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by Duaa Eldeib ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The National Institutes of Health has launched a five-year, $37 million stillbirth consortium in a pivotal effort to reduce what it has called the country’s “unacceptably high” stillbirth rate. The announcement last week thrilled doctors, researchers and families and represented a commitment by the agency to prioritize stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. “What we’re really excited about is not only the investment in trying to prevent stillbirth, but also continuing that work with the community to guide the research,” Alison Cernich, acting director of the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in an interview. Four clinical sites and one data coordinating center spanning the country — California, Oregon, Utah, New York and North Carolina — will come...

by Corey G. Johnson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Two major law firms accused the National Shooting Sports Foundation this week of violating the privacy rights of millions of gun owners by running a decades-long program that sent their information to political operatives without consent. The allegations in a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court by Keller Rohrback of Seattle and Motley Rice of Connecticut closely mirror the findings of a ProPublica investigation that detailed the secret program operated by the gun industry’s largest trade group. The 24-page complaint asks the court for approval of class-action status and requests financial damages against the NSSF, claiming the gun industry lobbyist enriched itself by exploiting valuable gun buyer information for political gain. It features the accounts of two gun owners, Daniel Cocanour and Dale Rimkus, both of whom asse...

by ProPublica ProPublica has hired Nick McMillan as a computational journalist on our data and news apps team. In this role, McMillan will use technology and data in innovative ways to find and report stories that would otherwise be out of reach. “Nick has an impressive track record of using cutting-edge technology to unlock reporting paths,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “I’m excited for him to use those skills to hold power to account at ProPublica.” McMillan comes to ProPublica from NPR, where he was a data journalist on the investigations team. At NPR, he combined reporting with data analysis, building tools that transformed raw records into evidence for investigations. His work included developing a custom optical character recognition program to parse more than 7,000 government work task files, which helped to reveal how a federal program was killing thousands of wild animals with little accountability . He also co-reported a story revealing...

by Margaret Coker , The Current This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Current . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Most of the tax dollars used to launch and implement the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program have gone toward paying administrative costs rather than covering health care for Georgians, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office , the nonpartisan agency that monitors federal programs and spending. The government report examined administrative expenses for Georgia Pathways to Coverage, the state’s experiment with work requirements. It follows previous reporting by The Current and ProPublica showing that the program has cost federal and state taxpayers more than $86.9 million while enrolling a tiny fraction of those eligible for free health care. The GAO analysis, which does not include all the Pathways administrative expenses detailed...

by Jeremy Kohler ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches , a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from campus. Bailey seized on the fight as evidence of what he called the Hazelwood School District’s misplaced priorities. He sent a letter to the superintendent demanding documents on the district’s diversity policies and accused leaders of “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.” Bailey argued that the district’s dispute with local police departments over its requirement that officers participate in diversity training — an impasse that resulted in some departments leaving sc...

by Eli Cahan for ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. As the share of U.S. adults receiving mental health care treatment steadily grows , for-profit companies are playing an increasingly important role. More than 40% of inpatient mental health beds were operated by for-profit entities as of 2021, according to unpublished data from Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies quality in behavioral health care. That’s up from about 13% in 2010 . (The number of mental health beds held relatively constant during that time.) Experts tie this growth to provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which made mental health care an essential health benefit that all insurance plans are required to cover. Before the law, millions of Americans lacked meaningful mental health care coverage by their insurers — if they had any coverage at all. ...

by Eli Cahan for ProPublica This article describes attempted suicide. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Late one Saturday night in May 2023, Melissa Keele’s phone rang. Her son had been found alone in the desert of Colorado’s Grand Valley. He was naked; his clothes, phone, keys and car were nowhere to be found. Keele rushed out to her own vehicle and floored it, her headlights piercing through the pitch black. For years, her son had been dealing with severe mental illness. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he hit a breaking point and attempted suicide by driving off a cliff on the highway. “God told him he needed to die,” Keele recalled him telling her. Eventually, she picked him up — and he didn’t look good. Fearing for his safety, Keele immediately took her then-21-year-old son to West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction. If you or someone you know needs help, here are ...