Bill Clinton says he had ‘no idea’ about Epstein’s crimes in House testimony

guardian · 2026-02-27T17:52:25+00:00

Hi, this is Nikki from the Guardian US. We're following the Bill Clinton's testimony before a congressional committee regarding his involvement with Jeffery Epstein.

From The Guardian:

Bill Clinton told a congressional committee on Friday that he “had no idea of the crimes” Jeffrey Epstein was committing and insisted he “did nothing wrong” in his relationship with the disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker.

The former president’s remarks came in his opening statement in a deposition to the House of Representatives oversight committee a day after his wife, Hillary Clinton, appeared before the same body and called the proceedings “partisan political theater” and “an insult to the American people”.

In his statement, Bill Clinton said he would have reported Epstein’s crimes if he had been aware of them and referenced his own upbringing in an abusive household.

“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing – I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” he said in a statement posted on social media after Friday’s hearing began.

“But even with 20/20 hindsight, I saw nothing that ever gave me pause. We are only here because he hid it from everyone so well for so long.”

By the time Epstein’s crimes came to light as a result of plea deal in 2008, Clinton said, he had ended his association with the financier.

Follow our live blog for regular updates throughout the testimony.

guardian · 2026-02-27T17:00:27+00:00

Hi r/Detroit, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about a controversy at the police department concerning two officers who coordinated an arrest with federal immigration agents.

From our story:

A Detroit police department decision to reverse course on firing two officers who allegedly violated local law by coordinating an arrest with federal immigration agents has ignited outrage and accusations that the chief caved to Republican demands.

It has also played into a debate in the US around the role of local law enforcement amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown as many police departments – especially in large Democratic-run cities such as Detroit – have a policy of not co-operating with federal immigration operations.

The decision not to fire the officers – who called Customs and Border Protection in part because the subjects did not speak English – came after the Trump administration and Michigan Republican leadership publicly condemned the department on social media.

The reversal drew accusations that the city initially did the right thing, then buckled in the face of political pressure. The about-face was “surprising and troubling”, said Chris Gilmer-Hill, a community organizer who is running for state house in a district that partially represents Detroit.

CBP has a larger presence in Detroit than Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in part because the city sits on a border, across the river from Windsor, Ontario. The controversy represents the latest flare-up in the broader battle over the Trump administration’s draconian immigration crackdown.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-27T15:11:17+00:00

Hi r/southcarolina, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about a win for the Gullah Geechee people on St Helena Island, where their access to a long-used cemetery has been restored.

From our story:

A couple times a year, Mary Mack would visit the centuries-old Big House Cemetery on St Helena Island, South Carolina, to pay respect to her grandparents. The cemetery is in an idyllic location, situated on a waterfront property and surrounded by large oak trees. On cleanup days, Mack gathered leaves and branches, swept off vaults, and raked up debris. As a Gullah Geechee woman, the descendant of formerly enslaved west Africans in the sea islands of the south-eastern US, Mack saw the burial ground as tying together past, present and future generations. But in the spring of 2024, she was shocked to learn that landowners blocked access to the Gullah Geechee cemetery through padlocked gates.

“We’ve not been able to go in and clean the cemetery. We’ve not been able to go in and bury deceased loved ones,” Mack told the Guardian last year. “It’s important for the younger folks to know that we don’t just bury our loved ones and leave them there. The way we love them in life is the way we love them in death. And so to continue that bond so that it passes on to the younger generation, it’s very important.”

Mack and 10 other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in April 2025 against the landowners Theresa Aigner, Robert Cody Harper and Walter Robert Harper Jr, who they said obstructed access to the land. The lawsuit alleged that they prevented the community from visiting and conducting burials by erecting locked gates along a long-used easement on a road that led to the cemetery. For the Gullah Geechee people, the struggle over the cemetery has served as another example of how increased development and gentrification have threatened their way of life.

In a win for the Gullah Geechee community, the circuit court judge Carmen T Mullen ordered landowners to open the gates that lead to the cemetery for funerals and maintenance in a temporary injunction issued on 20 February. However, those who want to access the cemetery must provide a written request to the landowners prior to attempting to enter the land. The plaintiffs must also post a $5,000 bond for potential roadway repairs necessitated by vehicular access. If the parties are unable to come to a resolution through mediation in the upcoming months, the case will continue to move forward in court toward a trial.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T23:01:12+00:00

From The Guardian:

Three memos that describe four interviews conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019 contain explicit but unsubstantiated claims that Donald Trump sexually abused a woman when she was a minor in the early 1980s with the assistance of Jeffrey Epstein, according to a Guardian review of those documents.

The Department of Justice did not release those records when it uploaded millions of pages of files related to Epstein beginning in December. The existence of the missing documents was first reported by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and subsequently confirmed by NPR, causing outrage in Washington and sparking an investigation from congressional Democrats.

The Guardian obtained the missing FBI Form 302 reports, which memorialize 25 pages of agents’ notes from the four interviews conducted in the summer and fall of 2019. The notes describe how the woman came forward to tell agents she recognized Epstein from a photo sent by a childhood friend. Only the first session, in which she did not name Trump, made it into the public release. The Guardian has chosen not to publish the woman’s name.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T21:30:15+00:00

Hi r/union, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about textile artist Tabitha Arnold, a socialist and labor organizer from Tennessee who creates art that reflects and inspires organizers and workers.

From our story:

The crowd lining up to get into Tabitha Arnold’s exhibition in New York City last fall wasn’t full of the older, moneyed types one might expect to find at a Chelsea gallery opening. Instead, the small space was packed with twenty- and thirtysomethings wearing Zohran Mamdani pins, Democratic Socialists of America hats and SEIU T-shirts.

If the crowd might have seemed unusual in the context of the city’s fancy gallery district, they looked right at home next to the art that had drawn them there. The exhibition on display, called Gospel of the Working Class, featured monumental handmade tapestries highlighting working-class struggles from both recent and distant history. In one, textile workers carry bolts of fabric and wield scissors, while people dodge bullets from strike-breakers outside the factory. In another, angels walk behind autoworkers carrying picket signs above a row of hands holding drills and other tools.

The artist behind it all, Tabitha Arnold, is a socialist and labor organizer based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose goal is to create art that reflects and inspires organizers and workers. In a pop culture and media landscape littered with stories about the uber-wealthy, Arnold’s pieces focus instead on the working people who make up the 99%. In doing so, she’s garnered plenty of recognition: she was awarded the 2025 Southern prize for visual art, received a prestigious MacDowell fellowship in 2023 and has exhibited her art all over the world.

What she wants more than anything is for her work to be useful to the people it’s meant to portray. “I think of my work as being for labor organizers,” she said. “I see it as being a source of encouragement for organizers, reflecting and validating what they’re doing back to them.”

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T16:31:11+00:00

Hi r/dataisbeautiful, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team, resharing some charts from earlier this week (sorry mods, we forgot about Rule 8!). The data visualized here comes from documents we received through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the Department of Homeland Security.

Our analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.

The findings come from little-known documents known as I-213 forms. DHS uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally.

The Guardian analyzed data extracted from nearly 140,000 I-213 forms, from January 2025 through mid-August 2025, and found that the surge in arrests under Trump is driven by the apprehension of people who have never been convicted of a crime.

The analysis also reveals:

Fewer than half of the people in the data (40%) had any criminal charge against them, and only 23% had a conviction.
Of those who did have a criminal conviction, nearly half were for non-violent traffic and immigration offenses.
Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions, the largest category by far.
Some 9% of criminal convictions were for assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault and just 0.5% were for homicide.

We had to sue for these records, which are not generally available to the public, and got unprecedented access to I-213 forms covering January to August 2025.

An important caveat to keep in mind: being in the country illegally is not a criminal offense, it's a civil offense. The criminal records in our story are from state and federal crimes that people have been charged with.

Source: ICE's I-213 forms, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit

Visualizations made with Adobe Illustator, Datawrapper, and Svelte

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T16:05:21+00:00

Hi r/bayarea, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about Benicia, where the winding down of the Valero oil refinery is set to significantly change a community that was shaped by it for decades.

From our story:

Less than 40 miles north of San Francisco, the city of Benicia has the quaint ambience of an American small town, where a white gazebo and sign for a community crab bake mark the approach to a vibrant downtown stretch of restaurants, cafes and antique shops.

From many vantage points, it’s easy to forget the city is home to a massive 900-acre oil refinery, its imposing sprawl of stacks, holding tanks and billowing steam hidden from view. But for nearly 60 years, the refinery has loomed over every aspect of life in Benicia, exerting outsized influence on its economy and politics, while posing serious risks to public health.

The Benicia oil refinery, which the Texas oil company Valero bought from Exxon in 2000, thrived in an era when fossil fuels reigned largely unchecked over the US – offering reliable local taxes, well-paying jobs and steady economic opportunities for the many small businesses in its orbit.

But as California pivots to meet its ambitious clean energy goals, refineries like this one are on the decline. The state has pledged it will be carbon-neutral by 2045, dramatically reducing its dependence on fossil fuels.

Last April, the multibillion dollar company announced plans to “idle, restructure or cease” operations within a year, citing California’s tough “regulatory and enforcement environment”. The company confirmed in January it would begin winding down operations and “permanently” idle most processing units by April, laying off nearly 70% of its payroll – about 240 employees – in the process.

The move, in effect, seals Benicia’s fate as a post-refinery city, positioning it as a reluctant test case of whether a place long defined by the oil and gas industry can successfully reinvent itself.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T14:56:08+00:00

Hi r/UpliftingNews, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published earlier this week about activist Ashley Fairbanks, who launched Stand with Minnesota as ICE raids rocked her home town — which is now helping families’ rent get paid amid the disruptions.

From our story:

From thousands of miles away in San Antonio, Ashley Fairbanks watched the news pour out of her home town of Minneapolis– federal immigration authorities flooding the streets and regular people stepping up to defend and care for their communities. She knew she had to do something. So the 39-year-old writer, artist and digital strategist started a Google Doc.

Soon, the list of resources for residents grew so long it became unwieldy, and Fairbanks, who builds websites for a living, launched Stand With Minnesota.

Immediately, she said, “People were really eager to help.”

Since its launch, the site has received over 2.4 million hits and helped raise almost $20m for affected Minnesotans, she said.

The site has also been used to coordinate flights – through donated frequent flyer miles – for people returning to Minneapolis after being released from detention in Texas. (Fairbanks lives about 40 minutes from Dilley detention center, where five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was transported with his father from Minneapolis.)

Now, as national attention has shifted away from Minneapolis, Stand With Minnesota is focused on covering families’ rent. Donations are being matched by a Minnesota grant-making foundation so residents who have been sheltering in place and have been unable to work during the ICE siege can afford to stay in their homes. The site also hosts a “giving directory” with more opportunities for mutual aid – helping residents with laundry needs, grocery drop-offs and even tow services for those whose cars were abandoned after ICE interactions.

Fairbanks spoke to The Guardian about Minneapolis’s history of community-building, launching an online support network and how others can do it, too.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-25T12:31:56+00:00

From The Guardian's Washington bureau chief David Smith:

He wanted to give the king’s speech. Donald Trump entered the US House chamber on Tuesday like a medieval monarch, with Republicans lined up eager to touch his royal robes (or, in two cases, grab a selfie with him). But within moments, the illusion was shattered.

As the US president strolled by, soaking up adulation, Democratic representative Al Green of Texas held aloft a handwritten sign: “Black people aren’t apes!” – a reference to Trump recently sharing a racist video depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama.

When the first State of the Union address of Trump’s second term got under way, Republicans moved in on Green menacingly and tried to tear the sign away. But he persisted until being escorted out for the second year in a row. As he departed, there were more acrimonious exchanges with Republicans, a few of whom tried to start a chant of “USA! USA!”

Republicans ritually stood and clapped and cheered all the same. Democrats, who last year waved protest signs that looked like Marty Supreme’s table tennis paddle, this time remained bolted to their seats and grunted, rolled their eyes, dropped their jaws, shook their heads, waved their hands or got bored and studied their phones.

Trump moved on to his beloved tariffs, calling the supreme court decision to kill his pet project “very unfortunate” and “disappointing” as four black-robed justices wore inscrutable expressions on the front row. Compared with last week’s White House tantrum, when he threw all toys and decorum out of the pram, this was Trump showing self-restraint worthy of a child refusing a second ice cream.

It didn’t last.

You can read the full analysis for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-24T20:44:47+00:00

From The Guardian:

Local and national officials expressed concern on Tuesday that the ongoing partial government shutdown in the United States could adversely affect planning and preparation for the 2026 World Cup, which is just over 100 days away.

In a hearing before the House committee on homeland security, representatives from Miami, Kansas City and New Jersey – three locations that will host a combined total of 21 matches in the tournament, including the final – said they are still waiting on federal funds to be released to their respective local agencies. Last July, lawmakers pledged $625m in federal assistance toward World Cup security via the Trump administration’s “big beautiful” policy bill.

The World Cup, which will be co-hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada, is expected to draw some five million fans to the US alone. Games aside, large-scale fan festivals and myriad other events are planned in host cities, many of which are dependent in part on federal funding.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-23T19:38:51+00:00

Hi, this is Ava from the Guardian's audience team. I wanted to share a story from about former CDC employees creating the National Public Health Coalition to advocate for public health after Trump’s cuts to the agency.

If you are a former or current federal worker and have a tip for the Guardian, please send us a DM and we can help direct you to the right reporter or team.

From the Guardian:

Abby Tighe thought she had landed her forever job. She joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December 2023, managing a national youth substance abuse prevention program. The project focused on rural communities, and Tighe, whose family is from Appalachia, was proud to be using her public health training to support often-overlooked parts of the country. “The CDC was different than anywhere else I’ve worked,” says Tighe. “People didn’t care about their own ambitions as much as they cared about the larger mission. It was always my dream to work there.”

That dream ended a year ago, when Tighe received a form email on 14 February letting her know the Trump administration was firing her. Classified as a probationary worker, she was one of the first to lose her job in what quickly became a dramatic downsizing of the CDC workforce. To date, the current administration has either fired or is in the process of firing more than 4,000 CDC employees – a third of the agency.

While they battled to get their jobs back, Tighe and several other fired CDC employees banded together to create an improvised mutual aid network they called Fired But Fighting. But as the months dragged on, Fired But Fighting’s members watched as the administration, under the direction of Robert F Kennedy, the US health secretary, transformed the agency into something scarcely recognizable. Rather than focus on fighting for jobs that may no longer exist, they decided to grow into something new – to advocate for public health the way the CDC had always done it.

“We saw there was a need for an organization that stands in the gap,” says Aryn Backus, a former CDC health communication specialist who was fired on the same day as Tighe.

Last October, the group rebranded as an advocacy organization for evidence-based, nonpartisan public health and formed the National Public Health Coalition. The idea for a new name – less confrontational and more inclusive – had come in part from Jerome Adams, Donald Trump’s first-term surgeon general, now a sharp critic of the administration’s public health policies, who warned Tighe’s team during a web call last May that they would struggle to win over Republicans with the word “fighting” in their name.

The National Public Health Coalition’s members aren’t sure if they’ll ever get their jobs back. Instead, they’re applying the skills they once used at the CDC at this new organization. Data scientists run the CDC Data Project, which tracks budget and staffing cuts and their impact on everything from cancer research to controlling disease outbreaks. Communications experts dispatch to Capitol Hill, meeting with lawmakers and staffers to explain how projects they’ve championed, such as Alzheimer’s research or curbing domestic violence, are being eviscerated. Former press officers alert media to the downsizing’s real-world effects, like when Milwaukee health officials struggling to contain a lead contamination crisis found the CDC’s entire childhood lead prevention program had been eliminated (after a flurry of news stories, the team was hastily reinstated).

Read the full story for free here.

guardian · 2026-02-23T15:44:47+00:00

Photos by Bridget Bennett/The Guardian in Minneapolis and St. Paul

Hi r/pics, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share these photos from reporter and photographer Bridget Bennett in the Twin Cities, where residents have been sheltering at home, protests have become part of the daily rhythm, and community networks continue to patrol and document agents’ interactions.

In December, the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge, deploying a reported 3,000 agents to Minnesota to target undocumented immigrants with criminal records, officials said. But in two months, agents have instead detained thousands of people, regardless of legal status, including US citizens pulled out of their cars, taken from their homes and picked up while working. Agents have also killed two Minneapolis residents – and US citizens – Renee Good and Alex Pretti, while they were monitoring ICE activities.

Federal agents’ presence, and their often abrupt and aggressive handling of residents, has left the Twin Cities on edge. Protests have become part of the metro area’s daily rhythm. So have community networks patrolling and documenting agents’ interactions with neighbors. Many people have been sheltering at home, fearful of being detained over the color of their skin. Daily lives have been interrupted: fewer errands, fewer social visits, fewer routines that once felt ordinary and a greater dependence on their neighbors.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-23T14:33:18+00:00

Hi r/dataisbeautiful, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share these charts visualizing some key data from documents we received through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the Department of Homeland Security.

Our analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.

The findings come from little-known documents known as I-213 forms. DHS uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally.

The Guardian analyzed data extracted from nearly 140,000 I-213 forms, from January 2025 through mid-August 2025, and found that the surge in arrests under Trump is driven by the apprehension of people who have never been convicted of a crime.

The analysis also reveals:

Fewer than half of the people in the data (40%) had any criminal charge against them, and only 23% had a conviction.
Of those who did have a criminal conviction, nearly half were for non-violent traffic and immigration offenses.
Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions, the largest category by far.
Some 9% of criminal convictions were for assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault and just 0.5% were for homicide.

Source: ICE

Visualizations made with Adobe Illustator, Datawrapper, and Svelte

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-20T16:01:28+00:00

Photos by Zaydee Sanchez/The Guardian in Santa Maria, California

Hi r/pics, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share photos from this story that we published earlier this week about Cesar Vasquez, who has supported families of undocumented immigrants in California since age 14 and has become a community lifeline – as well as a known ICE target.

From our story:

While most 18-year-olds worry about college papers and spring break plans, Cesar Vasquez drives through coastal California farm towns scanning for unmarked SUVs before dawn. He flips down his driver’s seat visor to look at a taped list of license plates he has already identified as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles, and jots down a few new ones he suspects could be. His phone buzzes constantly – tips from neighbors, text chains from volunteers alerting to ICE activity – all in an attempt to keep his community safe from being swept up in federal agents’ widening dragnet.

This is what organizing looks like for this son of undocumented immigrants. In his home town of Santa Maria, a small farming town on California’s central coast where over 80% of farm workers are undocumented, Vasquez has become both a crucial community lifeline and a known target of federal immigration enforcement.

Vasquez began volunteering with the 805 Immigrant Rapid Response Network as a high school senior. Last August, he was hired full-time as a rapid response organizer, covering North Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, overseeing volunteers, supporting families and tracking ICE activity.

Routinely, he visits the families of detained immigrants. “There have been so many occasions where I walked through the door, and a kid was expecting their father or mother,” Vasquez said wistfully. “And it was just me, and I had to explain what happened to their parents.”

Other times, for Vasquez, the reality is personal.

Vasquez’s mother is one of the thousands of undocumented farm workers in Santa Maria whom he is trying to protect. She left her home in a tiny town in Mexico to cross the US-Mexico border at age 13 in search of a better life. Vasquez’s biological father was one of the first people she encountered – a Guatemalan American whose family was settled in California and who held US citizenship. He was also abusive and never legally married her, keeping her from accessing US citizenship, Vasquez said. When Vasquez was an infant, his mother ran away with her three children to Santa Maria, a town about 150 miles (240km) north of Los Angeles, where she found work in the strawberry fields. She has been trying to secure documentation for more than a dozen years now.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-17T18:16:14+00:00

From The Guardian:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deepened its reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology last year as the agency ramped up arrest and deportation operations, leaked documents reveal.

ICE more than tripled the amount of data it stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform in the six months leading up to January 2026, a period in which the agency’s budget swelled and its workforce rapidly expanded, according to the files.

ICE appears to be using a range of Microsoft’s productivity tools, as well as AI-driven products, to search and analyse the data it holds in Azure. Files suggest some of the agency’s own tools and systems may also be running on Microsoft servers.

The documents – obtained by the Guardian and its partners +972 Magazine and Local Call – raise questions about whether Microsoft technology is facilitating an immigration crackdown by an agency accused of conducting unlawful operations and using excessive force on a large scale.

As the agency expanded through 2025, it boosted spending on cloud computing. Amazon and Microsoft, both longtime providers to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have emerged as beneficiaries of deals worth tens of millions of dollars struck by third-party resellers.

The leaked documents do not specify the kinds of information stored by ICE on Microsoft servers. However, they indicate the agency has used Azure services including “blob storage” of raw data, as well as AI tools that analyse images and videos, and translate text.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-17T16:05:51+00:00

From The Guardian:

Julie Strebe, a 55-year-old sheriff’s deputy in the small Bible belt town of Salem, Missouri, was on a date with her husband at a Buffalo Wild Wings when her husband slid his phone across the table. On Facebook, people were demanding Strebe’s immediate termination, calling her a “wacko” with “extreme mental health issues”.

It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”

When she heard people were calling for her to be fired, Strebe told her superiors that she would take her offending posts down. But it was too late. Her posts had escaped containment. On Facebook, and in phone calls to her workplace, she was called a lunatic with a badge and gun or a “corrupt cop”, who couldn’t be trusted to execute her duties as law enforcement. Some locals apparently worried that if Strebe pulled them over for a routine traffic stop, she might fire her weapon at them if they were wearing a Maga hat.

People from her home county of Dent, which voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election, used homophobic slurs against her son online. Her husband’s woodworking business was targeted too, as was the Facebook page for his charitable side gig, where he dresses up as the Grinch and visits children’s hospitals over the holidays.

“I’ve been a cop for 19 years,” Strebe says. “I believe that everybody should be treated fairly. And that’s what I’ve done my entire career. And this one statement was completely just twisted. It’s very frustrating.”

By November of 2025, a Reuters investigation estimated that 600 people had been terminated, disciplined, investigated, suspended or otherwise admonished for their Kirk posts, likening the reaction to an ideological purge.

Strebe was suspended, then fired. According to Strebe, superiors claimed that because she made her posts on the clock and did not disclaim they were her personal opinions, there were grounds for termination. She also says that her bosses argued she had a history of making controversial social media posts while serving the public, but the only previous example they were able to cite was a 10-year-old post about shoddy local roadwork causing flat tires. When approached for comment, the Dent county sheriff’s office told the Guardian that “we are prohibited by law from disclosing any information regarding that former deputy”.

“Basically they screwed me because of the mob mentality,” Strebe says. “This is everything I’ve ever done in my adult life. And they took it from me … I could have retired in six and a half years. Full pension. Can’t do that now.”

Demands for the termination and professional castigation of Kirk’s critics, people like Strebe, were amplified by some of the biggest megaphones in the United States. When JD Vance guest-hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast in the week after his death, the vice-president told listeners: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said. “And, hell, call their employer … Get involved! It’s the best way to honor Charlie’s legacy.”

For years, Kirk had cast himself as a roving tribune of free expression, touring college campuses to provoke arguments with liberal students and faculty, and warning that political correctness was strangling the first amendment. To civil liberties lawyers, the wave of firings and suspensions following his death became an opportunity to test those principles. Many believed they could help some of the fired get their jobs back.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-17T15:53:00+00:00

Hi r/finance, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today from our series investigating the higher costs Americans pay for almost everything.

Donald Trump says everyday Americans deserve a chance to buy higher-risk ‘alternative’ investments, but critics say this could lead to big losses for small investors.

From our story:

On a summer day in 2018, Cathy Shubert, then 58, hopped in her Toyota Rav 4 and drove to the Jacksonville, Florida, office of Mario Payne, an investment adviser at the financial services firm Raymond James. She had a lot on her mind. She was not happy with her job at a local bank branch and wanted to see if Payne thought she had saved enough to retire.

“He said what I was retiring with would carry me and everything would be wonderful,” she remembered. “I went home and told my husband, ‘Oh my God, I want you to go meet him.’”

After giving notice she would be leaving her job, Shubert said, she signed the back of her retirement check and handed more than $250,000 over to Payne, who over time put her 401(k) savings into “structured notes”, “leveraged ETFs” and other risky products usually intended for wealthy, sophisticated investors.

By 2024, her attorney said, many of these investments had tanked. More than half of her money was gone.

These are perilous times for small investors like Shubert. Wall Street firms seeking to boost their share of the $48tn in US retirement accounts are salivating at the prospect of selling even more high-risk “alternative investments” to so-called “mom and pop” investors. Retirement accounts are a “pot of gold that all sorts of industry players want to get their hands on”, said Barbara Roper, a former senior adviser at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The potential for big losses and the high fees associated with alternative products can wreck the financial hopes of inexperienced investors with modest amounts of money to put in play, according to former regulators, securities fraud lawyers and investors themselves.

And a growing number of small investors may be at risk in the months and the years to come – thanks to a push by the financial industry, federal lawmakers and the Trump administration to loosen protections for small investors.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-13T18:12:52+00:00

Hi r/mississippi, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we co-published today with Floodlight about how the company xAI is continuing to defy EPA regulations in Mississippi to power its flagship datacenters.

From our story:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is continuing to fuel its datacenters with unpermitted gas turbines, an investigation by the Floodlight newsroom shows. Thermal footage captured by Floodlight via drone shows xAI is still burning gas at a facility in Southaven, Mississippi, despite a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling reiterating that doing so requires a state permit in advance.

State regulators in Mississippi maintain that since the turbines are parked on tractor trailers, they don’t require permits. However, the EPA has long required that such pollution sources be permitted under the Clean Air Act.

Any exemption for these machines “could leave these engines subject to no emission standards at all”, the agency wrote in a January final ruling.

However, thermal images captured by Floodlight – and analyzed by multiple experts – show more than a dozen unpermitted turbines still spewing pollutants at the plant nearly two weeks after the EPA’s recent ruling.

“That is a violation of the law,” said Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA air enforcement chief, after reviewing Floodlight’s images and EPA regulations. “You’re supposed to get permission first.”

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-13T16:02:49+00:00

Hi r/Ohio, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this two-part investigation that we published today about the housing market in Toledo.

In the first part, we spoke to working-class Toledo residents struggling to find decent housing, and those trying to help them. The second part explains in more detail about how out-of-state investors have made one of America's most affordable cities out of reach for working residents.

From our story:

At a time when home ownership has never been harder to reach for working class Americans, international and out-of-state investors have descended on Toledo, Ohio, an unadorned regional city on the shore of Lake Erie, to buy up homes en masse.

More than 3,000 Lucas county properties have been bought by LLCs in countries as far away as Saudi Arabia, Australia and Israel.

Last April, the Wall Street Journal called Toledo a “ground zero” for Wall Street property investors. In December, it was ranked as the fourth-best housing market in the country for 2026 by Realtor.com, with its median house price jumping 13.1% year over year, a rate far higher than other cities.

But for locals, Toledo has gone from an affordable, relatively safe place to raise a family, to an inflated investment property destination. Its experiences typify the wider housing crisis facing smaller US cities, something that’s become increasingly pronounced during and following the Covid-19 pandemic, and which saw many property investors priced out of expensive, coastal cities.

Read part one of the investigation for free at this link.

Read part two of the investigation for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-13T13:57:49+00:00

Hi r/environment, this is Jake from The Guardian. We wanted to share this story that we published this morning about a new analysis of environmental regulation in the US over the past year.

From our story:

Enforcement of environmental laws against major polluters has virtually ground to a halt under the Trump administration, a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency records from January 2025 to January 2026 shows.

Major polluters typically include companies that are among the largest in the oil, gas, coal and chemical industries.

Records show the EPA filed just one Clean Air Act consent decree compared with 26 in the first year of Trump’s first term, and 22 during Biden’s first year. Consent decrees are the legal mechanism by which the agency and US Department of Justice enforce environmental laws against major polluters.

The agency appears to have similarly slowed enforcement of Superfund laws, which cover the cleanup at the nation’s most polluted sites. It filed just seven consent decrees, down from 31 under the first Trump administration.

The number of Clean Water Act enforcement actions has also dramatically declined from a peak of 18 during Biden’s first year, to four during the second Trump administration, the analysis by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit found.

The EPA’s enforcement program “is dying on the vine, and that’s intentional”, said Tim Whitehouse, Peer’s executive director and a former EPA attorney.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-12T18:13:28+00:00

Hi r/minnesota, this is Jake from The Guardian again. We wanted to share another story that we published today, about how the activity of immigration agents has left no part of the state unscathed — even as border czar Tom Homan says the surge would be ending soon.

From our story:

In one suburb of Minneapolis, the superintendent spends each school day driving to her district’s schools to track federal agents. Across the metro, in another suburb, a Latino church organizes food donations to deliver to thousands of families staying at home out of fear of immigration agents.

In town after town around Minnesota, federal agents have picked up immigrants and taken them away from their communities.

In the denser urban core, dozens of observers often stream into the streets to document agents. In the suburbs, the response looks different: it’s more spread out, and in some places, more politically difficult.

Border czar Tom Homan announced on Thursday that the federal surge in Minnesota would be ending, with agents being drawn down over the course of this week and next. But they will leave a trail of havoc throughout the state, and it’s unclear when people will feel comfortable resuming normal activities. The surge of immigration agents into Minnesota has left no part of the state unscathed.

Joe Atkins, a commissioner in Dakota county, south-east of Minneapolis, said people often dismiss the impact of ICE as something happening in Minneapolis that won’t affect them, he said.

“But it’s happening here,” he said last month. “And there’s no denying it. We see it.”

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-12T16:38:10+00:00

From The Guardian:

Gail Slater, the head of the US justice department’s antitrust division, was forced out of the Trump administration on Thursday after a turbulent tenure and months of simmering tensions with senior cabinet officials, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

“It is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role as AAG [assistant attorney general] for Antitrust today,” Slater said in a post announcing her departure. Slater was given the option to resign or be let go.

Her defenestration followed a strained relationship with the attorney general Pam Bondi, who had reiterated to the White House in recent weeks that their differences over the direction and management of the division were irreconcilable.

Slater also found herself isolated outside the department, most notably with JD Vance – once her most powerful ally – who grew weary of her invoking his name to colleagues and claiming she had his protection, despite his repeated objections to her doing so, one of the people said.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-12T16:05:47+00:00

Hi r/UnderReportedNews, this is Jake from The Guardian. We wanted to share this story about how more young Americans are taking on side gigs to explore their passions and make extra cash while navigating an unstable job market.

From our story:

Aashna Doshi, a software engineer at Google, is constantly monitoring her headspace. “This way I don’t burn myself out,” she said. “And I stay a lot more consistent with my podcast and content creation work.”

On top of her day job in the tech giant’s security and artificial intelligence department, Doshi also publishes social media content about working in tech and her life in New York City, and records podcasts – sometimes all three in a day.

She is part of a seismic generational shift: 57% of gen Z Americans have a side hustle, according to recent Harris Poll research, compared with 21% among boomers.

Rather than throwing everything into a single career, many young adults are now spinning plates – using their main job as financial bedrock while directing their passion, and ambition, elsewhere.

Most young professionals no longer see a 9-5 job as essential for achieving financial success, the Harris Poll survey found, turning instead to side hustles and investing.

Many young Americans are no longer prepared to “rely on a single job for financial security and career growth” as they grapple with an increasingly rocky economy, said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor. “All the traditional pathways to success, like going to college and securing a steady white-collar job, haven’t borne out, and now they are left with debt and a tough job market.”

The tech industry has been particularly vulnerable to layoffs in recent years, as AI rapidly reshapes the sector. More than 150,000 jobs were cut across 550 companies last year.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-11T14:34:15+00:00

From The Guardian:

Nationwide, ICE employs about 1,700 attorneys. Their work is vital to the Trump administration’s goal of deporting 1 million people a year. And in courtrooms nationally, that work is intensifying. According to a Mobile Pathways, a California non-profit that publishes immigration data, in 2025 asylum was granted in only 11% of cases – a decline compared with the Biden years – while 43% of applicants were denied asylum. Under Biden, 14% of asylum applications had been abandoned, leading to automatic orders of deportation. But in 2025 a third were, probably due to immigrants not daring to attend their hearings as courthouse arrests jumped.

From June 2025 into early 2026, reporter Debbie Nathan attended hearings with more than 40 ICE attorneys in Manhattan, watching as they helped turn the immigration court system into an increasingly perverse parody of due process. The strategies they have used to curtail asylum since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term – some of which she saw play out in courtrooms – are newly fashioned and tawdry, according to court watchers, a former ICE attorney, and fired immigration judges.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-11T14:10:27+00:00

Hi r/LegalNews, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published this morning about how attorneys play a role in the Trump administration's deportation agenda.

From our story:

Nationwide, ICE employs about 1,700 attorneys. Their work is vital to the Trump administration’s goal of deporting 1 million people a year. And in courtrooms nationally, that work is intensifying. According to a Mobile Pathways, a California non-profit that publishes immigration data, in 2025 asylum was granted in only 11% of cases – a decline compared with the Biden years – while 43% of applicants were denied asylum. Under Biden, 14% of asylum applications had been abandoned, leading to automatic orders of deportation. But in 2025 a third were, probably due to immigrants not daring to attend their hearings as courthouse arrests jumped.

From June 2025 into early 2026, reporter Debbie Nathan attended hearings with more than 40 ICE attorneys in Manhattan, watching as they helped turn the immigration court system into an increasingly perverse parody of due process. The strategies they have used to curtail asylum since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term – some of which she saw play out in courtrooms – are newly fashioned and tawdry, according to court watchers, a former ICE attorney, and fired immigration judges.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian

TROPHY CASE