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The International Atomic Energy Agency says the reactor Israel destroyed in 2007 was configured to produce material usable in nuclear weapons, and that a second site Syria had never declared held about 73 tonnes of natural uranium metal, closing a compliance file that stayed open for fifteen years and moved only after the Assad government fell.

Foreign food inspections fell to about 1,140 last year, a fraction of the number the law requires, and the agency's own answer to what a realistic number would be has sat unreported to Congress since 2023.

A proposed rule would strip the health-based standards from the 2024 sterilizer rule on the theory that the Clean Air Act permits a single residual risk review per industry, a reading that would permanently close the statute's route to tighter air toxics limits when the science on a chemical changes.

Today's stories and the historical context you need to understand them, in one audio briefing from AskWhy.News.

Before the first Europeans reached the islands in 1778, the Kanaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people, lived in what Congress would later describe as a highly organized, self-sufficient and subsistence social system…

The Office of the Ombudsman charged the President's first cousin with amassing at least 7.44 billion pesos in flood-control kickbacks, and a non-bailable statute made detention automatic the moment the warrant issued, in a prosecution brought by an Ombudsman the President appointed from his own cabinet.

For a century before Congress attempted a national pollution law, the outer boundary of federal power over American water was fixed by a single question, and it was not a question about water quality.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Army are taking comment on a proposal that would treat a water as federally protected only if it runs year round, an approach the agencies themselves expect would hit the arid West hardest.

Today's stories and the historical context you need to understand them, in one audio briefing from AskWhy.News.

Two federal lawsuits ask courts to void the 50 percent Native Hawaiian ancestry requirement for homestead leases, a threshold Congress adopted in 1921 as a compromise with plantation owners and has refused to let Hawaii change ever since.