As part of its ongoing investigation of deaths in county jails, which is supported by the Fund, the Tucson Sentinel tracked the case of Caleb Kenowski, whose family did not know about his death for nearly three months. Reporters Natalie Robbins and Dylan Smith found that Kenowski’s family searched for him for months, and that the sheriff’s department did not ...
In a story for NPR’s Throughline podcast, reporters Anya Steinberg and Sequoia Carrillo, with support from the Fund, showed that land in Minnesota’s Leech Lake Reservation has been taken away gradually from Native Americans through a web of complex forces – including coercion to sell, appropriation of lands for federal conservation and dam-building that flooded homes and food sources. The ...
With support from the Fund, a team of journalists documented how a disinformation campaign, orchestrated from abroad, aimed to topple the new administration in Brazil and install defeated far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The investigation found that since 2018, Eduardo Bolsonaro took part in 125 meetings with far-right leaders in several countries, including the U.S., and engaged cyber mercenaries to grab ...
A group of Nepali workers were subjected to abusive working and living conditions at Amazon warehouses in Saudi Arabia, a team of reporters found. Forty-eight of the 54 Nepali workers interviewed said recruiters misled them about the terms of their employment. All 54 say they were required to pay recruiting fees – ranging from $830 to $2,300 – that far ...
In an investigation for Wyofile, reporter Shane Sanderson found that Wyoming’s jails are among the nation’s deadliest for inmate suicide. Sanderson found that 22 inmates had died by suicide in Wyoming’s jails over a decade, the fourth-highest rate in the country. With support from the Fund, WyoFile requested records from the sheriffs of each Wyoming county, asking for details on ...
In an excerpt in Time from her new book, “The Cost of Free Land,” Rebecca Clarren explores the “blank spaces around the edges” of her own immigrant forebears’ acquisition of land in the American west and their rise to the American middle class. Her research found that her family’s history was linked to the appropriation of land by the U.S. government from ...
While the U.S. has passed laws to restrict goods produced with forced labor in China, one sector – the seafood industry – has escaped scrutiny, a new investigation found. With a grant from the Fund, Ian Urbina and a team from the Outlaw Ocean Project reviewed hundreds of pages of internal company newsletters, trade data, local news reports and satellite ...
As the Pittsburgh public school system struggles with dwindling student enrollment, reporter Lajja Mistry, writing for Public Source, revealed the many financial challenges the system is facing, and showed that fewer students mean the system must spend more on each pupil still in the school system. However, a higher investment per student does not necessarily reflect improved student outcomes or ...
Massoglia also investigated the extensive spending by former President Donald Trump’s political operation after it paid over $44 million to lawyers and major law firms that have represented potential witnesses and codefendants in his ongoing legal cases since 2020. The money represents about half of the operation’s legal expenses during that time. The OpenSecrets analysis, supported by the Fund, found ...
As part of Open Secrets’ ongoing investigation into the money behind election misinformation, reporters Olivia Buckley and Anna Massoglia charted the financial web of billionaire shipping supply magnates Richard “Dick” Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth “Liz” Uihlein. With support from the Fund, the reporters showed how the couple has linked up with “dark money” groups, conservative super PACs, activists spreading ...