by Ruth Talbot and Brandon Roberts ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Each year, people and companies contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to tax-exempt political organizations in an effort to influence elections nationwide. These organizations, commonly known as 527s after a section of the tax code, can raise unlimited sums for political spending. Today, ProPublica is releasing a database that will allow journalists, researchers and others to more easily search 527s’ finances and find ..read more

by Ruth Talbot, Brandon Roberts and Nat Lash A 527 is a nonprofit formed under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, which grants tax-exempt status to organizations whose primary purpose is attempting to influence the election of one or more people to public office at the national, state or local level. But contributions to these organizations are not considered tax-deductible, unlike gifts to charities. This database has at least summary information for any organizations that filed for tax-exempt status with the IRS under Section 527. Additional information, including financial details, i ..read more

by ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. After Russian hackers exploited a flaw in a widely used Microsoft product during one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history, the software giant downplayed its culpability. However, a recent ProPublica investigation revealed that a whistleblower within Microsoft’s ranks had repeatedly attempted to convince the company to address the weakness years before the hack — and that the company rebuffed his concerns at every step. Here are the key ..read more

by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. A frustrated woman recently called the Utah official in charge of professional licensing, upset that his office couldn’t take action against a life coach she had seen. Mark Steinagel recalls the woman telling him: “I really think that we should be regulating life coaching. Because this person did a lot of damage to me.” Reports about life coaches — who sell the pr ..read more

by McKenzie Funk 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. When the COVID-19 pandemic upended the workplace, jobs went remote, offices had to adopt new technologies and longtime employees suddenly departed. Federal stimulus dollars flooded into state and local government accounts, and fraudsters had a heyday. The pandemic was only one of several recent disruptions to roil the financial operations of state and local governments, which o ..read more

by Renee Dudley ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Members of Congress pressed Microsoft on Thursday to strengthen how it handles reported security flaws in its ubiquitous products after a series of cyberattacks struck the federal government. The criticism from members of the House Homeland Security Committee came in response to a new ProPublica investigation that found Microsoft repeatedly rebuffed a company engineer who, beginning in 2017, warned that a product flaw left millions of users ..read more

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Billionaire political donor Harlan Crow provided at least three previously undisclosed private jet trips to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in recent years, an investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats has found. The flights, which were detailed by Crow’s lawyer in response to inquiries from the committee, took the justice to destinations including the region near Glacier National Park in ..read more

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Microsoft hired Andrew Harris for his extraordinary skill in keeping hackers out of the nation’s most sensitive computer networks. In 2016, Harris was hard at work on a mystifying incident in which intruders had somehow penetrated a major U.S. tech company. The breach troubled Harris for two reasons. First, it involved the company’s cloud — a virtual storehouse typically containing an organization’s most sensiti ..read more

by Duaa Eldeib ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation that, for the first time, expressly permits states to spend millions of federal dollars on stillbirth prevention. The Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act, which passed the House in mid-May, now goes to President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign the measure into law. ProPublica has spent the past two years reporting on the crisis around stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 ..read more

by Ken Schwencke ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. We updated our “Supreme Connections” database on Wednesday with new entries from recently released financial disclosures from Supreme Court justices, as well as five filings from 2003 to 2007 we had previously been missing. “Supreme Connections” is our database that makes it easy for anyone to browse justices’ financial disclosures and to search for connections to people and companies mentioned within them. This update includes data from ei ..read more