Famine is already happening in parts of Gaza, a top U.S. humanitarian official publicly acknowledged last week for the first time. After six months of Israeli war and blockades, an estimated 2.2 million people are facing acute or catastrophic food shortages. One in three children in northern Gaza are malnourished, and deaths due to hunger are expected to accelerate quickly, U.S. officials have warned. According to the groundbreaking work of Dutch researcher Tessa Roseboom, the impacts of near-starvation are also likely being experienced by generations not yet born. Roseboom, a biologist and p ..read more

Last year, 25-year-old Carlee Russell called 911 in Hoover, Alabama, reporting that there was a child on the interstate. Then Russell vanished, and no child was found. A massive search effort followed, along with a national media frenzy. Two days later, she returned home, seemingly unharmed but claiming that she had escaped a kidnapping.  After about a week, sympathy for Russell turned to anger as investigators concluded that she had faked her disappearance and charged her with two misdemeanors for false reporting. She pleaded guilty, and a judge ordered Russell to pay nearly $18,000 in ..read more

In 1999, John Goodrich, an Idaho dentist who was also a bishop with the Mormon church, accompanied his teenage daughter Chelsea on a school field trip to the East Coast. During a stay in Williamsburg, Virginia, he allegedly abused her sexually, as she later claimed he had done since she was at least 9.  Nearly a quarter-century later, John Goodrich – whose story was at the center of an Associated Press/Reveal radio collaboration about how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints protects itself from sexual abuse allegations – has been arrested in Virginia following a grand jury in ..read more

This article was published in partnership with the Miami Herald. To understand the problems with Florida’s oversight of anti-abortion pregnancy centers, you don’t have to look much further than Mary’s Pregnancy Resource Center, north of Miami. The crisis pregnancy center in Broward County steered women away from abortion while providing free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and parenting classes. Founded by Yohanka Reyes and her husband, its mission was rooted in Reyes’ own horrific history: The first time she became pregnant after she was sexually assaulted as a young girl, she had an abortion ..read more

The Americans pulling into the luxury Caribbean resort town of Juan Dolio could have easily passed as tourists. Dressed in jeans and tennis shoes, they set up at a hotel overlooking the Dominican Republic’s southern coast. But the group, which included law enforcement officers from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wasn’t traveling to enjoy the area’s world-class golf courses and palm-studded white sand beaches. Trained to target and dismantle terrorist groups and transnational drug cartels, the special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, were probing something very ..read more

Written and reported by Julia Lurie This story was produced by Mother Jones. Get their investigations emailed to you directly here. The first time Katrina Edwards was locked in a psychiatric hospital for children, she was sure a foster parent would pick her up the next day. It was a spring night in 2012 when Edwards, then 12 years old, was admitted to North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage. In a photo taken upon her arrival, Edwards wears an Abercrombie hoodie and has dark circles under her eyes, her expression skeptical. During her initial evaluation, a psychiatrist asked a battery of que ..read more

Sequestered in a small interrogation room, sipping an iced coffee, Nicole Chase was trying to explain just how dysfunctional things had become at Nodine’s Smokehouse Deli and Restaurant, a family-owned place in Canton, Connecticut, that specialized in smokehouse meats and toxic masculinity.  There was the time one of her colleagues came to work high on acid, she said. On a day the restaurant made only $100, a manager closed early and got fired. Her boss, Calvin Nodine, was constantly telling sexist jokes and drinking on the job – even the customers saw it.  Chase thought she’d learn ..read more

As rural Arizonans face the prospect of wells running dry, foreign firms are sucking up vast amounts of the state’s groundwater to grow hay for Saudi Arabia and other wealthy nations. Now it turns out that a key investor in this water transfer scheme is Arizona’s own employee retirement fund. In La Paz County, a rural community about 100 miles west of Phoenix, Al Dahra Farms USA has been running a 3,000-acre farming operation in the Sonoran desert, draining down the same groundwater that the county’s residents rely on to fill their wells. The Emirati-owned farming company tapped into a former ..read more

Every day, thousands of tons of trash – rotten food, takeout containers, diapers, old shoes, construction debris, tires, plastic bags, soiled carpet and lawn clippings – burst into flame and turn to ash and energy at an incinerator in Palm Beach County, Florida.  “Right there is probably about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Ray Schauer, the facility operations director, looking at the incinerator’s combustion chamber during a tour in May. “Most people say, ‘If I could see hell, this is what it would look like.’ ” As the trash burns, the municipal incinerator produces enough electricity ..read more

Written and reported by Shoshana Walter Data analysis by Melissa Lewis This article is a partnership between The New York Times Magazine and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. One morning in the summer of 2020, Jade Dass woke up and vomited. She assumed she was hung over; she’d been depressed lately and sometimes self-medicated with too much wine. But then a woman in her online counseling group suggested that she might be pregnant. Dass looked in the mirror and realized she was probably right. At 26, Dass had spent the previous 10 months in recovery from an opioid addiction ..read more