Justin Rohrlich

For Mehdi Rajabian, an Iranian dissident and musician, spending long days and nights in isolation is nothing new.

As nearly half of all Americans cancel their summer plans to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, US president Donald Trump will be escaping to New Jersey.

When Michelle Renee Hughes registered his new airplane with the Federal Aviation Administration last February, he submitted all the necessary paperwork, including a signed bill of sale showing he bought the 1981 Piper Seminole from a private seller for $115,000.

Despite US president Donald Trump’s hostility toward Amazon and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, the White House ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to buy up to $12.8 million worth of thermometers from the retail giant as part of its response to the novel coronavirus, according to federal spending documents.

On April 15, the pharmacy director at an Indiana hospital contacted the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to report a theft: Someone had pilfered 30 pre-filled syringes of morphine the night before, valued at more than $500. Authorities quickly arrested a woman who works for a cleaning company that services the facility, Central Indiana Cancer Centers, and her friend.

The US Border Patrol is building a playground at an Arizona immigration lockup in hopes of “maintaining the health and mental disposition” of detained children, according to federal contracting documents reviewed by Quartz.

When a thief stole a multimillion-dollar painting by Vincent van Gogh from a small museum in the Netherlands last month, Octave Durham almost immediately found himself a person of interest.

A Southern California doctor is facing federal fraud charges after he allegedly told patients that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a “magic bullet” that “cures” Covid-19.

A newly-unsealed FBI filing reveals further evidence that a Civil War reenactor in Virginia made violent threats against his own organization and then pinned them on Antifa, a loose collection of left-leaning militant anti-fascist groups.

When Solimar Rodriguez Gonzalez messaged her stepfather on Facebook last month asking for surgical masks and gloves, he assumed she wanted them—like just about everyone else in the world right now—for protection against coronavirus.

A New York City pharmacist is under investigation for “exploiting the present Covid-19 pandemic and engaging in price gouging,” according to a search warrant application unsealed earlier this week in federal court.

A Louisiana correctional institution has been hit hard by the new coronavirus—and by jacked-up prices for face masks. The US Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which runs the facility, will pay nearly 70% more for an order of the personal protective equipment than it agreed to just one day earlier, according to federal purchasing data reviewed by Quartz.

Federal authorities have charged a man who allegedly spit in the face of a police officer and falsely claimed to have coronavirus, with perpetrating a “biological weapons hoax.”

A group of would-be kidnappers posing as Mennonites in an attempt to snatch five children from their families tracked their movements using a drone, according to a newly-unsealed court document.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs is buying “refrigerated mobile morgue trailers” for each of its seven medical centers in Florida. That’s according to a request for quotes reviewed by Quartz, which suggests the VA is expecting a large influx of Covid-19 cases in the state.

US auto insurance companies are making billions more in profit each month as Americans stay off the roads during the coronavirus outbreak.

The US Department of Justice has reportedly sought a broad expansion of its authority during emergencies—much like the one in which the country now finds itself. The new powers would allow the agency, among other things, to detain people indefinitely without trial.

Details emerging about conditions at a Massachusetts jail—one of the 637 facilities nationwide that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, uses to detain migrants—suggest a lack of urgency among detention staff regarding the new coronavirus that could potentially endanger lives.

Fifty-one US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees being held in a Massachusetts lockup have signed a letter that says the facility has put them at increased risk for coronavirus.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the world, authorities have seen a simultaneous outbreak of opportunistic cyber scams.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which enforces the country’s immigration laws, among other things, was unprepared to contain the spread of diseases across the US border or among the migrants it has detained, according to its own internal watchdog and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

On the same day a Manhattan judge sentenced disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein to prison on charges of rape and sexual assault, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the US Department of Justice—which reportedly investigated Weinstein for sex crimes in 2018—released a sharply worded memo criticizing how the department handles intimate relationships between its own higher-ups and their employees.

A criminal complaint filed in New Mexico federal court contains new details about the unprecedented ways in which the US government is using its military to further president Donald Trump’s domestic immigration policy.

In late September 2017, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Seattle arrested a large-scale heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, and methamphetamine dealer named Francisco Ruelas-Payan. He later pled guilty to charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, and was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.