Northern Nevada is one of the most productive and sought-after gold mining regions on the planet. In 2019, two companies merged their Nevada mines into a joint venture, Nevada Gold Mines, now one of the largest gold miners in the world. The company’s size and the absence of competition left the local community, the workforce, contractors, and Indigenous nations on ...
In North Carolina, several counties are betting their futures on bigger jails, guided by consultants who stand to profit. The decisions are often based on dubious work by consultants who may then be hired to design the jails they recommend. And the counties often fail to weigh the long-term costs of putting their money into bigger jails instead dealing with ...
The bankruptcy of prominent Easterday Ranches in Washington State, where owner Cody Easterday had lost more than $200 million in cattle futures, offered a rare opportunity to examine the opaque world of beef pricing, and in particular, Tyson Foods, one of four meat packing corporations controlling 73 percent of the protein market in the United States. Easterday was being prosecuted ...
SJV Water Editor and CEO Lois Henry had heard from farmers in Kings County in California’s San Joaquin Valley that water was being moved in large amounts from the heavily farmed region, possibly for sales outside the county. What she found was that water is, in fact, leaving the county, mostly under legal transfers by the region’s two largest farming ...
After Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while jogging in a majority-white neighborhood in Glynn County, Georgia, initial police reports cast him as a burglar and “suspicious person,” not a victim of crime. Many Black people who live in Brunswick, the county seat surrounded by a white majority, told The Current that they believed bias toward people of color by local police ...
Based on a trove of confidential internal documents, reporter Will Evans from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, in collaboration with WIRED, exposed how Amazon has failed to protect its empire of data, harming customers and small businesses. Amazon grew so quickly, with so few internal controls, that the company couldn’t even keep track of the sensitive data it ...
Grantees at Wisconsin Watch are investigating a child abuse pediatrician whose declarations of abuse have been rejected at least a dozen times by police, prosecutors, jurors, child protective services officials and other doctors. Dr. Barbara Knox was placed on leave from the University of Wisconsin in 2019 for allegedly bullying her colleagues. Now she is medical director of Alaska CARES, ...
Grantee Robert Lewis of CalMatters examines how California’s gun laws have fallen short of their promise after years of bipartisan support in the state. Lewis obtained hundreds of court filings and public records and interviewed dozens of sources, and his three-part series shows that California is struggling to recover illegally owned firearms. At the start of this year, 24,000 individuals ...
Grantees at Civil Beat in Hawaii obtained thousands of pages of records and emails showing that officials at the federal panel overseeing fishing in the Pacific Ocean have worked to protect commercial fishing interests instead of protecting the environment. A seven-part special project by deputy editor Nathan Eagle looks at the political activism of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management ...
Oil and gas companies claim that taking action on climate change puts Louisiana’s economy and workers at risk. But without action, coastal Louisiana residents are at greater risk of losing their homes to rising sea levels and more intense hurricanes. The fossil fuel industry’s contribution to the state economy has been in decline, as has the number of residents employed ...