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 ...
Following up on a June investigation that showed that Maine’s probate courts failed to closely track vulnerable adults under public guardianship, Samantha Hogan in Maine Monitor revealed that eight incapacitated people in the state’s care died during the past three years and authorities don’t know how. The adults, all under public guardianship, died of what medical examiners described as “undetermined” circumstances, while noting ...
As part of Honolulu Civil Beat’s investigation of the state’s system for removing children from their parents, reporter John Hill, with Fund support, told the story of a father who lost custody of his child because of allegations that he had abused him – and then three years later, the state government told him it had changed its mind. It ...