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This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive our biggest stories as soon as they are published. Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives.

At the first (and likely only) vice presidential debate, JD Vance was asked if Trump’s pledge to implement the largest mass deportation plan in United States history would involve deporting undocumented parents and separating them from their kids born in the United States. Instead of answering the question, Vance misleadingly claimed that the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration had “effectively lost” hundreds of thousands of children. “Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them, hopefully, are at home with their families.

The race for the 8th Congressional District — a battleground contest that could help decide which party controls the U. S. House — is tied about a month out from Election Day, according to a new poll released Wednesday. Forty-four percent of likely voters surveyed backed Democratic U. S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo, and 44.2% supported her challenger, Republican state Rep.

Former President Donald Trump wants you to believe that violence is surging. “All over the world crime is down; all over the world—except here,” he said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “Crime here is up and through the roof.” But the latest data seems to suggest the opposite. In 2023, murders in the United States fell at the fastest pace ever recorded, by about 11 percent, according to figures released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nestled in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and far from any coast, Asheville was touted as a climate “haven” from extreme weather. Now the historic city has been devastated and cut off by Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic floodwaters, in a stunning display of the climate crisis’s unlimited reach in the United States. Helene, which crunched into the western Florida coast as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday, brought darkly familiar carnage to a stretch of that state that has experienced three such storms in the past 13 months, flattening coastal homes and tossing boats inland. But as the storm, with winds peaking at 140 mph, carved a path northward, it mangled places in multiple states that have never seen such impacts, obliterating small towns, hurling trees on to homes, unmooring houses that then floated in the floodwater, plunging millions of people into power blackouts, and turning major roads into rivers. Helene, said Al Gore, is “a staggering and horrific reminder of the ways that the climate crisis can turbocharge extreme weather.” In all, about 100 people have died across five states, with nearly a third of these deaths occurring in the county containing Asheville, a city of historic architecture where new residents have flocked amid boasts by real estate agents of a place that offers a reprieve from “crazy” extreme weather. Now, major highways into Asheville have been severed by flooding from surging rainfall, its mud-caked and debris-strewn center turned into a place where access to cellphone reception, gasoline, and food is scarce.

“Fact-checkers” scramble to cover Walz’s record.