With support from the Fund, reporters at the Center for Public Integrity produced “40 Acres and a Lie,” a groundbreaking investigation that uncovered hundreds of unpublished land titles issued to freed people after the Civil War. Using image-recognition technology, they identified 1,250 Black people who were granted land by the federal government and conducted genealogical research to locate and interview ...
Researchers at Mount Sinai medical center used a false justification for taking brain tissue from vulnerable patients, according to a two-year investigation by STAT News, with support from the Fund. FDA reviewers determined in an internal report that “investigator-physicians are abusing or exploiting the trust of their patients,” the investigation found. The brain biopsies were taken from living patients undergoing deep brain ...
As part of a long-term investigation into police disciplinary files in New York, supported by the Fund, freelancer Sammy Sussman obtained the disciplinary file of New York City Mayor Eric Adams when he worked for the New York Police Department. Adams’ record reveals that he lost vacation days in 2006 after he spoke inaccurately and seemingly in his official capacity ...
With a follow-up grant from the Fund after earlier coverage in the Texas Observer, Steven Monacelli reported on a new coalition of Christian nationalist groups, the Remnant Alliance, that is mobilizing congregations to take over Texas school boards. Several leaders of the coalition are members of the Council on National Policy, a secretive group founded in 1981 that has worked ...
The Advocate and the Times Picayune received a follow-up grant from the Fund after an earlier series examined commonalities among 12 insurers in Louisiana that failed after 2021 and found many of them were poorly capitalized and had grown quickly, often by taking on risky policies. In addition, many used an affiliate model that made their books harder for regulators ...
Energy companies use “gas flaring” to burn off gas and reduce pressure in chemical plants, but this practice harms the environment, so the World Bank and the EU began asking energy companies to use other methods – and began using NASA satellites to monitor gas flares. With support from the Fund, Tom Brown and Christina Last showed that some oil ...
San Francisco has a long history of pushing for publicly-owned power utilities, which was renewed in 2019 when Pacific Gas & Electric – the investor-owned utility that owns the grid in San Francisco – filed for bankruptcy in the wake of wildfires in the state. City officials made a $2.5 billion offer to purchase the grid, but PG&E rebuffed the ...
Attacks on energy infrastructure have increased significantly over the last few years, amid plots hatched by right-wing extremists, known as accelerationists, who seek to sow chaos as a way to hasten societal collapse. Even when attacks on energy substations are robberies, rather than politically motivated, extremists seize on them to advance their agenda, Jane C. Hu found in an investigation ...
The city of Gainesville, Florida, placed a landfill in the backyard of Joseph Williams Elementary School in the 1950s. The dump was closed 60 years ago, but even after other environmental issues were discovered on the site, it was never fully cleaned up. With support from the Fund, Georgia Gee’s yearlong investigation – based on hundreds of public and archival ...
New reporting by The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering education, shows that Louisiana school officials only notified victims that their data had been compromised in a cyberattack after media coverage of the issue. With support from the Fund, The 74 and The Acadiana Advocate uncovered the data breach last year. The school district insisted that student and teacher information ...