by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. It was during a summer visit to their son’s boarding school that Cian Roy’s parents said they realized something had gone terribly wrong. Cian, who has autism and intellectual disabilities, could no longer make out the numbers on the elevator buttons, his parents said. He held his iPad up to his nose to try to see images like the icon for the Netflix ..read more

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Several months ago, in a lawsuit that was in its ninth year, a federal judge blasted the medical care at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Many inmates hoped it would be a watershed moment. In her opinion, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick excoriated the state for its “callous and wanton disregard” for the health of those in its custody. “Rather than receiving medical ‘ca ..read more

by Mark Olalde ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Last October, California passed the nation’s strongest law to address the glut of oil and gas wells that are unplugged and ownerless, many leaking pollutants into the environment. The legislation required that, as part of any sale or transfer of wells, the purchasing company set aside enough money in financial instruments known as bonds to cover the entire cleanup cost of low-pro ..read more

by Topher Sanders ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A new federal rule aims to keep people from being pulled into storm drains during heavy rains. It comes after ProPublica’s 2021 reporting on how dangerous and uncovered storm drains were responsible for at least three dozen deaths across the country in a six-year span. The rule, which went into effect in May and applies to new projects funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, builds on guidance the federal agency rel ..read more

by Catherine Rentz ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. One of the country’s oldest backlogs of untested evidence from rape exams is on track to be processed by the end of the year after new laws in Maryland put more than 1,400 cases dating back to 1977 on an expedited timetable. As detailed in ProPublica’s 2021 series “Cold Justice,” a doctor at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center began quietly preserving physical evidence obtained during exams of rape survivors in the 1970s, believing that ..read more

by Heather Vogell ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The Biden administration has quietly pushed more than a half-dozen countries to weaken, delay or rethink baby formula regulations aimed at protecting the public’s health — sometimes after manufacturers complained, a ProPublica investigation has found. In the European Union, the U.S. opposed an effort to reduce lead levels in baby formula. In Taiwan, it sought to alter labeling that highlighted the health benefits of breastfeeding. And in C ..read more

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Frontier. Additional funding for this story was provided by The Pulitzer Center. On the morning of April 12, the farmworker woke up struggling to breathe and delirious with fever. Jiaai Zeng had spent the past month working nonstop at a marijuana farm in Oklahoma run by fellow Chinese immigrants. The job was ..read more

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Sen. J.D. Vance, whom Donald Trump named as his vice presidential running mate Monday, told a group of influential young conservatives in a closed-door speech in 2021 that they should stand up for “nonconventional people” who speak truth, such as Infowars founder Alex Jones. “If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Su ..read more

by Eli Hager ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies. In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted ..read more

by Marcus Baram, Documented, with data analysis by Joel Jacobs, ProPublica This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Documented. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. In the lobby of its midtown Manhattan headquarters, Fedcap Rehabilitation Services has a large wall display that pays homage to its near 90-year history of leading “the fight for equity and opportunity” for the disabled community. The nonprofit is known in New York as having pioneered the field of vocational rehabilitation, a service that he ..read more