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Unfounded Health Concerns Are Powering a Solar Backlash

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A sign denouncing large-scale solar energy development lies a short distance from where a project has been proposed in St. Clair County, Michigan. The county’s medical director has claimed that large solar facilities are a potential health risk for residents. Nick Hagen for ProPublica Kevin Heath had hoped there would be solar panels by now on his family farm in southeastern Michigan, roughly 50 miles outside Detroit. About six years ago, he agreed to lease part of his land for a solar project. It would help him pay off debt and keep the farm in the family, he said. But the opportunity was thwarted when, in 2023, following pushback from some local residents, his township passed an ordinance that banned large solar projects from land zoned for agriculture. In the fight over solar development, Heath said he was bombarded by just about every argument from critics — including claims that solar fields are a health hazard. “I’ve heard them say that, but I’ve never heard anybody prove th...
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“A Punch in the Gut”: After Years of Waiting, Many Opioid Victims Will Be Shut Out of Purdue Settlement

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Pennsylvania resident Mary Jannotta, 77, left, and her daughter, Susan Ousterman, with a photograph of Susan’s son, Tyler Cordeiro. Jannotta had to overcome an addiction to opioid painkillers. Cordeiro died of a drug overdose in 2020. Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer Mary Jannotta sliced meat and cheese behind deli counters at Acme and Pathmark supermarkets in the Philadelphia suburbs for decades, developing aches that came with working on her feet. A botched back surgery in 2008 made the pain worse. Her doctor repeatedly prescribed OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s marquee painkiller — the high-dose opioid the company later admitted it criminally marketed and distributed.    Jannotta said she soon became dependent on opioids. Cut off by her doctors, she found her way to Kensington, home of Philadelphia’s dangerous open-air drug market, to score pills. She eventually lost her car, her home — and her grandson. Tyler Cordeiro first pilfered Jannotta’s prescription pil...
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Are You Waiting for Opioid Settlement Money From Purdue, Mallinckrodt or Endo? Get in Touch.

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OxyContin Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer are looking into how individual opioid victims have been compensated for addiction and other harm as a result of the tens of billions of pills distributed throughout the United States during the prescription-opioid crisis. Please tell us about your experience seeking payment from the court-appointed trusts funded by the drugmakers Purdue, Mallinckrodt and Endo. About us: Craig R. McCoy was a veteran corruption reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bob Fernandez was an enterprise and investigative business reporter, also at the Inquirer. We previously wrote for ProPublica and the Inquirer about the Endo bankruptcy . Our most recent story investigates the impact of Purdue’s new bankruptcy plan on victims seeking compensation for the harm they said its drugs caused.  The post Are You Waiting for Opioid Settlement Money From Purdue, Mallinckrodt or Endo? Get in Touch. appeared first on ProPubl...
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They Said a 3D Printer Would Bring Housing to This Town. It Was Yet Another Broken Promise.

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The one duplex built using the 3D printer remains unfinished. Julia Rendleman I wasn’t looking for a revelation on a country road in southeastern Illinois. But on the outskirts of Galatia — a tiny town where Appalachian hardship seems to have drifted west and settled in — that’s what I found. It was not a burning bush in some biblical wilderness, but an industrial 3D printer the size of a small garage — a machine, I would learn, that took a $1.1 million investment to get to Illinois, carrying with it the promise of an affordable housing renaissance across the region known as Little Egypt. And it called to me. I drove past it again and again. A year prior, in August 2024, this printer was at the center of a groundbreaking ceremony attended by more than 100 people, myself included. I covered the event for Capitol News Illinois and watched as the machine laid down the first layers of what was supposed to be a new beginning. Two local men had promised to help save Cairo, Illinois, b...
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The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan

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Photo illustration by Geoff Kim for ProPublica. Source images: Bloomberg, Kevin Carter, Flavio Coelho, Frank Rossoto Stocktrek, FPG/Getty Images. March unfolded like a stress test for U.S. counterterrorism authorities. The month opened with a gunman in an Iranian-flag shirt killing three people at a bar in Texas. Then, an attack with homemade explosives outside the mayor’s mansion in New York City. Next came a deadly shooting March 12 on a Virginia college campus and, the same afternoon, a car-ramming at a Michigan synagogue. Days later, agents arrested a man charged with threatening a mass shooting at an Ohio mosque. To current and former national security officials, these were omens, signs of the dangers they predicted last year when President Donald Trump began redirecting counterterrorism resources toward his mass deportation campaign. They had warned of a diminished ability to respond should major global events inflame threats at home and abroad. Now, they say, the war in I...
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