyword search and pattern matching to pull exempted drug names and manufacturing locations from hundreds of old reports that were put out by the FDA and are no longer on the agency’s website. The reports identified factories barred from shipping drugs to the United States and at times referenced the exemptions with almost no explanation.

ProPublica found the FDA did not regularly test the exempted drugs to ensure they were safe or use its massive repository of drug-related complaints to proactively track whether they were harming unsuspecting patients.

“I am deeply concerned by the FDA’s pattern of allowing foreign generic drugmakers to export drugs to America even when their facilities have been found to fall below our standards,” Gillibrand said. “This is a threat to our seniors and our national security.”

Several House members have also raised concerns. 

“The FDA should never have allowed corporations with unsafe foreign factories to import risky drugs or ingredients,” Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Pa., said in a statement. “We need stronger and better domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing, and we need a government that refuses to roll the dice on our health.”

The senators asked the FDA to provide more information about the exemptions by mid-October. The committee is planning to hold a second hearing. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20250919-fda-impact.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2025 16:19:47 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>“Unacceptable”:, Prominent, U.S., Senators, Demand, FDA, Provide, Names, Troubled, Foreign, Drugmakers, Skirting, Import, Bans</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Amid Rise of RFK Jr., Officials Waver on Drinking Water Fluoridation — Even in the State Where It Started</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/amid-rise-of-rfk-jr-officials-waver-on-drinking-water-fluoridation-even-in-the-state-where-it-started</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/amid-rise-of-rfk-jr-officials-waver-on-drinking-water-fluoridation-even-in-the-state-where-it-started</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Anna Clark                
                                             

                                                                    
            
                ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

            

                

      
  



                    
Just 15 months after receiving an award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for excellence in community water fluoridation, the city of Grayling, Michigan, changed course.

With little notice or fanfare, council members voted unanimously in May to end Grayling’s decadeslong treatment program. The city shut down the equipment used to deliver the drinking water additive less than two weeks later. 

Although it already paid for them, the town returned six unopened barrels of the fluoride treatment to the supplier.

Personal choice was the issue, said City Manager Erich Podjaske. “Why are we forcing something on residents and business owners, some of which don’t want fluoride in their water?” he said. He saw arguments for and against treatment in his research, he said, and figured that those who want fluoride can still get it at the dentist or in their toothpaste.  

Drinking water fluoridation is widely heralded as a public health triumph, but it’s had critics since it was pioneered 80 years ago in Grand Rapids, about 150 miles southwest of Grayling. While once largely on the fringes, fluoridation skeptics now hold sway in federal, state and local government, and their arguments have seeped into the mainstream.

Even in the state where the treatment began, communities are backpedaling. And because customer notice requirements are patchy, people may not even know about it when their fluoridation stops.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has called fluoride “industrial waste” and supports an end to community water fluoridation. The head of the Food and Drug Administration said on a newscast that the CDC’s online description of water fluoridation as one of the greatest public health achievements is “misinformation.”

The CDC, which is in the midst of a leadership exodus and staff revolt, and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their respective approaches to fluoride in drinking water. At the same time, President Donald Trump’s administration dismantled the CDC’s Division of Oral Health, which, among other initiatives, provided research and technical assistance on fluoridation. That’s the office that helped present awards for well-run programs like the one in Grayling.
        
    
                    
Since Kennedy was elevated to the nation’s top health post, Utah and Florida became the first states to ban communities from adding fluoride to public drinking water. The Utah ban included measures to make prescription fluoride supplements more accessible — but now, the FDA is moving to remove certain types of those supplements for children from the market. 

Altogether, legislation was introduced this year in at least 21 states to prohibit or roll back provisions related to adding fluoride to public water systems, according to Abby Francl, policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. In addition, citing Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, Oklahoma’s governor issued an executive order instructing state agencies to cease promotion of fluoridation in the public water supply while it reviews the practice.

Some local communities across the country opted to stop treatment this year, including at least four in Alabama, the state with the second-lowest number of dentists per resident. Others are debating it. On Michigan’s east side, the medical director of St. Clair County’s health department urged the agency to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems. Two Upper Peninsula cities with a shared water system had special council meetings this summer on fluoridation. In Hillsdale, the acting mayor has said that ending fluoridation is a top priority.

“I want to reform the water system now that we have RFK in Health and Human Services,” Joshua Paladino told a local paper in November. Paladino added in an email to ProPublica that he sees public water fluoridation as an imprecise tool because it gives a standard dose across the population. 

According to Michigan’s environmental agency, some communities had temporarily stopped fluoridation and were “hesitant to restart because of uncertainty.” That prompted it to issue a five-page statement with the state health department in March, stressing that the levels recommended for water suppliers — 0.7 milligrams per liter of water — have no adverse health effects and that fluoridation benefits everyone. 

“Local anti-fluoride movements can be vocal and persistent, but do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the greater community,” the statement said. 

Communities that end fluoridation will see more decaying teeth, according to Margherita Fontana, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Young children, older adults, people with disabilities and people who are poor are especially at risk, she said, but everyone will be vulnerable. Excessive tooth decay in children can require treatment in hospitals, under anesthesia. In rare but extreme cases, it can lead to death.

“It’s unfortunate, because we know how to prevent the disease,” Fontana said. “So it just seems like we’re going backwards in time rather than forward.”

A handful of states require customer notification when fluoridation ends. New York mandates such notice, yet fluoridation in Buffalo lapsed for years before it was widely known. Outside Detroit, the city of Wyandotte suspended treatment about a decade ago, despite saying on its website until early this summer that it used fluoride. The claim was removed only after a local reporter raised the issue.

Michigan doesn’t have a statewide protocol for notifying residents when fluoridation stops. The environmental agency’s spokesperson said in an email that while it strongly recommends that communities inform customers, it doesn’t have the authority to compel them.

Grayling’s water operator, Josh Carlson, said a district engineer at the agency told him he just needed to tell the state if the town decided to stop fluoridating the water.

“It was almost like she was caught off guard that we actually did it,” Carlson said.
        
    
                    
From Fringe to Mainstream
Water fluoridation began in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second-largest city, as part of a planned trial intended to last 15 years. Muskegon, on the Lake Michigan shore, served as the control, meaning its water was not treated with a fluoride additive. An Illinois city with naturally occurring fluoride in its water was another point of comparison. 

Six years in, Muskegon officials withdrew from the trial after determining that the health benefits were so significant, they couldn’t deny treatment any longer to Muskegon’s children. Similar studies elsewhere continued for years, showing positive outcomes.

“It was very usual to have dentures at a very young age” at the time, Fontana said. Fluoride treatment “was such a fantastic discovery, something so easy that nature already provided. It was already there. It was the greatest discovery, really, for oral health.”

Grand Rapids celebrates its role in public health history with plaques and a totemic sculpture. But the treatment has been criticized since the early days as, variously, a Communist plot, forced mass medication and an industrial byproduct that causes more harm than good. (Fluoride additives are commonly derived from the processing of phosphate fertilizer.)

Even as fluoridation became widespread, opposition persisted. Today’s critics note that fluoride is now available in toothpaste, as well as in ingestible drops and tablets like the ones for children that the FDA is working to remove from the marketplace. Dental care is also more accessible than it was in the 1940s. The need that fluoridated water was meant to address, critics say, isn’t as urgent.

While progress has made fluoridation’s effects less dramatic, they’re still significant. It was initially credited with a 65% reduction in tooth decay; now, it’s about 25%. No other fluoride source compares to the cost-effectiveness of drinking water, proponents say, especially for those least able to access dental care, either because of cost or because they live in areas with a shortage of dental providers.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            “Steel Water,” a sculpture by artist Cyril Lixenberg, was erected in 2007 in Grand Rapids to celebrate the community’s role in advancing water fluoridation.
    
            (Joel Seewald, HMdb.org)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Community water fluoridation is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Dental Association and the American Medical Association. The CDC, at least for the moment, still recommends it. 

Advocates say that its benefits are so pervasive, they’ve become invisible to many.

“Known benefits that are not visible, they take it for granted, whereas unknown risks are what they are always worried about,” said Jayanth Kumar, lead researcher on a systematic review of community water fluoridation and IQ. “Florida didn’t ban alcohol. Florida didn’t ban cigarettes. But they banned fluoride.”

Critics say the National Toxicology Program’s “state of the science” report from last year shows an association between fluoridated drinking water and a lowered IQ in children. But that assessment — which is both contested and much-cited — involves fluoride levels that are more than twice what the federal government recommends for drinking water, and it’s based on limited studies conducted outside the U.S., with different water conditions.
        
    
                    

    
        

                        
                    
                

            A post made on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ X account, celebrating Florida’s ban on local governments adding fluoride to public drinking water, was sent to ProPublica in response to a query to the governor’s office about the state’s policy.
    
            (Obtained by ProPublica)
    
    
    

    

        
    
                    
Even the report’s abstract says that “more studies are needed to fully understand the potential for lower fluoride exposure to affect children’s IQ.”

In a lawsuit brought against the EPA by groups opposed to water fluoridation, a district judge relied in part on the NTP analysis in ruling that fluoridation presents such an “unreasonable risk” that the agency must take action. Even as it appeals the decision, the EPA said its review of new science on fluoride in drinking water “is being done in coordination with Secretary Kennedy and HHS.”

The court ruling, the NTP report and the wavering stance of federal agencies have empowered a backlash to fluoridation in state and local governments.

Stuart Cooper, executive director of the Fluoride Action Network, said he’s seen momentum shift over the last two decades as his group sought to eliminate fluoride treatment, not least as a plaintiff in the EPA lawsuit. Kennedy has given a jolt to the movement, he said. Now, “we have allies at every level.” 

“Legislators and city councilors are calling us instead of me having to do vice versa,” he said.

Tooth Decay and Regrets
In Grayling, questions about fluoridation were brewing for at least a year before the town changed course. Podjaske, the city manager, said he discussed it off and on with Carlson, the city’s water operator. When it came time to reorder the fluoride additive, Podjaske wondered: Is this really necessary?

Carlson asked the state’s environmental agency about the protocol for discontinuing treatment and was told to keep the state posted. In April, Podjaske suggested adding the fluoridation question to the City Council’s agenda. At the May meeting, the council voted 4-0 to end treatment.

“I figured the best option was don’t push it on people,’’ council member Jack Pettyjohn said about his vote. “Don’t force them to have it in their water.”

There wasn’t any outreach to the public or health experts ahead of the vote. Meeting minutes say that Podjaske and Carlson discussed the removal of the fluoride additive after the water operator received “additional education and training.” 

But both men say that isn’t right. Fluoridation was already on the agenda when Carlson attended a training that wasn’t about the treatment, but where he had an informal conversation with an instructor that made him worry about fluoride’s safety.

The vote would’ve occurred even without Kennedy’s activism, Podjaske and Pettyjohn said. Carlson, though, noted how Grayling’s pivot played out in context of “some of the new narratives coming out of Washington.”

“There’s a lot of mixed feelings about RFK Jr., but he seems to be anti-fluoride,” Carlson said. “I don’t know if that’s driving people’s complaints about fluoride.” With the proliferation of social media, he said, “I could see that being a factor, in the fact there’s more people with an opinion now.”

At the same time, he said, locals are more tuned in to water issues following the Flint water crisis and the contamination of waterways with PFAS chemicals linked to a nearby military base. PFAS are a group of “forever chemicals” that can carry a cancer risk.

Carlson said that in the occasional feedback he’s gotten on fluoridation over the last couple of decades, “the negatives were more than the positives in recent years.”

Following input from the state environmental agency, Grayling posted a notice about the change online in August, 10 weeks after treatment stopped. Some people didn’t see it. Mary Bobenmoyer, owner and general manager of Our Town Coffee &amp; Treats, didn’t know until a reporter asked her about it in late August. “They did it?” she said.

Bobenmoyer spent seven years as a dental assistant. She encourages children especially to get fluoride treatment at the dentist. But, she said, “I personally don’t think it should be filtered in our water. We should have free and clear water.”  

Over in Grand Rapids, there’s sporadic pushback on fluoridation, said water system manager Wayne Jernberg. But he hasn’t noticed any recent escalation. And he doesn’t see why there would be.

“We rely on the science of us,” Jernberg said. “We’ve been adding it for 80 years, OK? And we don’t see any issues in our community.”

Meanwhile, reports on dental health have caused some communities that dropped fluoridation to reconsider.

In Canada, just across the river from Detroit, the City Council of Windsor, Ontario, voted to stop fluoridation in 2013 after lengthy public debate. Less than six years later, the county health agency reported troubling outcomes from oral health screenings at area schools. It found that the percentage of children with decay or requiring urgent care increased 51% in five years, while the percentage of children that didn’t require any care decreased by 43%. The Windsor council soon decided to reintroduce water fluoridation, citing it as “a key prevention strategy.”  

In the province of Alberta, Calgary’s council voted in 2011 to stop fluoridation in part because of community skepticism and because expensive repairs to the equipment were needed, according to Councillor Gian-Carlo Carrà. But in time, researchers found that local children developed significantly more cavities than their peers in Edmonton, where water is fluoridated. 

“We saved ourselves some money,” said Carrà. “Fast-forward 10 years, and the results are clear that dental outcomes for Calgarians are worse after 10 years of not having fluoride in the water.”

When fluoridation was put on the ballot in 2021, 62% of voters supported its reintroduction. It took more than 28 million Canadian dollars and several years to start treatment again. 

But, Carrà said, those costs — and the money to run the system — seem worthwhile. “I’m just much more interested in doing as much good as I possibly can,” Carrà said.

In Grayling, speaking more than two months after voting to end the treatment, Pettyjohn said he has an open mind about the future of fluoridation. “I would totally look at readdressing it, especially if the people of Grayling really wanted us to,” he said.

For now, though, he said he’s heard nothing negative from residents. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:19:48 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Amid, Rise, RFK, Jr., Officials, Waver, Drinking, Water, Fluoridation, —, Even, the, State, Where, Started</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>ProPublica Names Dana Chiueh and Aaron Brezel as Lenfest AI Engineering Fellows</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/propublica-names-dana-chiueh-and-aaron-brezel-as-lenfest-ai-engineering-fellows</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/propublica-names-dana-chiueh-and-aaron-brezel-as-lenfest-ai-engineering-fellows</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by ProPublica                
                                          

        
	ProPublica has selected Dana Chiueh and Aaron Brezel as AI engineering fellows as part of its participation in the Lenfest Institute’s AI Collaborative and Fellowship program, a nationwide news industry effort supported by Microsoft and OpenAI to explore how artificial intelligence technologies can responsibly contribute to the work of mission-driven newsrooms. The Lenfest AI program selected ProPublica among 10 regional and national news organizations for the two-year fellowships.
            
	The ProPublica fellowships are made possible through funding from both the Lenfest Institute and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.
            
	“We’re thrilled to welcome Dana and Aaron as our first AI engineering fellows,” said Ben Werdmuller, ProPublica’s senior director of technology. “Their unique combination of technical expertise and journalism experience positions them perfectly to help us explore how AI can safely enhance investigative reporting while maintaining the rigorous standards, ethical principles and human expertise that define ProPublica’s work.”
            
	Chiueh was most recently a news innovation engineer at the Minnesota Star Tribune, participating in the Lenfest program on the newsroom’s behalf. She was a recipient of a Brown Institute Magic Grant for developing Tipbot, a tool that automates the gathering of missing information from submitted tips, and previously reported for The Dallas Morning News and Los Angeles Times, among others.
            
	Brezel joins ProPublica from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, where he was lead software engineer. Before that, he was a software engineer at The Washington Post, where, as a founding member of the reporting tools team, he built software for journalists across the newsroom.
            
	About ProPublica 
ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With a team of more than 150 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics, focusing on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Its reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels. Since it began publishing in 2008, ProPublica has received eight Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 16 George Polk Awards.
            
	About the Lenfest Institute for Journalism  
The Lenfest Institute creates solutions for the next era of local news by investing in sustainable business models at the intersection of local journalism, responsible use of technology and service to community in Philadelphia and nationwide. 
            
	About the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation 
The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation is a philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence and data science solutions to create a thriving, equitable and sustainable future for all. PJMF works in partnership with public, private and social institutions to drive progress on our most pressing challenges, including digital health, climate change, broad digital access and data maturity in the social sector. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:19:49 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>ProPublica, Names, Dana, Chiueh, and, Aaron, Brezel, Lenfest, Engineering, Fellows</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>ProPublica and Other News Organizations Fight to Unseal Texas AG Ken Paxton’s Divorce Records</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/propublica-and-other-news-organizations-fight-to-unseal-texas-ag-ken-paxtons-divorce-records</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/propublica-and-other-news-organizations-fight-to-unseal-texas-ag-ken-paxtons-divorce-records</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom                
                                             

        
                        ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.*
This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune.

        

    
      
  



                    
A group of state and national media organizations, including The Texas Newsroom, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, are arguing in court that records in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s divorce case should be made available to the public.

The organizations filed their plea to intervene with the Collin County district court handling the Paxtons’ case on Tuesday. The filing requests that the court reverse a July decision to seal the case records, arguing that both the attorney general and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, are elected officials subject to public scrutiny. The documents should be available for “review and inspection” with limited exceptions, the media organizations said. 

“The grounds alleged for divorce and the disposition of property are of substantial public interest because they bear on integrity in public office, potential use of public resources, and transparency in judicial proceedings,” the media organizations argued.

The organizations noted that family law cases across the country, including divorce proceedings, are presumed public and that the couple’s political positions in Texas and Paxton’s decision in April to run for U.S. Senate add to the public interest. 

Paxton served more than a decade in the Texas House of Representatives and Texas Senate before his election as state attorney general in 2014. Angela Paxton was first elected to the state Senate in 2018. 

“Where, as here, the parties are not private citizens but elected constitutional officers, the need for transparency is heightened, not diminished,” the filing read. “Allegations that might suggest abuse of marital assets, concealment of financial information, or personal conduct inconsistent with public responsibility are not merely private — they are of public consequence.”

The eight organizations that signed on to the filing are Dow Jones &amp; Co. (publisher of The Wall Street Journal), The Washington Post, Hearst Newspapers (which owns the Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News), ProPublica, The Texas Lawbook, the Texas Observer, The Texas Tribune and The Texas Newsroom.
        
    
                    
Angela Paxton filed for divorce in July, accusing her husband of adultery. Soon after, she requested all records in the case be placed under seal, arguing that doing so would “not have an adverse affect on the public health or safety.” 

Judge Ray Wheless granted her request in mid-July. He then recused himself. It’s not clear why, but Wheless and his wife, also a district court judge in Collin County, have donated to the Paxtons’ campaigns in the past. 

The current judge listed online as presiding over the case is Lindsey Wynne.

After news of the divorce went public, Ken Paxton posted on the social media site X that he and his wife “decided to start a new chapter in our lives.” He attributed the divorce to the work of political enemies. In court, his attorney filed a brief general denial of Angela Paxton’s divorce petition.

In their filing calling for the records to be unsealed, the media organizations note that Paxton has been accused of impropriety at least six times while in elected office, including fraud, abuse of office and self-dealing. 

In one of the most serious cases, he was charged with multiple felonies in 2015 for allegedly encouraging investors to buy into a McKinney, Texas, tech firm without telling them that he had a financial interest in the company and also failing to register with the state before soliciting clients for a friend’s investment firm. After years in court, Paxton cut a deal to do community service in lieu of facing trial. He did not admit guilt in this case and has not been convicted of a crime. 

Then in 2023, the Texas House impeached him for alleged official misconduct, some of it related to accusations that he swapped political favors with a campaign donor in exchange for a job for the woman with whom he was allegedly having an affair. Paxton called it a political witch hunt and denied that he broke the law. 

After a trial, the Texas Senate acquitted him and he was reinstated to office. 

“These sustained, serious, and high-profile matters raise questions about AG Paxton’s conduct in public office and his fidelity to the law,” the organizations argued.

The couple’s assets, which were scrutinized during the impeachment process, will be a subject of the divorce case. 

The Paxtons have purchased multiple homes and parcels of land in several states but failed for years to disclose them on state ethics filings. 

This summer, after The Texas Newsroom revealed the lack of disclosure, the couple listed more information about the property acquisitions on their annual financial statements. In a note on the documents, Paxton said he believes the disclosure rules are murky and contradictory and that he was only disclosing properties “that continue to have bank notes serviced by the filer and/or the filer’s spouse.”

Angela Paxton has asked for a “disproportionate share” of the couple’s assets in her initial divorce filing, which The Texas Newsroom obtained prior to the records being sealed. She wanted sole use of their McKinney home while the case is pending as well exclusive access to her business account. 

She also wants Ken Paxton to admit fault in the breakup of the marriage.

A lawyer for Ken Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the media organizations’ request. A spokesperson for Angela Paxton declined to comment.
        
             

                                    
        
                        Update, Sept. 17, 2025: This story has been updated to add a response from Angela Paxton’s spokesperson.

        

    


                                    
        
                        Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:19:48 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ProPublica</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>ProPublica, and, Other, News, Organizations, Fight, Unseal, Texas, Ken, Paxton’s, Divorce, Records</media:keywords>
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<title>FinCEN plans to delete data on U.S. companies from beneficial ownership database</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/fincen-plans-to-delete-data-on-us-companies-from-beneficial-ownership-database</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/fincen-plans-to-delete-data-on-us-companies-from-beneficial-ownership-database</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Five years after ICIJ published the FinCEN Files, the Trump administration has walked back significant anti-money laundering rules. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/09/Untitled-design-6.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2025 04:24:41 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>FinCEN, plans, delete, data, U.S., companies, from, beneficial, ownership, database</media:keywords>
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<title>Fitters Diversified, syarikat dikuasai Jacky Phang didenda  RM2 juta Bursa Malaysia: Mengapa Tindakan Begitu Lambat?</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/fitters-diversified-syarikat-dikuasai-jacky-phang-didenda-rm2-juta-bursa-malaysia-mengapa-tindakan-begitu-lambat</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/fitters-diversified-syarikat-dikuasai-jacky-phang-didenda-rm2-juta-bursa-malaysia-mengapa-tindakan-begitu-lambat</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Bursa Malaysia akhirnya mengenakan denda RM2 juta ke atas Fitters Diversified Bhd serta lima orang pengarahnya kerana gagal ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2025/09/jacky-Fitters-Diversified-.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sun, 14 Sep 2025 05:39:56 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>thecorporatesecret</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Fitters, Diversified, syarikat, dikuasai, Jacky, Phang, didenda, RM2, juta, Bursa, Malaysia:, Mengapa, Tindakan, Begitu, Lambat</media:keywords>
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<title>The Great Reverse Migration: Traveling With Migrants Abandoning Their Journey to the United States</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-great-reverse-migration-traveling-with-migrants-abandoning-their-journey-to-the-united-states</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-great-reverse-migration-traveling-with-migrants-abandoning-their-journey-to-the-united-states</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This investigation was produced in partnership with Rolling Stone and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. As more migrants self-deport and turn around before they get to the U.S. border, Paola Ramos investigates what happens when migrants stop looking to America as a land of safety and opportunity. Ramos, reporting in partnership with Rolling Stone, traveled to […]
The post The Great Reverse Migration: Traveling With Migrants Abandoning Their Journey to the United States appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://www.typeinvestigations.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Darien-Drones.00_14_53_00.Still002-scaled.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:36:48 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Great, Reverse, Migration:, Traveling, With, Migrants, Abandoning, Their, Journey, the, United, States</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Chelsea FC faces over six dozen charges for improper conduct under Abramovich’s ownership</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/chelsea-fc-faces-over-six-dozen-charges-for-improper-conduct-under-abramovichs-ownership</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/chelsea-fc-faces-over-six-dozen-charges-for-improper-conduct-under-abramovichs-ownership</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ The Football Association announced it is investigating payments routed through offshore companies that were uncovered as part of ICIJ’s Cyprus Confidential investigation. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2023/11/Abramovich-GettyImages-1320706623-760x427.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2025 04:24:41 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Chelsea, faces, over, six, dozen, charges, for, improper, conduct, under, Abramovich’s, ownership</media:keywords>
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<title>New TV series highlights ICIJ reporting on disgraced Legion of Christ priest</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/new-tv-series-highlights-icij-reporting-on-disgraced-legion-of-christ-priest</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/new-tv-series-highlights-icij-reporting-on-disgraced-legion-of-christ-priest</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Documents from the Paradise and Pandora Papers leaks showed the &quot;full extent&quot; of the hidden financial schemes set up by Marcial Maciel, a priest found to have molested at least 60 children. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://media.icij.org/uploads/2025/09/Marcial-Maciel-GettyImages-112833642-copy.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2025 04:24:43 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>New, series, highlights, ICIJ, reporting, disgraced, Legion, Christ, priest</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>RASHPALGATE: A DEEP DIVE INTO MALAYSIA’S CORPORATE MAFIA AND THE SHADOW OF TAN SRI RASHPAL SINGH RANDHAY</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/rashpalgate-a-deep-dive-into-malaysias-corporate-mafia-and-the-shadow-of-tan-sri-rashpal-singh-randhay</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/rashpalgate-a-deep-dive-into-malaysias-corporate-mafia-and-the-shadow-of-tan-sri-rashpal-singh-randhay</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://icijnews.online/uploads/images/202509/image_870x580_68db49f028f60.jpg" length="87353" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2025 05:13:57 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>Ireka kembali diburu – Saman RM1.03 juta hantui Projek Mont Kiara lebih sedekad</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ireka-kembali-diburu-saman-rm103-juta-hantui-projek-mont-kiara-lebih-sedekad</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ireka-kembali-diburu-saman-rm103-juta-hantui-projek-mont-kiara-lebih-sedekad</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR, Sept –  Sudah jatuh ditimpa tangga, selepas ditamatkan projek Pan Borneo kini Ireka berdepan saman baharu. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://thecorporatesecret.com/storage/2025/09/ireka.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Sep 2025 05:39:57 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>thecorporatesecret</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Ireka, kembali, diburu, –, Saman, RM1.03, juta, hantui, Projek, Mont, Kiara, lebih, sedekad</media:keywords>
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<title>Where Europe is Dumping its Problematic Waste</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/where-europe-is-dumping-its-problematic-waste</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/where-europe-is-dumping-its-problematic-waste</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ In the middle of Europe, a contaminated legacy of the Soviet nuclear program has turned into a lucrative opportunity for the waste industry. Our investigation reveals that companies continue to dump millions of tons of old tyres, shoes, and even hazardous waste. ]]></description>
<enclosure url="https://correctiv.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/MydlovaryMichaelBillig009-scaled.jpg" length="49398" type="image/jpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2025 16:55:12 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>correctiv</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Where, Europe, Dumping, its, Problematic, Waste</media:keywords>
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<title>Hextar Global lupus tanah ladang durian di Raub RM13.75 juta, fokus semula kepada pemprosesan</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/hextar-global-lupus-tanah-ladang-durian-di-raub-rm1375-juta-fokus-semula-kepada-pemprosesan</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/hextar-global-lupus-tanah-ladang-durian-di-raub-rm1375-juta-fokus-semula-kepada-pemprosesan</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR, 3 Sept – Hextar Global Bhd (HGB) meneruskan langkah penstrukturan portfolio agrikultur dengan melupuskan tiga bidang ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2025 05:39:57 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>thecorporatesecret</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Hextar, Global, lupus, tanah, ladang, durian, Raub, RM13.75, juta, fokus, semula, kepada, pemprosesan</media:keywords>
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<title>Watchdog report finds overwhelming majority of IRS employees fired by DOGE for performance had no documented issues</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/watchdog-report-finds-overwhelming-majority-of-irs-employees-fired-by-doge-for-performance-had-no-documented-issues</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/watchdog-report-finds-overwhelming-majority-of-irs-employees-fired-by-doge-for-performance-had-no-documented-issues</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration notes that the termination letters were written for the agency by the OPM and its cuts failed to follow internal IRS procedures. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:22:50 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>journalist</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Watchdog, report, finds, overwhelming, majority, IRS, employees, fired, DOGE, for, performance, had, documented, issues</media:keywords>
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<item>
<title>The Backstory: Liset Cruz</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-liset-cruz</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-backstory-liset-cruz</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Paco Alvarez: Let’s start with a definition – what is medical deportation? Can you explain what the rules are regarding hospital discharges and how this type of deportation differs from what the federal government is doing right now with its mass deportation? Liset Cruz: The difference between medical deportation and medical repatriation is really the […]
The post The Backstory: Liset Cruz appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2025 11:36:23 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Backstory:, Liset, Cruz</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Great Reverse Migration</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-great-reverse-migration</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-great-reverse-migration</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ This article was produced in partnership with Rolling Stone and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. As soon as they take off from the Panamanian coast, there is a sigh of relief. Surrounded by 30 other Venezuelan migrants, packed inside an overloaded midsize speedboat, Edinson holds on tightly to the edge. The 37-year-old is tall and slender […]
The post The Great Reverse Migration appeared first on Type Investigations. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 27 Aug 2025 11:35:56 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Great, Reverse, Migration</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Unmasking the BPMB Scandal: A Web of Conspiracy, Bribery, and Betrayal Targeting the Innocent</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/unmasking-the-bpmb-scandal-a-web-of-conspiracy-bribery-and-betrayal-targeting-the-innocent</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/unmasking-the-bpmb-scandal-a-web-of-conspiracy-bribery-and-betrayal-targeting-the-innocent</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:16:33 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icijnews</dc:creator>
<media:keywords></media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>CEO Ivory Properties Datuk Low Eng Hock letak jawatan susulan siasatan Skim MBI</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/ceo-ivory-properties-datuk-low-eng-hock-letak-jawatan-susulan-siasatan-skim-mbi</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/ceo-ivory-properties-datuk-low-eng-hock-letak-jawatan-susulan-siasatan-skim-mbi</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ KUALA LUMPUR – Ivory Properties Group Bhd mengumumkan bahawa Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif (CEO) dan Pengarah Eksekutifnya, Datuk Low ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2025 05:39:58 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>thecorporatesecret</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>CEO, Ivory, Properties, Datuk, Low, Eng, Hock, letak, jawatan, susulan, siasatan, Skim, MBI</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Price of Justice</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-price-of-justice</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-price-of-justice</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 25 Aug 2025 17:34:05 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>abc.net.au</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Price, Justice</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>36 Days in July: Sheikh Hasina’s secret orders revealed I Al Jazeera Investigates</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/36-days-in-july-sheikh-hasinas-secret-orders-revealed-i-al-jazeera-investigates</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/36-days-in-july-sheikh-hasinas-secret-orders-revealed-i-al-jazeera-investigates</guid>
<description><![CDATA[  ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2025 06:34:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>AlJazeeraInvestigates</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Days, July:, Sheikh, Hasina’s, secret, orders, revealed, Jazeera, Investigates</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Careplus terpalit saman penipuan RM3.53 Juta – Anak Syarikat NexV gagal ‘strike out’, Sheikh Azli Nasimuddin didakwa menyeleweng dana</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/careplus-terpalit-saman-penipuan-rm353-juta-anak-syarikat-nexv-gagal-strike-out-sheikh-azli-nasimuddin-didakwa-menyeleweng-dana</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/careplus-terpalit-saman-penipuan-rm353-juta-anak-syarikat-nexv-gagal-strike-out-sheikh-azli-nasimuddin-didakwa-menyeleweng-dana</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Reputasi Careplus Group Bhd kini semakin tercalar selepas anak syarikatnya yang dimiliki 51%, NexV Manufacturing Sdn Bhd, dinamakan ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2025 05:39:58 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>thecorporatesecret</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Careplus, terpalit, saman, penipuan, RM3.53, Juta, –, Anak, Syarikat, NexV, gagal, ‘strike, out’, Sheikh, Azli, Nasimuddin, didakwa, menyeleweng, dana</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>Canada to announce new foreign interference watchdog to fight transnational repression</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/canada-to-announce-new-foreign-interference-watchdog-to-fight-transnational-repression</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/canada-to-announce-new-foreign-interference-watchdog-to-fight-transnational-repression</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Just months after ICIJ’s China Targets investigation, the country has confirmed that countering foreign influence is an “utmost priority” for the government. ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:22:59 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>journalist</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>Canada, announce, new, foreign, interference, watchdog, fight, transnational, repression</media:keywords>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Man Suing Trump</title>
<link>https://icijnews.online/the-man-suing-trump</link>
<guid>https://icijnews.online/the-man-suing-trump</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ A Conversation with Ben Wizner, US Civil Rights Attorney ]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2025 16:55:14 +0200</pubDate>
<dc:creator>correctiv</dc:creator>
<media:keywords>The, Man, Suing, Trump</media:keywords>
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