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Margaret Flatley for ProPublica Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack. Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts.  In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942.  More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system ...

They were victims, not abusers. That’s what they told police officers, attorneys, visitors and anyone else who would listen. It didn’t matter. The women were all taken to a sprawling immigration detention center in the woods of west Michigan and handed thin jumpsuits — red, to mark them as a high security risk. Inside the North Lake Processing Center, they talked about the men whose calls to police landed them there. The boyfriends or husbands who threatened to get them deported and cut them off from their children. The men, or sometimes women, who hit them, pulled their hair or choked them, bruising their throats. They didn’t know where to go for help before, but now, in the confines of a cold cellblock in a former prison, the women helped one another. If one spoke to somebody on the outside who could connect them with advice, legal aid or money for the commissary, she’d pass around a tablet used for calls so others could tell their stories. Migladys Bermudez, an ...

Meta is building a massive data center on the northeast edge of El Paso, Texas, on the New Mexico border. Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Last December, New Mexico officials celebrated publication of a plan to address climate change, designed to dramatically reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A few months later, just across the state line in Texas, El Paso city officials adopted their own such plan with a similar ambition.  Each report cost millions of dollars to draft, but neither one took into account how the construction of data centers could upend climate goals in both places.  Work is underway in Doña Ana County in southern New Mexico on one of the largest data center developments in the country: Project Jupiter, built by Austin-based Oracle. Twenty miles away in El Paso, construction is underway on another massive data center, this one built by Meta Platforms.  A third, larger data center project is planned less...