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He Profits Off Raw Milk That’s Making People Sick. The Government Isn’t Stopping Him.

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Mark McAfee, CEO and founder of Raw Farm Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A white Ford pickup truck broke through a thick curtain of fog one morning in February, winding its way down a muddy farm road in California’s Central Valley. From it emerged a 64-year-old dairyman, burly and tan, who left the engine running as he lumbered toward me with open arms.  “You must be Mark,” I said, warning him I wasn’t one for hugging.  “I’m a hugger,” he said, pulling me in anyway. “I feel like I’ve known you for a lifetime.” I had spent the past couple of weeks corresponding with Raw Farm founder Mark McAfee, who’d filled my inbox with messages and PowerPoints extolling the virtues of his most important, and controversial, product: It is delicious. It makes you feel good (the gut-brain serotonin and dopamine cycle). ...
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A U.S. Senator Pushed to Cut Firefighting Aircraft Inspections the Same Month His Former Company Failed One

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Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Records obtained by ProPublica, USDA Forest Service photo by Andrew Avitt. A little over a year ago, Sen. Tim Sheehy floated an audacious proposal to reshape the way the federal government fights wildfires. It called for expanding the use of private planes and helicopters to quickly attack blazes while also eliminating the U.S. Forest Service’s rigorous airworthiness inspections for those aircraft. The idea stood to benefit Sheehy, a Montana Republican, personally. Before running for Congress, he founded and ran an aerial firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace, which is known for its scoopers, aircraft built to retrieve water from lakes or oceans and drop it onto fires. Since 2021, the Forest Service has paid Bridger more than $235 million for use of its scoopers, according to public records. Sheehy’s ownership of Bridger is well known, but what hasn’t been reported is that the same month the proposal leaked, a Forest ...
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