On Our Radar

The United States dropped from being the 18th happiest nation in 2018 — out of the 153 reported — to being the 19th this year, the lowest it has ever been.

The U.S. Supreme Court, narrowly divided along ideological lines, ruled Tuesday that the government may detain — without a hearing — legal immigrants long after they have served the sentences for crimes they committed.

Elite colleges and universities have subtle, but clear, ways of creating class systems that exclude and/or embarrass low-income students, such as making students who want to earn money clean the bathrooms of their peers. Although these practices are far from new, they have been accentuated during recent court cases of wealthy parents buying their children’s way into these top schools.

As a response to substantial evidence of advertising discrimination, Facebook has announced that it will no longer provide certain demographic information such as gender, zip codes or anything that can be used to indicate race, from housing, credit and employment advertisers.

Tasked with protecting Americans against harmful financial practices, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken a less aggressive approach under the Trump administration, according to a pair of new reports, one given exclusively to USA TODAY.

The Southern Poverty Law Center fired Morris Dees, the nonprofit civil rights organization’s co-founder and former chief litigator.SPLC President Richard Cohen said in a statement Dees’ dismissal over his misconduct was effective on Wednesday, March 13. When pressed for details on what led to the termination, the organization declined to elaborate.

JPMorgan Chase & Co is making intentional efforts to service low-income communities by creating a new type of checkless account that does not allow overdrafts, requires no minimum balance, and offers free check cashing.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairman Jelena McWilliams tells a compelling story about her negative encounters with the U.S. financial system and vows to make substantive changes to the Community Reinvestment Act that benefit communities she has called home and others alike.

Tanitoluwa Adewumi is an 8-year-old Nigerian refugee and a chess prodigy. He began playing a little over a year ago and now has achieved a chess rating of 1587, highest being a 2845, while living in a homeless shelter in New York City.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., dropped a requirement that credit unions face Community Reinvestment Act obligations from a revamped affordable housing bill introduced on Wednesday.

Homeownership rates rose dramatically from 2016 through 2018 while renting rates had slowly declined within that same time frame.

Professor Chris Mayer has a lesson for ­homeowners: Reverse mortgages, which let older Americans tap their home equity without selling or moving, aren’t as risky as some say.

Rep. Katie Porter, D-CA, pulls out her self-authored textbook and a calculator during a House Financial Services Committee hearing because CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger did not give the definition of ‘annual percentage rate’ (APR) that was sufficient for Porter. Porter also gave Kraninger a practice problem where the director was asked to find the APR. The director would not, or could not, answer the question.

White Americans contribute largely to air pollution but Black and Hispanic Americans are the ones primarily exposed to, and inhale more of, the polluted air.

JPMorgan Chase & Company announced that it will stop financing private operators of prisons and detention centers, possibly as a response to Trump’s administration increasing its attempts to detain undocumented migrants in privately run prisons or due to public pressure to do so.