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Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Jesse Costa/WBUR, Alyssa Sieb via Nappy, PatrickRich via Flickr. On the day 5-year-old Lens Joseph was killed by a Boston Public Schools bus last year, the driver had already struck a postal truck, ignored a stop sign and missed several stops, prosecutors said. When he got to Lens’ house, he dropped him off on the wrong side of the street and then ran over the kindergartner as he crossed in front of the bus. Transdev, a multinational company that has been the city’s sole bus contractor since 2013, hired and trained the driver of the bus that killed Lens. Yet a federal safety database shows no sign that the company was involved in the April 2025 crash. WBUR and ProPublica found at least 60 fatal Transdev crashes in the last decade, but the federal database shows only 18 under the company’s name. That means 42 fatal crashes are not identified as Transdev’s. This missing information is important because the Feder...

Logos of organizations under the Addiction Recovery Care umbrella are on display at ARC’s career services office in Louisa, Kentucky. Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader Timmy G. Robinson Jr., founder and owner of what was once Kentucky’s largest drug addiction treatment company, was criminally indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering . The indictment, filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky, charges Robinson with fraudulently selling millions of dollars of the same IRS tax credit to two companies. Robinson “devised a scheme” to “unlawfully enrich himself” by selling those tax credits to two parties, the indictment says. Robinson is also charged with two counts of money laundering  for spending the proceeds of the fraudulent sale.  Robinson has resigned as CEO of ARC, company spokesperson Vanessa Keeton said Thursday. Robinson, 50, founded the company in 2012 after becoming sober and telling people he felt cal...

The North Carolina legislature, where Democrats recently introduced three bills to reform the state’s courts and protect the separation of powers between its branches of government Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images Democratic lawmakers in North Carolina introduced a trio of constitutional amendments this week aimed at protecting traditional powers of the state’s governor and reforming oversight of its court system. The effort was prompted in part by ProPublica’s reporting, including an investigation that found that over nearly a decade, Republican lawmakers had pushed through law after law shrinking the powers of North Carolina’s governor, always a Democrat during that time. At a press conference on Wednesday, the bills’ sponsors readily acknowledged that the initiatives are unlikely to pass, at least in the current legislative session: Republicans hold majorities in North Carolina’s House and Senate. But in proposing the measures as changes to the state constitut...

North Dakota state Rep. Eric Murphy at home planning a day of canvassing in his Grand Forks district. Murphy, an incumbent Republican, faces a contested primary election from conservative challengers after he introduced a bill to expand abortion access last year. Dan Koeck for ProPublica If Eric Murphy loses his primary election on June 9, he believes he already knows one reason why. Last year, the North Dakota state representative, a Republican, tried to expand the window of pregnancy in which women could access abortion. The state legislature had banned it for almost everyone from the moment of conception. Tied up in court, the ban hadn’t yet gone into effect. But Murphy wanted to lock in a less restrictive law, making abortion accessible up to 15 weeks and even later for women whose doctors deemed it a medical necessity. To convince his fellow legislators, he read out loud from two ProPublica stories about women in Texas who died without lifesaving care . “Physic...