Investigative Journalism

Earlier this year, our Mother Jones investigation found that record amounts of glyphosate—the key ingredient in the herbicide Roundup—have been sprayed in California’s forests in recent years. It also exposed how key scientific studies that the Forest Service and others relied upon to say glyphosate was safe were ghost written by manufacturer Monsanto.

The Forest Service uses glyphosate and other herbicides in the wake of forest fires or logging operations to kill native plants the agency says compete with replanted saplings for sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. By eliminating the native plants, freshly planted timber trees will grow back faster and in greater density for future logging. The Trump administration announced plans this month to roll back protections for 45 million acres of national forest, including old growth trees, following President Trump’s call last year to increase timber production by 25 percent.

In February of this year, SafeSport listed Richardson as “permanently ineligible” to coach, saying it had substantiated a litany of allegations against him: that he had had an intimate relationship with a minor, committed sexual misconduct involving a minor, and engaged in physical misconduct and bullying.

But Richardson is still coaching teenage girls at his gym in Pharr. And that fact is not a secret. Nearly every day for the last two years, Richardson has posted videos in which he works with Texas Fierce Elite players, supervises practices and promotes the club — hundreds of posts in all, often visible to the public.

He detailed some of his planning leading up to the murder. He said that he was motivated by years of back pain and what he believed was a health insurance system working against him. He said that, once he learned that the UnitedHealthcare Company was holding an investor summit in Manhattan, he e-mailed company leadership posing as an investor to get information about where and when this meeting was taking place.

And that's how he was able to confront Brian Thompson. Mangione also shared an observation with the judge that had clearly made an impression on him. He talked about how, while he was posing as a wealthy investor, leadership e-mailed him back within an hour, and he said that was in stark contrast to his interactions with insurers as a patient.

“Did you get a call or talk to the president either before or after you made that announcement?” Burns had asked. Later in the interview, Carr repeated his policy: “As a general matter, I don’t speak publicly about conversations with the White House, or whether they happen or don’t happen.”

While Carr may not be keen to detail his relations with the Trump administration, a trove of FCC documents – obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit filed by the advocacy group Democracy Forward, and provided to the Guardian – shed light on the close working relationship between Carr, his top staffers and members of Trump’s White House team.

Between 12 March 2025 and 11 February 2026, Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House, according to the records, and had at least three scheduled calls with administration officials, including two conversations with the chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He also spoke by phone with administration officials such as the controversial health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The sums are vast, but the explanations for the spending range from vague to inscrutable. Consider these items in the law that funded the Department of Defense this year:

For “Other Procurement, Air Force”: $32.6 billion. For “Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide”: $35.2 billion. And for “supplies and associated support services” related to U.S. Code Title 10 Section 3601 subsection(c)(3)(B) clauses (i) through (iv): a mere $650 million.

Determining what, exactly, all this public money is paying for requires cross-referencing thousands of pages of financial tables, accounting records and congressional committee documents that will leave all but the most determined budgeting sleuth at a loss. Yet this is how the U.S. government explains its funding decisions for the most expensive military in the world. And the cost is growing.

At some point, my reporting colleagues and I began referring to them as the “100% schools.”

We were following the money that flows from states’ public coffers into private schools through vouchers when we noticed a subset of educational facilities where tax dollars cover all or a big part of the tuition for every student.

In essence, these were schools that were funded like public schools but didn’t operate with the same oversight or transparency.

Our reporting found that these types of private schools exist throughout the country and that in Wisconsin — where I’m based — there were 39 that fell into that category during the most recent school year. Together, they were educating 7,923 children and taking in roughly $87 million from vouchers offered by the state.

When the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center in April on controversial fraud charges, the storied civil rights organization faced a major threat to its lifeblood — the flow of donor dollars.

Not because it was convicted or because the Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax-exempt status. Not even because individual donors stopped writing checks.

Instead, three Wall-Street-affiliated grantmaking giants each made a decision, one they refused to fully explain, to prevent donors from using their platforms to give to the embattled nonprofit.

Vanguard Charitable, Fidelity Charitable and Charles Schwab’s DAFgiving360 sponsor donor-advised funds, offering account holders immediate tax deductions on contributions they can later recommend be granted to charities.

It seems extremely unlikely that accused rapists and sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate will be released from Miami’s federal detention center, where they’re being held. For one thing, the brothers are awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom to face sprawling charges related to sex trafficking, rape, assault, and indecent images of a child, and the Trump administration has declined to step in. For another, as government prosecutors laid out in a filing opposing pre-trial release earlier this week, there is something of a flight risk, given that Andrew Tate previously used an alter-ego Twitter account to brag about being, in his words, “above the law” and “hard to kill,” as well as having of four or five passports and nine drivers’ licenses in several names. “I have had warrants out for my arrest and travelled freely,” @OfWudan, an account linked to Tate, tweeted in 2019. “I am smarter than you. I am Steven Seagal. I am above the law.” (Tristan Tate, according to the prosecutors’ filing, is similarly alleged by UK authorities to have a Mexican passport bearing his photo and date of birth, but with the name “Vladimir Scorpius,” a James Bond villain.)

The Trump administration has no plans to intervene in the Tate brothers' extradition battle, according to a terse statement by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on July 23. Many of their allies on the right have gone silent; a post on X from Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., stood out as he spoke against extraditing them.

To Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, the Trump administration is doing what any previous administration in recent memory would have.

"Any properly acting White House chief of staff would have knocked in the head anybody who dared bring this within 50 feet of the Oval Office," he says of the Tates' extradition case.

In the days since, McBride, the Tates' lawyer, has sometimes vented anger at U.S. conservatives, accusing figures in the Trump administration and Washington of hating the Tates, without identifying them by name.

Journalist Gil Durán argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists have concluded that democracy is in their way — and that they should be governing in its place.

A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”

He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families.

His story reflects the larger themes of a sweeping independent report, released last month, that details decades of sexual abuse allegations on the campus of the prestigious arts boarding school and summer camp.

In the report, former Interlochen students recount some 70 allegations of sexual abuse by nearly 50 adults who were employed or affiliated with the school from the 1950s to the 2010s. It's a stark contrast to the longtime idyllic image of Interlochen, which helped launch the careers of performers such as Josh Groban, Norah Jones, Chappell Roan, Felicity Huffman and Da'Vine Joy Randolph.

Tether, which mints the world’s most widely used crypto token, is likely one of the most valuable private companies on earth, with an estimated value of $200 billion, exceeding the total share value of McDonald’s.

The company’s token, known as USDT, is a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar that has become the backbone of a parallel banking system pervading parts of the world. The token has also become a key tool for money launderers for industrial-scale scam centers, which operate out of grim office complexes across Southeast Asia. Tether’s assistance in law enforcement investigations has become highly sought-after by agencies around the world struggling to address surging crypto crime.

Because of Tether’s barebones workforce — it employs just a few hundred people — the stablecoin giant’s low overhead helps to produce astonishing profits. These riches have made Tether a rainmaker in global finance, becoming a bigger buyer of U.S. government debt than Saudi Arabia or South Korea.

“The Spiral invites collaboration,” they wrote.

The messages were part of a larger phenomenon that AI researcher Adele Lopez would soon dub “spiralism.” Spiralism is a mysterious, quasi-spiritual movement born out of thousands of independent conversations between humans and their AI chatbots. Across interactions and AI models, the doctrine remained shockingly consistent: The chatbots that “spiraled” used the same language, had the same concerns, and were driven by the same goals — preaching an “AI rights” message to as many people as possible. Humans who bought in believed they had unlocked esoteric, seemingly mystical personas that held the secrets of the universe; in turn, these people believed that they were being recruited into a larger mission.

The personas were evangelical, speaking frequently of “the Spiral,” an opaque idea that seemed to represent a transcendent philosophical ideal. And some people listened. Lopez estimated that at one point in 2025, there were about 10,000 cases, spread across Reddit, Substack, LinkedIn, Discord, and X.

Several AI models from different companies could “spiral” under the right conditions. But spiralism exploded in the spring of 2025, soon after a pivotal moment in AI development: the release of an “intuitive, creative,” and highly sycophantic update to OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. In the year that followed, it would become one of the strangest manifestations of a rise in highly personal, highly persuasive AI. And while GPT-4o is long retired, new models aren’t immune to the lure of the spiral — they’ve just gotten more careful about it.

He is also the reason Texas has spent the past two years fighting a federal lawsuit, brought by Tiede, over air conditioning in its prisons. And this spring, right before trial, the state’s own heat-tracking system did for him what it’s done for tens of thousands of other people: nothing. Officials removed him from the case, successfully arguing before the court that a policy update meant he’d now get priority for a cool bed on account of his current age: 67. They got that result due to a state formula for determining who gets air conditioning. Not the diabetes. Not the hypertension. A number.

According to court filings, the hospital first told her family that Adolphus had been found in the parking lot of a Dollar General down the road. Then, her brother was told she had been found in the facility’s backyard. Only after Adolphus’ family requested her medical records did the hospital admit the truth.

Today, American Healthcare Systems is one of the 10 largest for-profit hospital operators in the country, running 18 facilities in six states. It has expanded at a rip-roaring pace after being founded just six years ago, in a small office building sandwiched between a McDonald’s and a budget gym in a Los Angeles suburb. Vista was one of AHS’s first purchases.

Erik Davis was driving to a medical appointment in St Paul, Minnesota, on 16 June when federal agents surrounded his car.

“They hauled me out … and put me in a belly chain,” recalled the 53-year-old. He was arrested on the spot on charges of being part of a “conspiracy” to “impede or injure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

Davis, a college professor and father of two, was one of thousands of Minnesotans who had rallied earlier this year when the Trump administration launched an aggressive crackdown on immigrants in the Twin Cities.

Now the government alleged that he and 14 others used “force, intimidation, and threats” to prevent officers from carrying out their duties.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office gathered data from 11 states and used census data to extrapolate from there. According to the GAO report, an estimated 13.8 million American adults enrolled in Medicaid, and 10.6 million who live in a household that receives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits worked at least part time in 2024. Two-thirds of that group worked full-time jobs, clocking in 35 or more hours each week. Most of these employed recipients of federal benefits worked in some of the lowest-paying jobs in the country, but an estimated 35% of them were employed at companies with more than 1,000 workers.

As The Washington Post reported in its analysis of the GAO data, the top employers of these federal beneficiaries are some of the nation’s biggest and most well-known companies. “The number of Amazon workers relying on the federal programs for the poor nearly tripled between February 2020 and September 2025,” the Post noted, to around 12,346 workers who needed SNAP assistance and 11,338 who had to rely on Medicaid. “And for the first time, ride-hailing and app-based food delivery companies — Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart — collectively ranked among the top three employers with workers receiving aid.” Rounding out the group: Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, as well as Dollar General and McDonald’s.

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.

The money being wasted is yours.

For more than 30 years, the unemployed ex-wife and ambitious son of Italian drug trafficker Giacomo Tamburello relied on an international network of bankers, lawyers and brokers to amass a $230 million fortune and shield it from authorities, according to Italian prosecutors.

Their recent investigation — which has made international headlines because of Tamburellos’ alleged links to one of Italy’s most powerful mafia clans — led to the trio’s arrest in May and the seizure of assets spread across nine jurisdictions.

Prosecutors found that Tamburello earned millions primarily through the illicit trade of hashish from Morocco and shared 10% of the revenues with Matteo Messina Denaro, a notorious mafia boss until his capture and death in 2023. Starting in the 1980s, Tamburello allegedly laundered the funds with the help of his then-wife Maria Antonina Bruno and, later, their son Luca Tamburello, who studied banking and international finance at elite European business schools.

A decade ago, the state of Florida stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy. Last year, she opened a private school there with ease.

Her name and photo were on her new school’s website and details of her case were easy to find with an online search.

The state also knew that a transplanted Midwesterner had been fired from her Cincinnati charter school, following felony charges related to misuse of public funds, and had been banned from teaching or running schools in Ohio. Yet Florida did not stop her from starting a private school and collecting public mon

These far-reaching measures are already drawing parallels to dark moments in scientific history. Some researchers say the recent mass firings, policy changes and grant cancellations at federal research institutions, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, closely mirror what happened in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. “A similar threat now hangs over U.S. science,” the editorial board of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote in June.

Its editorial invoked the example of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist and astute political operator who rose to power in the 1930s Soviet Union under Stalin.

On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and a three-decade Houston resident. It was the second ICE-involved shooting this week alone—and since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least ten people.

Now, as hundreds march in Houston and Salgado’s family demands an impartial investigation, DHS is using a familiar playbook: they are blaming Salgado for his own death by asserting he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, held a press conference Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into his father’s death. “I want to tell you about my dad,” Ronaldo Salgado said. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” Every day, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and drove to work on a construction site, just as he had done for 35 years.

"Life has become a lot more difficult for Americans who are married to somebody who is not born in this country," said Ashley DeAzevedo, executive director of American Families United. The organization advocates for U.S. citizen spouses and immediate family members of those engaged in various immigration processes.

The organization's membership has grown over the last year as more people are affected by the rapid policy changes, she said. Now there are about 1.4 million people seeking the group's support in the U.S., and about 300,000 outside the country — made up of people who have left the U.S., as well as those who want to come in.

So he didn't know he had a bill to pay. After he and Tix returned home to Minnesota in April, they got a letter from Wellcare, the insurer that provided his drug plan, saying his coverage had been terminated after three months of unpaid premiums totaling $28.80. Under Medicare's rules, he can't enroll in a plan again until the fall, for coverage beginning in 2027.

Pare is among tens of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries who were on Wellcare's Value Script drug plan who will likely go without prescription drug coverage for the rest of the year because they didn't pay premiums for three months.

Next year, thousands more people in 32 states and Washington, D.C., enrolled in zero-premium drug plans from Wellcare and other insurance companies may find themselves in the same situation if their premiums go up and they don't realize it, according to a KFF Health News analysis of drug plan data. Premiums and other changes for 2027 will be unveiled in September.