Posts

The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan

Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trump Pardoned a Nursing Home Owner Who Owed Almost $19 Million to a Grieving Family

Image
President Donald Trump signs a series of executive orders and a pardon in February 2025.  Andrew Harnik/Getty Images When Amanda Coulson was a child, she visited her mother at work at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Doris Coulson was a nurse, and one memory never left her daughter. A code blue was called, and suddenly her mother was racing alongside a patient’s bed.  “She jumped into the middle of the bed and was doing CPR in the bed as it flew down the hallway,” Amanda Coulson said years later in court. “I realized she didn’t play at work all day.” That was the kind of caregiver her mother was: someone who understood what quality care meant because she had spent her life giving it to others.  After Doris Coulson retired, she became a patient at a nursing home owned by Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey businessman who was buying up nursing homes across the country. The staff wasn’t supposed to serve her solid food, but they did, and she died. Doctors told the famil...
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas Medical Board Sanctions Three Doctors for Delayed Care That Led to the Deaths of Two Pregnant Women

Image
Photographs show Hope and Porsha Ngumezi, left, and Nevaeh Crain. Photos by Danielle Villasana for ProPublica The Texas Medical Board has disciplined three doctors ProPublica previously investigated whose patients died after receiving delayed or inappropriate pregnancy care under the state’s strict abortion ban. Two of the doctors failed to properly intervene as a pregnant teenager repeatedly sought care for life-threatening complications, the board found. The third did not provide a dilation and curettage procedure to empty a miscarrying patient’s uterus, and she ultimately bled to death. As ProPublica investigated those preventable deaths and five others across three states in the past few years, reporters found that abortion bans have influenced how doctors and hospitals respond to pregnancy complications. Facing risks of prison time and professional ruin, doctors have delayed key interventions until they can document that a fetus’ heart is no longer beating or that a case m...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Protester Threw a Snowball. Federal Agents Responded With Tear Gas and Pepper Balls.

Image
A federal agent shoots pepper spray out of the window of a moving vehicle. The stream hit FRONTLINE’s video team. Tim Evans/Reuters Five days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot activist Renee Good, tensions were running high in the Minneapolis neighborhood where she was killed.  As federal immigration agents surrounded and questioned a man whose car they had stopped, people emerged from their homes onto the snow-lined sidewalks and street. They shouted obscenities, told the agents to leave and filmed what was happening on their phones. A crew from FRONTLINE and ProPublica was filming, too. The man being questioned, a U.S. citizen named Christian Molina, told ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson that federal agents had followed him and rammed his car: “They looked at me and they decided to pull me over for no reason,” Molina said. Co-published With What happened next can be seen in footage from FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s new documentary “Caught i...
Post a Comment
Read more

What You Should Know About Lead Contamination in Omaha, Nebraska

Image
ProPublica reporter Cassandra Garibay collects soil samples to test for lead in Omaha, Nebraska, last fall. Chris Bowling/Flatwater Free Press For more than a century, a lead smelter and other factories in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, spewed toxic dust across the city, contaminating the soil and causing lead poisoning. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the city of Omaha have spent decades trying to clean it up. But in 2019, the EPA acknowledged its plan may not do enough to protect kids, and the agency is reexamining the site to potentially expand the cleanup, which could result in more residential yards being remediated. Journalists at the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica teamed up to report on how well the cleanup effort is going . This included collecting soil samples from more than 600 yards in and around the affected area, called the Superfund site. Many people we met in the process told us they had never heard of the Superfund site and had no idea they could be at...
Post a Comment
Read more

Omaha Is Home to a Massive Superfund Site. Most Kids Living There Aren’t Tested for Lead.

Image
Belinda Daniels panicked in 2018 when the pediatrician said her 1-year-old son, Jovanni, had lead in his body. The toxic metal could stunt his brain, the doctor told her, but catching it early meant she could prevent more damage. Daniels moved out of her Omaha, Nebraska, apartment that had chipping lead paint. The doctor continued testing Jovanni periodically while Daniels followed instructions on cleaning, handwashing and keeping Jovanni away from contaminated dirt. Eventually, the lead level in Jovanni’s blood dropped. While the now-8-year-old has anger and impulse-control issues, Daniels said it could have been a lot worse. “They told me that the side effects of it would be him being autistic” or having “very delayed behaviors,” she said. Not every child’s high lead levels are caught as early as Jovanni’s. In Nebraska, it’s largely up to the doctor or health system to decide whether to test a child’s blood for lead. As a result, local public health officials say, not enough kids...
Post a Comment
Read more