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Top Commanders Told Hegseth Not to Cut Civilian Protection Program, Poll Showed. He Did It Anyway.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, front left, and senior U.S. military leaders listen to President Donald Trump speak at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia in 2025. Evan Vucci/AP Photo Shortly after taking office last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled the nation’s top commanders about cutting a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military operations. Hegseth had bet senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials told ProPublica. Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea. The poll from early 2025, which has not been previously reported, cemented top-level military support for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a relatively new program adopted after years of heavy civilian tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As part of its mission, CHMR (pronounced “chimmer”) stationed personnel within major regional commands. Officia...
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Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen.

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Newborn baby Malachi lies in the lap of his mother after dying from pneumonia and bleeding lungs — preventable conditions that could have been treated in a hospital — in 2023 in Idaho. Since the 1970s, the state’s criminal and civil laws have allowed parents who belong to Followers of Christ and other faith-healing sects to pray as their children die. Obtained by ProPublica via Canyon County Sheriff A sheriff’s deputy opens the door of an Idaho farmhouse where a newborn baby has just died. It’s almost 10 p.m., but the house is filled with adults and children seated anywhere they can find a spot: in reclining chairs, on the wood-stove hearth, on a chest of drawers. Some of the women hold babies in their laps. “Sorry,” the deputy whispers as the door creaks. No one greets the officer. No one speaks or even looks at anyone else, casting their eyes instead at the floor or around the room. The deputy’s video camera records as he walks through the front room and past a b...
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His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws.

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Dr. Craig Towers in 2018. The local newspaper gave him an award for his work with pregnant women with opioid addiction Michael Patrick/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images When Dr. Craig Towers moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2010, the high-risk obstetrician encountered a crisis unlike anything he’d seen. Towers, who had practiced for 25 years in California and Wisconsin, found himself caring for an unusual number of pregnant women addicted to painkillers — and delivering newborns who were suffering withdrawal symptoms. Those babies, born shaking and inconsolable and who required weeks of specialized care, were becoming tragic symbols of the region’s raging opioid epidemic. “We were inundated,” Towers later told the Knoxville News Sentinel. In those initial years in Tennessee, Towers recognized a need — and a research opportunity. Medical doctrine had long held that a pregnant patient with an opioid addiction could not be safely detoxed because withdrawal could ha...
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They Rebuilt After Texas’ Devastating Floods. Then Their Home Flooded Again.

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Joan Connor and David Stearns survived the 2025 floods in Kerr County, Texas, by clinging to the pergola outside their house. Their home flooded again this year. Brenda Bazán for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune When deadly flooding swept through the Texas Hill Country in July of last year, Joan Connor and her husband swam and waded out of their home, surviving only by clinging to a pergola in their front yard.  The Guadalupe River flood destroyed most of their possessions. It killed at least 119 people in Kerr County, where the couple live, about 100 miles west of Austin.  But Connor, now 82, and her husband, now 99, moved back into the refurbished house by Christmas, with donated furniture arranged by volunteer decorators.  They didn’t fear another flood. Connor told me earlier this year: “We don’t think a thing like that will happen again in our lifetime.” Last month, almost exactly one year after the last deluge, their house flooded again . ...
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