Introduction Nikole Hannah-Jones meant her daughter’s education to be an argument against leaving neighborhood schools. After a decade, it has become one of the strongest arguments for letting families leave them. In her Sept. 20 New York Times Magazine essay, she concludes that keeping her daughter in high-poverty Brooklyn public schools failed the girl, and...
Intro Two Queens men have been charged after police say they were recorded climbing out of a manhole on Park Avenue in the early hours of Wednesday, Sept. 23 a few steps from a hotel used by visiting dignitaries during the United Nations General Assembly. Kevin Rodriguez, 26, of Flushing, and Samuel Reveron, 25, of...
Introduction The Department of Homeland Security said on Sept. 25, 2026, that it is “reducing your rent,” crediting immigration enforcement for falling rents in states that cooperate most with ICE. In a post on X, the agency said Texas accounted for about a quarter of ICE arrests in July and posted the country’s sharpest rent...
On Chicago’s West Side, Frederick Douglass Academy High School sits in a building designed for about 1,000 students. According to a June 2025 ProPublica and Chalkbeat investigation, Douglass had 27 employees for 28 students. Douglass is the extreme case, but the gap between building space and students runs across Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the nation’s...
For years, federal and state governments made jobs, military service, hospital work and school enrollment depend on vaccination. Those standards were never applied at the same strength to people entering between ports of entry, or to the jurisdictions that shelter them. Measles is now at a 35-year high, largely for reasons unrelated to the border....
Intro On Sept. 16, the Federal Open Market Committee raised its policy rate a quarter point. The decision, approved unanimously 12-0, brought the target range to 3.75%–4% and marked the first hike since July 2023. Updated projections showed a strong majority of officials expect another increase before year-end. Two weeks earlier, that outcome was not the...
Intro A defense contractor’s former CEO is in federal prison for illegal campaign contributions to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). A new investigation now says the FBI later wanted to go much further. ProPublica reported Tuesday that FBI agents sought in 2024 to open a broad pay-to-play inquiry examining dealings between Collins and a major donor,...
The McKenna West case took four courts in three states to reach an unfinished answer, and every party in it was American. The fastest-growing part of the market she entered is not American at all and the legal machinery that eventually resolved her case stops at the border. The Growth Isn’t Mostly American Gestational surrogacy...
A California couple is seeking at least $100,000 in damages from the woman who carried their son, on the theory that she breached their contract by declining to end the pregnancy. The clause they are suing over is one courts have long said cannot be enforced against a pregnant woman. What remains enforceable is the...
Four major indicators moved in a favorable direction this year. Each arrived with a documented explanation from the agency that produced it. Almost none of them led a newscast. Intro The Atlantic hurricane season passed its climatological peak this month without producing a single hurricane. Five tropical storms have formed Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly and...