The Trump administration has sued another state — Virginia — in its quest to obtain sensitive voter data, despite two recent legal setbacks in suits against other states.

The Justice Department on Friday sued Susan Beals, the elections commissioner in Virginia, after months of seeking a copy of the state’s voter registration lists, including individual names, addresses, dates of birth and Social Security numbers.

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State leaders who want to curb the increasingly violent arrest tactics of immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are struggling to push back.

They’ve promised civil rights legislation that could offer alleged victims another route to courts, ordered up official tribunals to gather video and other records, or asked cities to refuse requests to cooperate with raids. But for the most part, states looking for concrete ways to push back find themselves largely hamstrung.

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In a win for President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, a recent court ruling has cleared the way for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume using states’ Medicaid data to find people who are in the country illegally.

The case is ongoing. But for now, immigrants — including those who are in the country legally — will have to weigh the benefits of gaining health coverage against the risk that enrolling in Medicaid could make them or their family members easier for ICE to find.

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New research shows Americans are paying almost the entire cost of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, directly challenging his repeated assertion that foreign nations absorb the burden.

Nearly all tariff costs fall on American importers and consumers, underscoring that Americans – not foreign entities – are covering the expense, according to a report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank.

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Part 1 of this article was published in HSNW, 19 January 2026.

In the first part of this article, we explored four key myths and why they don’t stand up to scrutiny:

•  ‘Vaccines were never properly tested’

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In consulting rooms across America, physicians face a challenge that no medical school prepared them for. A parent arrives with a list of concerns gathered from social media, podcasts, and well-meaning friends. The questions sound scientific. The language borrows from immunology. The citations reference real studies. And yet the conclusions are wrong.

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A year ago, Donald Trump assumed the presidency for a second time and immediately got to work dismantling the climate progress that Joe Biden’s administration had made.

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New federal guidance to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for all children from 17 vaccines down to 11 comes as states already are charting their own courses on vaccine policy.

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Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns.

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Minneapolis is once again the focus of debates about violence involving law enforcement after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, in her car.

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This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

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On Monday, acting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Jim O’Neill signed a decision memo adopting the most significant weakening of childhood vaccine recommendations in modern American history.

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The governors of Texas and Florida have declared the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy group a foreign terrorist organization, but they may stand alone. None of their Republican counterparts in other states seem ready to follow suit.

The Center Square reached out to every other Republican governor whose state has offices of the nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations. Not one – from Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma or Virginia – responded to inquiries about whether they plan to slap a terror label on the group, too.

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One morning in mid-November, Mario Guerrero, the executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, was checking a group chat when a video of federal agents detaining people from a construction site popped up.

He watched the video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining workers who were pouring cement in front of a home in an idyllic neighborhood here in the Rio Grande Valley.

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Western states that rely on the Colorado River have less than two months to agree on how to manage the troubled river – and pressure is mounting as the federal government pushes for a compromise and a troubling forecast for the river’s two biggest reservoirs looms.

Top water officials for the seven Colorado River Basin states — Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — gathered for the three-day Colorado River Water Users Association conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas last week.

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This story is part of The Disaster Economy, a Grist series exploring the often chaotic, lucrative world of disaster response and recovery. It is published with support from the CO2 Foundation.

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This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Gristand The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah.

A Utah company says it has unearthed a massive deposit of minerals crucial for building electric vehicles, semiconductors, satellites, magnets, and more.

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Colorado environmental leaders approved landmark water protections in reaction to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that they believed weakened regulations in Western states.

The bipartisan Water Quality Control Commission convened to pass stream and wetland protections that come as the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency pushes for further federal deregulations.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER) and DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory announced the winners of the eleventh CyberForce Competition held on Nov. 15 in Tinley Park, Illinois. At the end of the competition, Tinley Park MHC from the University of Central Florida defeated 93 teams from 73 universities to claim first place.

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The Trump administration has removed scientific data and climate change information from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) webpages, including all references to human activities driving climate change. This includes key U.S. climate change indicators such as changes in temperature, drought and extreme precipitation over the last few decades.

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