propublica Posts

The line drive ripped off the hitter’s bat and rocketed into the right hand of Dr. Lawrence Schlachter, shattering bones and ending his career as a neurosurgeon. The Atlanta doctor, then 52, turned to an unusual place for a new challenge: Law school. He became, of all things, a medical malpractice attorney. Schlachter has been practicing law for a dozen years and says he sees the medical world differently than he did from the operating room. Now it is from the perspective of patients, who too often suffer infections and injuries while undergoing medical care and then are unable to get answers from doctors and medical officials.

How do you stop states and cities from forcing more disclosure of so-called dark money in politics? Get the debate to focus on an “average Joe,” not a wealthy person. Find examples of “inconsequential donation amounts.” Point out that naming donors would be a threat to “innocents,” including their children, families and co-workers. And never call it dark money. “Private giving” sounds better.

Mayor Bill de Blasio commented for the first time Monday on the Daily News/ProPublica’s investigation into the NYPD’s use of the nuisance abatement law to boot hundreds of people from homes — saying while he supports the underlying “concept” of the law to keep neighborhoods safe, he thinks “there should always be due process” and promised to “look carefully at protocols.”

According to water investors, the West’s millions of acres of farmland account for less than 2 percent of the region’s economic output, and moving just 10 percent of the water off farms would likely resolve the region’s current water shortfalls.

ProPublica

The NYPD is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime - And it’s happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods.

World tennis was stunned last month by allegations of widespread match-fixing, as well as the utter failure of the game’s authorities to deal with the underhanded practice. In a blockbuster investigation called The Tennis Racket, by BuzzFeed data reporter John Templon and BuzzFeed UK investigations editor Heidi Blake, the journalists drew on evidence from leaked files showing that 16 tennis players (who at some point have been ranked in the top 50) have been repeatedly flagged to the Tennis Integrity Unit for suspicions they had thrown matches or arranged for their opponent to lose.

On Monday, a grand jury indicted David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, and Sandra Merritt, a center employee, on felony charges of tampering with government documents and a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs. The charges stem from the investigation surrounding the controversial Planned Parenthood videos that surfaced last summer.

Thus began a 2001 article by Eric Lipton in The New York Times. It must come as no surprise to the reader that almost 15 years later, ProPublica detailed how New York City failed to police expensive tax subsidies it gave out to developers in exchange for limiting rent increases and including a modest number of affordable apartments in projects.

The Republican split that defines this year’s presidential campaign has been on display in Congress for years, with the most conservative wing battling party leaders on issues from spending to immigration. A ProPublica analysis of campaign donations highlights just how profound this gap has become in the House of Representatives. “Sometimes,” Hasen said, “self-interest can trump ideology.”

The United States has spent nearly half a billion dollars and five years developing Afghanistan’s oil, gas and minerals industries — and has little to show for it, a government watchdog reported today.

It is one of the most controversial moments from the Netflix sensation “Making a Murderer” — the graphic pre-trial news conference held by local prosecutors seeking to convict a Wisconsin man and his nephew of murder. The lead prosecutor, in front of television cameras and radio microphones, talks in detail about the alleged confession of the nephew, complete with details of the rape and strangling of a young woman.

On the coldest morning New York City has seen this winter, a stream of teenage students hit a bottleneck at the front of a Brooklyn school building. They shed their jackets, gloves and belts, shivering as they wait to pass through a metal detector and send their backpacks through an x-ray machine. School safety agents stand nearby, poised to step in if the alarm bleats.

Rep. Bennie Thompson said it is “critical” for the Red Cross to act quickly in response to problems reported by ProPublica. A key congressman who sits on a committee that oversees the American Red Cross is pressing the group’s chief executive for information about how layoffs and other cuts have affected its ability to respond to disasters

Snooping on celebrities has been a bane for health systems around the country for years. The proliferation of electronic medical records systems has made it easier to track and punish those who peek in records they have no legitimate reason to access.

As the principal designer at the software company Adobe, a former digital design director for The New York Times and the writer behind the popular design blog Subtraction, Khoi Vinh knows more than just about anybody on the art and business of design.

The Pentagon is scrambling to justify its actions in restricting the government watchdog investigating a $766-million task force in Afghanistan — with more controversy seemingly erupting by the day. Now there are allegations that Defense Department officials retaliated against a whistleblower and news of several ongoing criminal investigations.

Current and former government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. CIA Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of “hand-wringing” that has made “our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.” Former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, “In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn’t seem to be the scariest thing in the room.”

You would think the nation’s military would move with lightning speed to patch cell phones vulnerable to hackers, particularly after recent disclosures that Chinese hackers harvested the personal information of 21.5 million U.S. government employees and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard broke into the Obama Administration’s social media accounts. You would be wrong.

After a Boston priest was convicted of sexually abusing more than 100 children, a team of Boston Globe reporters published an investigation that shocked the city. The Globe’s investigative unit, known as the “Spotlight” team, revealed in 2002 that Catholic Church leaders knew about child abuse by dozens of priests for decades and covered it up, reassigning the abusers to new parishes while paying millions in settlements to a trail of victims. The new film Spotlight, in theaters on Nov. 6, chronicles the Pulitzer-winning investigation that exposed the scandal.

The U.S. Department of Education announced new transparency measures for college accreditors today, encouraging the organizations to focus more on student outcomes such as graduation rates. As part of a series of legislative recommendations, the agency also called on Congress to give it the power to set standards for how accreditors measure student achievement.