This week, California enacted new regulations that will allow the state to publish a list of potentially dangerous chemicals — something the country as a whole has been unable to do for decades.

The waiting goes back to 1976, when the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) gave the EPA power to require testing of dangerous compounds. In the nearly 40 years since its passage, the EPA has banned all of five chemicals.

“We hope if and when TSCA is revived it will be for the good of everyone. We don’t really want to wait, we can’t wait for that,” a California state official said.

California's Kern County, about an hour's drive north of Los Angeles, is a fertile mecca for agriculture, but it also lacks viable education alternatives for farmworkers' children who are expelled from the classroom. 

For students in rural areas, the commute to get to a teacher even just once a week is daunting. In many cases, their parents either aren't able to request time off from working in the fields, or can't afford to. 

The 17-year-old son of a farmworker we spoke with told us, “I want to graduate. I don’t want to work in the fields like my parents.”

The creators of a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC have rather suspicious pasts, with legal woes, bankruptcy and shifting personal identities among their troubles.

For instance, it is unclear that the "Time for Hillary" super PAC's chairman is a real person. And the story gets murkier from there...

We wrote last month of a coordinated health insurance industry effort to limit the role of Obamacare "navigators," or trained guides to the new online marketplaces opening Oct. 1. Insurance agents felt the federally funded navigators tread too closely on their job, so they worked to pass laws in 16 states limiting the scope of what the navigators are allowed to do.

Now recent attention (and political pressure) on navigators has led groups in Ohio and Texas to decline their federal grants. With new regulatory hoops to jump through, one multi-state group returned $833,000 in navigator funding, as they no longer had staff on hand to accommodate.

We've looked at bank CEOs & subprime lenders, now, where are the financial regulators five years after the meltdown? http://buff.ly/19LHDlS

We all know Washington, D.C. tends to go about problem-solving in perplexing ways — here's a great (not-shutdown-related) example... 

In the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, heightened security standards and new counterterrorism efforts created hundreds of thousands of positions. With all those workers needing background checks and security clearance at once, the government soon had a backlog of would-be employees that topped 180,000. 

The solution? A 2004 act that put clearance applications on a deadline, or rather, prioritizing speed over quality. As a result, the government now relies on a private contractor to conduct a large portion of background checks — this company, USIS, ran checks on both Edward Snowden and Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis.

Read more on USIS and the role of Congress in the acceleration of our vetting process: http://bit.ly/17oYcoD

(Photo: USIS headquarters in Falls Church, VA)

This is a type of ID scanner used at more than 150 military and government installations across the U.S. — including the Washington Navy Yard — to keep bases secure. 

During an Inspector General probe of just 10 of these installations, at least 52 felons were given access to Naval bases for anywhere from two months to three years. That's because the system allows temporary access to visitors without completing background checks. 

The IG recommended immediate cancellation of the scanner system to avoid giving bases "a false sense of security." See how the Pentagon stumbled upon the security contractor: http://bit.ly/1aZKA3B

(Photo: Screen shot from an Eid Passport video)

In the wake of the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria that killed more than 1,000 people, U.S., British and French officials are looking for a means to dispose of Syria's immense chemical weapons arsenal.

Destroying the Syrian chemicals safely is a task some believe would be best performed outside the county's border where it could happen on a quick timeline, and with international supervision.

Due to its proximity, and possession of a chemical weapons demilitarization plant, Russia may be the only nation up to the job. 

Executives from all of the top 25, pre-meltdown subprime lenders are back in the mortgage business today http://buff.ly/1b5vxIj

Advocacy group American Chemistry Council has taken to the states to beat back chemical reform efforts, check out our latest 'Toxic Clout' investigation to see if they've been active in your state.