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Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing

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Alex Bandoni and Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Corbis, AFP and Weegee (Arthur Fellig)/International Center of Photography/Getty Images. A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week. Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But...
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“They’re Putting Kids’ Lives at Risk”: How Abuse in a Tennessee Businessman’s Juvenile Prisons Remained Under Wraps

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Thomas Jarvis, now 20, was attacked twice at juvenile justice facilities overseen by Jason Crews, a Tennessee businessman. In both instances, facility leadership failed to report the incidents to the state as required.   Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica The video clip lasted less than two minutes, but Tonya Webb remembers every second as heartbreaking. The grainy surveillance footage, dated June 29, 2024, showed a teenager in an anti-suicide smock being dragged violently by other teens across the floor at Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center. As guards watched, the teens pulled the smock over the boy’s head, exposing his naked body. Then they stuffed him, limbs flailing, into a cell. One guard pushed the door closed, locking him in, and the boy pressed his face against the sliver of a cell window. The guard flashed the teens a thumbs-up. Webb, a medication supervisor at the facility, saw the video when a co-worker showed it to her and knew she was lookin...
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