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The number of prisoners paroled in Louisiana has plummeted under Gov. Jeff Landry to its lowest point in 20 years, the most visible impact of the “tough on crime” policies he campaigned on. The parole board freed 185 prisoners during Landry’s tenure compared with 858 in the two years before his January 2024 inauguration, a 78% drop, according to a Verite News and ProPublica analysis of data provided by the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole. Hundreds of people who would have been paroled under previous administrations now remain in state prisons with little chance of earning an early release through good behavior or by showing they are fit to reenter society and are unlikely to reoffend. Landry — a former state attorney general and sheriff’s deputy — and his fellow Republicans in the state Legislature overhauled Louisiana’s parole system through a 2024 law that banned parole altogether for anyone convicted after Aug. 1 of that year. The overhaul also impacted the t...

Washington state has launched a sweeping effort to speed up construction of renewable energy projects, prompted by reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica that chronicled how the state came to rank dead last in the nation for renewable energy growth . Washington’s Department of Commerce, which works on state energy policy, has offered up state employees to help the federal Bonneville Power Administration process its backlog of renewable energy projects — though it remains uncertain whether the agency will accept the offer. Bonneville, which owns 75% of the Northwest’s power grid, must sign off before wind and solar developers who wish to connect to its grid can break ground.  Meanwhile, four state agencies have recommended that Washington’s Legislature provide incentives for utilities to upgrade transmission lines, plan out “microgrid” energy projects that don’t need to connect to Bonneville’s power lines and create a new state agency that would plan and potenti...

Joann Carl’s dog Rocky, a long-eared, short-legged mix the color of graham crackers, has become Alaska famous since I first met Carl in April. Over the past few months, she’s seen his photo all over Facebook, she said, rescued after Typhoon Halong wiped away more than half the homes in her coastal Alaska Native village of Kipnuk, population 700.   At the Anchorage Daily News, we’re based in Alaska’s largest city but travel as often as we can to small communities like Kipnuk in an attempt to cover a state that’s twice the size of Texas. We try to report more than one story at a time to justify the expense of plane tickets. Flights to a remote village in a small plane cost the same as a trip to New York. But rarely do we have the chance to document a community just before the breaking news arrives.  Maybe you didn’t hear much about the typhoon. It began as a tropical storm, dumping record rainfall in parts of Japan before swirling toward Alaska. By the time it reached ou...

The calls came over the span of a single month in 2004, patient after patient with strikingly similar complaints. Some told Oregon psychiatrist James Hancey that their new generic medication for depression had stopped working. Others described unexpected reactions — dizziness, flu-like symptoms and electric shock sensations in the brain. “That started to tell me, ‘This drug is no good,’” Hancey said. “You get all these phone calls where people are saying the exact same thing.” Hancey suspected that the generic was ineffective, and that his patients were suffering from abrupt withdrawal. But he had no easy way to confirm exactly where the pills came from or the safety record of the factory that made them. He began keeping what he called a “no fly” list — dozens of generic drugs he suspected were unsafe or ineffective — based largely on patterns he observed in his patients. Now, he has something else. Last month, ProPublica launched Rx Inspector , a free, searchable tool that allows ...

An ethics watchdog group filed a complaint Thursday seeking an investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney — now the No. 2 at the Justice Department — broke federal conflict-of-interest law when he issued a new prosecution policy that benefits the cryptocurrency industry. The complaint comes after a ProPublica investigation revealed last month that Todd Blanche owned at least $159,000 worth of crypto-related assets when he ordered an end to investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges launched during President Joe Biden’s term. Blanche, the deputy attorney general, issued the order in an April memo in which he also eliminated an enforcement team dedicated to looking for crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. Blanche had previously signed an ethics agreement promising to dump his cryptocurrency within 90 days of his confirmation and not to participate in any matter that could have a “direct and predictable effect on my ...

ProPublica on Friday published never-before-released data connecting generic drugs to the factories that manufactured them. The data powers Rx Inspector , our groundbreaking tool that allows you to find the factories where your generic drugs were made and their Food and Drug Administration inspection track records. The data, which ProPublica created by linking several FDA datasets, has never been made available by the agency before. It will allow anyone to connect prescriptions to the facilities they were manufactured in by linking National Drug Code numbers to FDA Establishment Identifiers of drug manufacturing facilities.  You can access the data on Github here. Academic researchers said the data would contribute significantly to research evaluating the quality and supply of generic drugs. “This bypasses an incredibly time-consuming barrier for people who want to study drugs and anything to do with manufacturing,” said John Gray, a professor at the Ohio State University. Gra...

Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. “I am an American. … Help me come home.”  The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison. Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency ta...