When Abe and I started reporting, we met people from the community and out of town who tried to help. I watched as New Mexico National Guard service members loaded sand bags into families’ cars, people prepared hot meals for those who had been displaced and volunteers handed out donated supplies from collection centers.

While we were reporting one afternoon, it started raining. Fear swept through me. Our phones lit up with flood warnings from the National Weather Service. We knew we should take them seriously.

Abe and I sought refuge in a local brewery perched high above the river basin. Before we knew it, the water from that thin little creek of Rio Ruidoso became a torrent. The rushing water rose quickly. It swept through the river valley right under the brewery, carrying what looked like trees and debris with it.

n selling its blockbuster anticancer drug Keytruda to the Russian government, the pharmaceutical giant Merck turned to a hospital supplier with friends in high places: Alexey Repik, a now-sanctioned oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and fluent in the ways of Russia and Western business.

A native of Moscow, trained as an economist, Repik started R-Pharm in 2001 after selling his car and borrowing $15,000 from his mother. Serving as an intermediary for pharmaceutical firms bidding on massive government contracts for medicine, the firm took off.

In 2009, the year New Jersey-based Merck forged a strategic alliance with R-Pharm, the Russian company was expanding and soon teamed up with other Western firms and formed new lines of business.

Over the last three years, the Institute for Palestine Studies' blog, Palestine Square, has published testimonies, stories, news, and perspectives from writers and journalists in Gaza. This reading list gathers a selection of pieces published in English that document the realities of survival through the genocide and the many ways Palestinians have continued to resist, sustain one another, and hold on to life.

Some pieces bear witness to displacement and loss. Sama Hassan recounts realizing she was alone with her children in an apartment building in the first days of the genocide. Ahmad Al Halaby writes about the pain of ceaseless displacement, while Shahad Ali traces her grandmother's repeated displacement from Beit Daras in 1948 to Gaza.

Others document efforts to sustain life amid an engineered famine. Mariam Mushtaha describes growing vegetables outside her home, while Areej Al Mashharawi writes about her brother, who was martyred while trying to obtain flour for his family. Ohood Nassar tells the story of a family-run bakery established after its members suffered severe injuries and amputations.

The selection also explores the traces of war and efforts to care and heal: Donya Abu Sitta writes about soldiers' graffiti across Gaza, Mohammad al-Naami about unexploded devices that continue to threaten lives, and Sojoud Alkhour about Gaza's cemeteries. Other pieces highlight forms of care and creative survival, including VR therapy for children, art initiatives, and Ayah Annab's writing on music as a way to withstand the sounds of drones.

These stories document the hardships Palestinians in Gaza have endured and continue to endure, as well as the many ways they resist. We invite you to explore these selections and the rest of Palestine Square's coverage, published in both Arabic and English.

This is a great resource for stories from Palestine over the past couple of years!

With so little evidence to work with, David Keith, a Canadian physicist, proposed a workaround: The authors could conduct an “expert elicitation,” taking an anonymous survey about what they expected the evidence to eventually show.

At first, not everyone was willing to go along. Some scientists worried that making what amounted to educated guesses would mislead the public, they told Drilled and ProPublica. Benson and Metz, though, both argued that on such an important matter informed advice was better than nothing.

In the end, the group agreed to take the survey and to keep it off the record — they would “burn it afterward,” Keith recounted, making no mention of it in the official report. When the meeting concluded, some of the scientists popped their bottles of cava in celebration.

MeidasTouch, in coordination with our partner VALOR Media Network, has obtained dozens of never-before-published photos and videos showing damage to U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, along with firsthand accounts from people who were there. They describe destroyed aircraft, bombed-out barracks and mess halls, troops digging their own foxholes, and military families hiding in parking garages while Iranian missiles flew overhead.

“It’s so much worse than people realize,” one source said.

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because, they said, they have been repeatedly threatened with disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for speaking out or sharing images. The accounts were gathered by VALOR Media correspondents El Powers and What in Clay Nation, who provided their notes and the images to MeidasTouch.

The Bank of North Dakota is the nation’s only surviving state-owned and -operated bank. It has persisted as Great Plains politics has shifted from prairie progressivism to deep-red conservatism, and it now manages about $11 billion in assets while enjoying broad support from the state’s current political leaders.

“I think it’s weird, right? We’re one of the most conservative states in the union, and we have this state-run bank that was started by first-generation Norwegian immigrants,” North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong, a Republican, told CNBC. “I don’t think we could set one up now, but I’m sure glad we have it.”

In addition to Armstrong, the bank’s present-day boosters include the state’s U.S. senators, Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven — who is a former president of the bank, and former North Dakota governor and current Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. All are Republicans in a party where “socialist” is a pejorative on the 2026 campaign trail.

“I’ve always said it’s a very interesting concept; obviously it’s a successful one up here,” Don Morgan, the Bank of North Dakota president and CEO, told CNBC. “It’s one that if you use it wrong, it could be a little bit dangerous. But if you use it right, it can be a really powerful financial tool.”

To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.

After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.

Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.

Podcast: https://www.propublica.org/podcast/susan-collins-bribery-allegations-fbi-martin-kao

Last month, in collaboration with the investigative sports podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Mother Jones published a months-long investigation into Life Surge, the Christian wealth seminar company that has attracted large crowds with celebrity speakers including college football legend Tim Tebow, NBA icon Magic Johnson, and Red Sox great David Ortiz. We detailed how the company attracts crowds of thousands who pay around $20 to attend its one-day events, which mix a star-studded lineup with worship music, tearful and heartfelt Christian testimony, and demonstrations of the company’s proprietary stock-market and real-estate investment strategies. Attendees are given the opportunity to sign up for three-day “impact classes,” where, they are told, they will learn more investment tips—so that they can improve their own finances as well as make a Christian “kingdom impact.” At those classes, which now cost about $97, former attendees reported salespeople invoking Christian faith to sell them a program called SurgeU, investment education packages ranging from $10,000-$40,000.

After paying for the SurgeU classes through a third-party financing company contracted by Life Surge, some attendees have reported ending up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. As one dissatisfied customer wrote in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, “I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me. This is evil, especially because I’m disabled on a limited income.” Karen Neal, a 61-year-old former Life Surge customer, told me that for her, buying into the SurgeU classes was a $15,000 mistake. “I see many of these strong Christian artists and strong Christian people that are up there speaking at the Life Serve conferences,” she said. “And it’s like, do they know what’s happening to some of these people that are getting into this?”

It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?

When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.

In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.

It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.

DraftKings and FanDuel say that they don’t want to profit off bettors who can’t control themselves, and they provide a range of what the industry calls “responsible gaming” tools to help users stay in check.

Jake received pop-up notices, reminders and emails noting his time on the app and nudging him to “take a beat” after a loss. He opted into some of the tools DraftKings makes available. But he was struck by user design choices and promotions that encouraged him to keep betting, some of which he was served right after setting limits on his play.

In a statement, DraftKings told ProPublica that it trains its more than 5,000 employees on responsible gaming and has more than 50 full-time staff dedicated to its “responsible engagement” program. A FanDuel spokesperson wrote that the company’s program is “designed to identify potential risk early and empower customers with real-time information about their play.”

Even so, regulators and lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts have begun to question whether sportsbooks have sufficient protections in place. Those concerns have risen with the popularization of prediction markets, which are even less regulated than sports betting apps like DraftKings.

In my opinion, this is the best economy explanation I've ever heard.

As the cost of living keeps rising while Americans’ paychecks fail to keep pace, Jon is joined by labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards to break down where our economy went so wrong for so many years. Together, they explore how decades of policy choices and corporate practices have weakened workers’ leverage and channeled gains toward those at the top—and lay out a vision for how to rebalance the economy so that workers share more fairly in the prosperity they help create. Plus, Jon answers listeners’ questions about impeaching Trump, the White House Press Secretary, and Daylight Savings Time!

But Sir James Goldsmith, who was knighted by the Queen in 1976 and became a prominent British politician, remained wary of the American financier and even “despised” him, his daughter Jemima recently told the Guardian.

Two decades before Epstein came under federal investigation, Goldsmith – who died in 1997 – told a confidant that Epstein was a “sexual deviant” who was recruiting children for illicit activities.

Goldsmith “told me not to have anything to do with him, that he was a pervert, and he didn’t want him near any of us. He had four daughters to protect,” recalled the famous French architect Robert Couturier, who designed opulent homes for Goldsmith in New York and Mexico.

Goldsmith’s alleged warning came aro

Reporting Highlights

• An Easy Process: In Arkansas, all it took to establish a school was filling out a form on a state website, $45 and the purchase of an American flag.
• No Qualifications Needed: Having no experience running a school — or even teaching — didn’t stand in the way of founding schools.
• Fewer Barriers: We discovered that opening microschools, which are proliferating nationwide, offer an even easier route.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

The parents told officers that they hadn’t taken the four children who died to the doctor because of their religion, the Followers of Christ, which considers the use of modern medicine a sinful lapse of faith in God. And Idaho exempts parents from faith-healing sects like the Followers from the legal duty to give their children lifesaving medical care.

The sect had at least 15 avoidable deaths among children from 2015 through 2025, according to healthcare professionals who reviewed their records for ProPublica.

Among them were children in five families, including Emma Joyce’s, who had a combined total of two, three or four losses in this period or earlier.

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute.

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure.

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said.

This is from a month ago, but I can't say enough, worth watching. He is a light in the darkness of AI.

Doctors were already giving thalidomide to thousands of U.S. patients, including pregnant women. Some children whose mothers were given the drug during pregnancy were born with severely deformed limbs.

Those children are now adults, and they want the federal government to formally acknowledge their existence.

"We go to doctors today who say it didn't happen here in the United States. Oh yeah, it did," said Gwen Riechmann, who was born with phocomelia, the signature shortened limb deformity caused by thalidomide.

The Arctic’s rivers are turning a vibrant shade of orange, which scientists have attributed to thawing permafrost from—you guessed it—rising temperatures. Here’s the latest in this depressing saga: The rivers are now spreading plumes of metal and acid far downstream.

An analysis of six watersheds in Alaska’s Brooks Range revealed that the tributaries and seeps feeding into the park’s rivers are extremely acidic and metallic, with levels comparable—and sometimes even higher—than water drainage from rivers located near metal mines. While the rivers’ main waterstems weren’t as acidic, the region’s drainage system has been transporting contaminated water over 60 miles (100 kilometers) downstream. As the tributaries and seeps dump more water into the river, metal concentrations can increase by roughly 70 times compared to their initial entry. The findings were published yesterday in AGU Advances.

As the Fed battles inflation and Americans bear the costs, Jon is joined by Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative and author of the new book “Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your Wallet.” Together, they uncover how corporations collude to manipulate prices—and expose the new tools and technologies companies are using to track us, target us, and charge us more at checkout.

The numbers from The 74’s analysis are considerably higher than the 13.4 percent of cases attributed to K-12 schools in a more narrowly focused review of the New York Child Victims Act cases done by the advocacy organization Child USA. They also provide greater context to the frequently cited estimate that 1 in 10 K-12 students will be subject to sexual misconduct by an adult by the time they graduate, according to a 2014 government report and 2004 research mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.

“That’s an insane number for one period of time where a window was open,” said Kathryn Robb, director of the Children’s Justice Campaign at the advocacy organization Enough Abuse. “And how many possibly couldn’t file after the window had closed.”

Robb, who spent over a decade helping to draft and pass the New York bill, added that because so few survivors ultimately report their abuse, the tally of school-based complaints is likely a significant undercount. But the number who did come forward, she said, “allows a justified alarm to be sound[ed] for both the public—parents, grandparents, people, guardians—and also our lawmakers and leaders.”

Follow up and very satisfying

With Luigi Mangione’s upcoming sentencing, John Oliver devotes the full episode to covering UnitedHealth Group: Why customers hate them, how they got so profitable, and why doctors are wishing explosive diarrhea on their board members.

For the first time, a trove of confidential records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists offers a window onto the inner workings and decision-making of ICBC, a vital cog in China’s global geopolitical ambitions. The records reveal that the state-owned bank has used London as a financing hub for companies linked to sanctioned Russian and Belarusian business owners, autocrats publicly accused of corruption and China’s political establishment.

As part of China Capital, ICIJ found that at times the bank’s Beijing headquarters directed bank officers overseas to pursue explicitly political objectives for its majority shareholder, the Chinese state — to cement alliances, acquire natural resources and expand control over communications, energy and transportation infrastructure around the world. While doing so, ICBC breached some of its own anti-money laundering and sanctions policies, the investigation found.

Before I joined ProPublica in 2021, I had spent a year writing about a Georgia prison physician named Carlo Musso, one of the rare doctors who’d openly talked about his role in lethal injections. After he stepped away from that work, I wanted to know who replaced him, so I filed open records requests for documents that would shed light on that.

The role Musso held is so controversial that more than a dozen states have made it illegal to disclose the names of those involved with lethal injections. Georgia is among them. The state has gone to great lengths to hide the details around how it carries out lethal injections.

Georgia wouldn’t release records I had requested, claiming that its secrecy law is needed to prevent those helping with its executions from getting harassed by opponents of the death penalty.

I ended up suing the state. A few years later, a panel of three judges sided with me, and the state released some of the documents.

What I received reveals new details — and revives old questions — about Georgia’s lethal injection process. Among the discoveries: Georgia has made payments of more than $1.1 million since the COVID-19 pandemic for at least one contractor to work with the Corrections Department on its lethal injection process. During that period, the state carried out just a single execution.