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The Victims Who Fought Back

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Lisa Rae Moss — serving a life sentence for her involvement in the 1990 murder of her husband, Mike Moss — sat in the witness box in a courtroom in Seminole, Oklahoma, on a frigid January morning in 2025, her hands knotted in her lap. Moss, who is 60, was asked to recount what she endured in her 20s, during her marriage to a volatile man a dozen years her senior. Her long silver hair and prison-issued glasses accentuated the years between her and the younger self she was describing. “Did Mike ever use a gun on you in the bedroom?” her lawyer, Colleen McCarty, asked. “He had a gun that usually lay on top of the chest of drawers at night,” Moss said quietly. She explained that her husband would place it there before they went to bed. “There were a number of occasions where he took the gun — and I wasn’t in the mood to have sex and I didn’t want to have sex — and he would move the gun up and down my inner thigh and then lay it on the pillow next to the bed.” She stopped to correct hers...
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South Carolina Hospitals Aren’t Required to Disclose Measles-Related Admissions. That Leaves Doctors in the Dark.

In mid-January, an unassuming man in khakis and a button-down shirt walked to a wooden lectern at a school board meeting in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Most chairs in the audience were empty. The man, Tim Smith, was the only person signed up to speak during public comments. He had five minutes. “I trust that each one of you had a good Christmas and New Year’s,” he began. “Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing.” His wife is an assistant teacher at a public elementary school in the county, epicenter of the state’s historic measles outbreak, and shortly before winter break she’d received a notice that a child in her classroom had measles. Given his wife is fully vaccinated, he wasn’t worried.  Then, she began to get sick. And sicker. She got a measles test and, to their shock, it came back positive. She was apparently among the very rare breakthrough infections.  Frightened, they took her to the hospital that night. “My wife was throwing up,” Smith said at the mee...
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New Moms in Wisconsin to Get Extension of Vital Benefits After GOP Powerbroker Ends Holdout

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For years, Wisconsin’s powerful Assembly speaker refused to allow a bipartisan bill to come to a vote that extends postpartum Medicaid coverage for new moms. Finally, this week, he relented. “Go out and take your victory lap,” Republican Robin Vos told caucus members late Wednesday, according to one lawmaker.  “You won,” Vos added.  On Thursday, the Assembly agreed 95-1 to opt in to a federal program that provides free health insurance to low-income mothers for a year after giving birth, up from 60 days. Vos was among those voting yes.  The legislation, which had already been adopted by the Senate, now goes to Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. He has openly supported such legislation for years and is expected to sign it. Every other state in the nation, except Arkansas, has already taken the step.  The vote represented a rare capitulation for Wisconsin’s longest-serving Assembly speaker — a man who controls the legislative agenda, provides campaign cash to those he ...
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Insurer Agrees to Pay Millions for Failing to Fix Errors That Made It Harder for Customers to Get Mental Health Care

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One of New York’s largest health insurers is set to pay a multimillion-dollar fine for failing to fix a series of errors that made it harder for its customers to get mental health care. EmblemHealth this week agreed to a $2.5 million settlement with the New York attorney general’s office because of the large number of inaccuracies in its listings of in-network mental health providers, a problem that has persisted for years. The fine is the biggest secured by the state attorney general’s office in its yearslong quest to clamp down on the chronic problem of provider directory errors, also known as ghost networks. It’s an issue that has led customers to postpone treatment, forgo care and pay for more expensive out-of-network providers.  The office found that EmblemHealth overstated the availability of in-network mental health providers and failed to comply with state and federal laws requiring that insurers make mental health care as available as other kinds of medical care. “Hea...
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Chlorine Dioxide, Raw Camel Milk: The FDA No Longer Warns Against These and Other Ineffective Autism Treatments

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The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk.  Now that advisory is gone. The Food and Drug Administration pulled the page down late last year . The federal Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica in a statement that it retired the webpage “during a routine clean up of dated content at the end of 2025,” noting the page had not been updated since 2019. (An archived version of the page is still available online.)  Some advocates for people with autism don’t understand that decision. “It may be an older page, but those warnings are still necessary,” said Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit policy organization run by and for autistic people. “People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments like chelati...
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