On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing. The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The…
In a private ceremony on Sept. 17, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a podium inside the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and praised a Florida nonprofit for what he called a singular achievement in American education. The attendees were celebrating the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, which announced that it had reached…
For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe. They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself. The leading theory stated that…
The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas is trying to turn a key talking point of his Republican opponent against him — alleging Attorney General Ken Paxton is guilty of the same type of voter fraud he has spent years trying to eliminate. “As our state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton has gone on a…
I never thought I’d spend six months of my life investigating raw milk. But I did. In early June, ProPublica published a story I reported that features Mark McAfee, who runs America’s largest raw-milk dairy. The story came about after months of reporting on how the Trump administration’s policies were reshaping federal health agencies. My…
It’s been nearly two years since I started reporting on abuses of foreign farmworkers in Georgia. Some of the workers I tracked down had come to the U.S. legally through the H-2A visa program and were harmed and exploited by labor contractors — despite protections that were supposed to be guaranteed by the federal government. …
Over the past year, I’ve reported about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America. Over the past year, I’ve reported about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America. I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were…
For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church. It came from their brothers in the next bedroom. Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older…
Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrop to pay the equivalent of more than $173,000 in libel damages after he published an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic TV channel a “convicted terrorist.” Westrop eventually admitted the underlying evidence for the claim was not…
For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to…
