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California Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi authored a bill, passed by the legislature last week, that would allow the state to punish administrators who fail to fully vet teacher applicants as well as discipline educators who do not disclose their full employment histories when applying for jobs. Rich Pedroncelli/AP California lawmakers unanimously passed legislation last week to ensure that school administrators are informed about past accusations of misconduct against teachers as part of their hiring process.   The legislation follows a KQED-ProPublica investigation revealing how delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, allowed educators to get new jobs after school districts reported them to the state teacher licensing agency for sexual harassment or other misconduct. Our reporting found that at least 14 educators were hired by new schools after their former employers determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual miscond...

Russell Vought, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in July. Samuel Corum/Sipa USA via AP Images In mid-July testimony before Congress, Russell Vought boasted that, as the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he’d refashioned the agency’s approach to pursuing banks and other financial companies accused of exploiting Americans — the role Congress had created for the agency after the 2008 economic crash. Vought had spent the first 18 months of the new Trump administration trying to dismantle the bureau, much as he and other appointees had done with the U.S. Agency for International Development . At CFPB, he’d ordered mass layoffs , tried to choke off the bureau’s funding and ended the lease on its headquarters, attempting to make good on his vow to put civil servants “in trauma.” But federal courts blocked Vought’s efforts to close the CFPB, with a ...

Jimmie “Chris” Duncan lived in a motel in Alexandria, Louisiana, for weeks until he found an apartment. Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica Jimmie “Chris” Duncan wiped the sweat off his forehead as he assessed his temporary home from the parking lot of a rundown motel in central Louisiana. Sure, there’s drug dealing and prostitution, he said on a recent summer afternoon. And he suspected his neighbors were cooking meth on a floor below the room he paid $350 a week to rent. But, he said, “I feel safe here. I mean, I’ve been on death row. I feel safe anywhere.” Duncan had spent the last three decades trying to prove his innocence after a jury convicted him of killing his former girlfriend’s toddler. An investigation by Verite News and ProPublica last year showed that prosecutors had relied on key evidence that appeared to be fabricated by a pair of forensics experts whose use of bite mark analysis has since been widely discredited as junk science . Nevertheless, Louisiana p...

Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica and Vanessa Saba for ProPublica. Photo by Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo. When ProPublica recently investigated a rape crisis that surged through Syracuse University in the 1980s, we found evidence that the school had taken steps to suppress news coverage of the assaults. The university responded by portraying itself as a changed institution today, “committed to supporting the students who come forward and being there for them at every step of the process,” as a school spokesperson put it. But the university’s recent actions in a lawsuit filed by a former student who was attacked on campus during that period appear at odds with that commitment. After the Syracuse Police Department agreed to provide old records to the victim, lawyers for Syracuse University intervened, seeking to block the victim’s access to many of the records. The school argued in legal papers that the subpoena sent to the police department was “overbroad” and suffered...

Camp East Montana, an immigration detention facility inside the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas Omar Ornelas for ProPublica The first emergency call about a detainee trying to harm himself came about a month after Camp East Montana — an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas — started to house immigrants. It was 2:50 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 12.  “We have a patient currently in holding who is saying he’s got suicidal ideations, swallowed some foreign object, has refused our basic medical care here,” a nurse told the operator. In the audio, you can hear that someone is moaning and yelling in the background.  “At this point he is unable to speak and rolling on the floor in agonizing pain, holding his stomach,” the nurse continued. “A preliminary X-ray was done and a foreign object was found. We just need to take him to the hospital that’s closest so that they can verify if the object is currently in his system and possibly to excavate the object.” ...