In the second half of our two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), members of the Pine Ridge community put pressure on the Catholic Church to share information about the boarding school it ran on the reservation.  Listen to part 1 here.

ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, visits Red Cloud Indian School, which has launched a truth and healing initiative for former students and their descendants. A youth-led activist group called the International Indigenous Youth Council has created a list of demands that includes financial reparations and the return of tribal land. The group also wants the Catholic Church to open up its records about the school?s past, especially information about children who may have died there. 

Pember travels to the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, which administered boarding schools like Red Cloud. She discovers that many records are redacted or off-limits entirely, but then comes across a nuns? diary that ends up containing important information. Buried in the diary entries is information about the school?s finances, the massacre at Wounded Knee and children who died at the school more than a century ago. 

Pember then returns to Red Cloud and attends the graduation ceremony for the class of 2022. In its early years, the school tried to strip students of their culture, but these days, it teaches the Lakota language and boasts a high graduation rate and rigorous academics. Pember presents what she?s learned about the school?s history to the head of the Jesuit community in western South Dakota and to the school?s president. 

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In a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children.  

These schools were part of a federal program designed to destroy Native culture and spirituality, with the stated goal to ?kill the Indian and save the man.? ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, explores the role the Catholic Church played in creating U.S. policy toward Native people and takes us to the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Under pressure from the community, the school has launched a truth and healing program and is helping to reintroduce traditional culture to its students. 

Next, Pember visits 89-year-old boarding school survivor Basil Brave Heart, who was sent to the Red Cloud School in the 1930s. He vividly remembers being traumatized by the experience and says many of his schoolmates suffered for the rest of their lives. We also hear from Dr. Donald Warne from Johns Hopkins University, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota tribe who studies how the trauma of boarding schools is passed down through the generations.

We close with what is perhaps the most sensitive part of the Red Cloud School?s search for the truth about its past: the hunt for students who may have died at the school and were buried in unmarked graves. The school has brought in ground-penetrating radar to examine selected parts of the campus, but for some residents, that effort is falling short. They want the entire campus scanned for potential graves. 

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When the Supreme Court?s decision undoing Roe v. Wade came down in June, anti-abortion groups were jubilant ? but far from satisfied. Many in the movement have a new target: hormonal birth control. It seems contradictory; doesn?t preventing unwanted pregnancies also prevent abortions? But anti-abortion groups don?t see it that way. They claim that hormonal contraceptives like IUDs and the pill can actually cause abortions.

One prominent group making this claim is Students for Life of America, whose president has said she wants contraceptives like IUDs and birth control pills to be illegal. The fast-growing group has built a social media campaign spreading the false idea that hormonal birth control is an abortifacient. Reveal?s Amy Mostafa teams up with UC Berkeley journalism and law students to dig into the world of young anti-abortion influencers and how medical misinformation gains traction on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, with far-reaching consequences.

Tens of millions of Americans use hormonal contraceptives to prevent pregnancy and regulate their health. And many have well-founded complaints about side effects, from nausea to depression ? not to mention well-justified anger about how the medical establishment often pooh-poohs those concerns. Anti-abortion and religious activists have jumped into the fray, urging people to reject hormonal birth control as ?toxic? and promoting non-hormonal ?fertility awareness? methods ? a movement they?re trying to rebrand as ?green sex.? Mother Jones Senior Editor Kiera Butler explains how secular wellness influencers such as Jolene Brighten, who sells a $300 birth control ?hormone reset,? are having their messages adopted by anti-abortion influencers, many of them with deep ties to Catholic institutions.

The end of Roe triggered a Missouri law that immediately banned almost all abortions. Many were shocked when a major health care provider in the state announced it would also no longer offer emergency contraception pills ? Plan B ? because of a false belief that it could cause an abortion. While the health system soon reversed its policy, it wasn?t the first time Missouri policymakers have been roiled by the myth that emergency contraception can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting and cause an abortion. Reveal senior reporter and producer Katharine Mieszkowski tracks how lawmakers in the state have been confronting this misinformation campaign and looks to the future of how conservatives are aiming to use birth control as their new wedge issue.

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From the Frisco RoughRiders to the Dayton Dragons, minor league baseball teams are a classic American tradition. But their players are not covered by some classic American laws: Players can earn less than the equivalent of minimum wage and don?t get paid overtime.

We explore how that?s even possible with the podcast The Uncertain Hour from our colleagues at Marketplace. This season, they?re looking at how certain companies ? and whole industries ? maneuver around basic worker protections.

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Eight months after Reveal?s three-part series about the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014, the government?s investigation is in high gear. But parents of the missing still don?t have the answers they want. There have been arrests and indictments of high-profile members of the military, and even the country?s former attorney general. But no one has been convicted, and the remains of only a handful of students have been identified. 

In the first segment, we relive the night of the attack on the students, and chronicle the previous government?s flawed investigation into the crime. We meet independent investigators who succeeded in getting close to the truth, then fled the country for their safety. 

Then we explore how the election of a new Mexican government led to a new investigation led by Omag Gomez Trejo, a young lawyer who pledged to expose the truth about the crime. 

We end with a conversation with Reveal?s Anayansi Diaz Cortes and Kate Doyle, from the National Security Archive. They bring us up to date on what?s happened with the investigation since we aired our three-part series, After Ayotzinapa. 

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After the Civil War, a new form of slavery took hold in the US and lasted more than 60 years. Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell investigate the chilling history of how Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies ? for years, even decades, at a time. The team talks with the descendant of a man imprisoned in the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee nearly 140 years ago, where people as young as 12 worked under subhuman conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron. This system of forced prison labor enriched the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company ? at the cost of prisoners? lives. 

At the state park that sits on the former site of the Lone Rock stockade, relics from the hellish prison are buried beneath the soil. Archeologist Camille Westmont has found thousands of artifacts, such as utensils and the plates prisoners ate off. She has also created a database listing the names of those sent to Lone Rock. A team of volunteers are helping her, including a woman reckoning with her own ancestor?s involvement in this corrupt system and the wealth her family benefited from.   

The United States Steel Corporation helped build bridges, railroads and towering skyscrapers across America. But the company also relied on forced prison labor. After U.S. Steel took over Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in 1907, the industrial giant used prison labor for at least five years. During that time, more than 100 men died while working in their massive coal mining operation in Alabama. U.S. Steel has misrepresented this dark chapter of its history. And it has never apologized for its use of forced labor or the lives lost.The reporters push the company to answer questions about its past and engage with communities near the former mines. 

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This episode explores two stories of fights over the right to vote. 

Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote claims to have evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election?an idea Trump loudly echoes as part of ?the big lie.? But True the Vote has never shown any proof. The lack of evidence hasn?t stopped the group from netting millions of dollars in donations. As reporter Cassandra Jaramillo explains, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips took home hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal loans and payments to companies they?re associated with. Despite this grift, True the Vote?s influence is still expanding. The group provided ?research? for a new film called 2000 Mules that promises to expose widespread voter fraud?with no evidence to back it up. 

The big lie sparked the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, an event that is now part of the nation?s election history. But this was not the first time that a violent mob tried to challenge election results. In 1898, a group of armed white supremacists carried out a coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, and seized power from legally elected Black leaders. The Wilmington coup created a blueprint for taking voting rights away from people of color?a legacy of voter suppression that the country is still grappling with today. Host Al Letson pieces together the story with help from the grandson of a prominent member of the Black community in Wilmington. 

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Picture stepping into a drug rehab. You?re looking for treatment, but instead, you get hard work for no pay. For decades, this type of rehab has quietly spread across the country. How are rehabs allowed to do this? 

Some organizations argue that participants can work without pay as long as they?re provided with housing and treatment. This issue was raised by a cultish organization that recruited dropouts from the hippie movement and had them sew bedazzled designer jean jackets. The clothes became a Hollywood fashion trend, and the unpaid labor propelled a case all the way to the Supreme Court. 

The federal government doesn?t track work-based rehabs, so reporter Shoshana Walter spent a year counting them herself. She learned that work-based rehabs are present across the entire country. And the coronavirus pandemic has made the opioid epidemic even more deadly. As one crisis slams into another, we look at how work-based rehabs are turning participants into unpaid essential workers. 

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By the end of the 1960s, Synanon was a widely respected drug rehab with a celebrated treatment program. It had intake centers and commune-style rehabs all over the country. 

It subsisted by turning members into unpaid workers who hustled donations and ran Synanon businesses. As the money poured in, Synanon?s founder, Charles Dederich, transitioned the group from a rehab into an ?experimental society.?  

Dederich instituted a series of increasingly authoritarian rules on members: He banned sugar, dissolved marriages, separated children from their parents and forced vasectomies. Synanon ultimately became a religion, with Dederich as its violent and vengeful leader.

Synanon descended into madness. But before it crumbled, the group inspired an entire generation of rehabs. By one researcher?s count in the 1970s, there were 500 programs in the United States stemming from Synanon. Many of those rehabs still exist today, including Cenikor. 

This is a rebroadcast of an episode that was originally aired in 2020. 

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Reporter Shoshana Walter gets a message from a stranger: Penny Rawlings has just read one of Walter?s stories about Cenikor, a drug rehab with a facility in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Rawlings is desperate to learn more because her brother Tim Roe is a participant there. Rawlings helped send him to Cenikor ? but didn?t realize getting him out of treatment was going to be the bigger problem.

Cenikor?s model has its roots in Synanon: a revolutionary, first-of-its-kind rehab that started in the 1950s on a California beach. Its charismatic leader, Charles Dederich, mesmerized the nation by claiming to have developed a cure for drug addiction. But as it spread across the country, Dederich wanted the rehab to turn into something else: a business.

This is the first episode in our series American Rehab, which we first broadcast in 2020. Listen to the whole series here.

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There isn?t a single country in the world that recognizes the Taliban as a legitimate government. And neither do many Afghans. One year after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, reporter Najib Aminy checks back in with a teacher from Kabul named Aysha, who fled to the U.K. She was one of the 120,000 people airlifted out of the country as the Taliban took control. Like many other Afghan refugees, she?s frustrated that the Taliban?s leadership has resulted in having to leave her home country behind.

While the Biden administration has claimed to welcome refugees from both Afghanistan and Ukraine, the process for people fleeing the two countries has been unequal. To gain temporary entry to the United States, more than 66,000 Afghans applied through a process called humanitarian parole. But the hurdles for Afghans are huge, including monthslong wait times, piles of paperwork and a steep cost ($575 per person). In contrast, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States created a special humanitarian parole process for Ukrainians caught in the conflict ? it can be filed online and has no application fee. Government records reveal that only 123 Afghan humanitarian parole applicants have been approved, compared with 68,000 Ukrainian applicants.

Guest host Ike Sriskandarajah and Aminy then head to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where $7 billion in assets belonging to Afghanistan has sat frozen since the Taliban took control of the country last year. Aminy talks with Shah Mehrabi, an economist who sits on the governing board of the Afghan central bank, who says that without access to those assets, the country?s economy is headed toward collapse. The Biden administration is in a complicated position as it considers whether to release the money ? and how to do it without aiding the Taliban.

Obaidullah Baheer is a lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan who is trying to bring the Taliban and its critics together to chart a future for the country. For Baheer, Afghan politics is personal ? his grandfather served as prime minister of the country and is accused of committing war crimes that killed thousands of civilians. With that weight of personal history, Baheer is organizing Afghans to figure out how to resolve the conflicts at the heart of the country today.

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In July, a popular uprising in Sri Lanka forced the country?s president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to step down and flee the country. Rajapaksa is accused of carrying out massive atrocities more than a decade ago. 

Reveal reporter and host Ike Sriskandarajah looks into why powerful people suspected of committing war crimes often walk free. Sriskandarajah spent six months investigating the U.S. government's failure to charge accused perpetrators of the worst crimes in the world. The federal government says it is pursuing leads and cases against nearly 1700 alleged human rights violators and war criminals. Victims of international atrocities sometimes even describe running into them at their local coffee shop or in line at Walgreens.  

After the end of Sri Lanka?s civil war, families seeking accountability for state-sanctioned violence filed a suit against a man they say is a war criminal. A private eye was tasked with hunting down Gota, Sri Lanka?s former defense minister. The P.I.  found the alleged war criminal in Southern California, shopping at Trader Joe?s. 

At the close of World War II, dozens of former Nazi leaders came to the United States. After decades of inaction, in 1979, President Jimmy Carter created a special unit within the Department of Justice dedicated to hunting down Nazi war criminals. Decades after passing the first substantive human rights statutes that make it possible to prosecute war criminals for crimes like torture and genocide, the U.S. has successfully prosecuted only one person under the laws. Sriskandrajah talks to experts about why prosecutors often take an ?Al Capone? strategy to going after war criminals, pursuing them on lesser charges like immigration violations rather than human rights abuses. 

With little action from the government to prosecute war criminals, victims of violence are instead using civil lawsuits to try to seek accountability. Lawyers at the Center for Justice & Accountability have brought two dozen cases against alleged war criminals and human rights violators ? and never lost at trial. But when the lawyers share their evidence with the federal government, it often feels like the information disappears into a black box. 

This is a rebroadcast of an episode originally released on April 22, 2022.

The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 marked the beginning of a new chapter of the struggle for civil rights in America. A mostly White jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the teen?s murder, in part because Florida?s stand your ground law permits a person to use deadly force in self-defense ? even if that person could have safely retreated. Nationwide protests after the trial called for stand your ground laws to be repealed and reformed. But instead, stand your ground laws have expanded to 38 states. 

Reveal reporter Jonathan Jones talks with Byron Castillo, a maintenance worker in North Carolina who was shot in the chest after mistakenly trying to get into the wrong apartment for a repair. While Castillo wound up out of work and deep in debt, police and prosecutors declined to pursue charges against the shooter, who said he was afraid someone was trying to break into his apartment. Researchers have found that states that enacted stand your ground laws have seen an increase in homicides ? one study estimated that roughly 700 more people die in the U.S. every year because of stand your ground laws. 

Opponents of stand your ground laws call them by a different name: ?kill at will? laws. Jones speaks to lawmakers like Stephanie Howse, who fought against stand your ground legislation as an Ohio state representative, saying such laws put Black people's lives at risk. Howse and other Democratic lawmakers faced off against Republican politicians, backed by pro-gun lobbyists, intent on passing a stand your ground bill despite widespread opposition from civil rights groups and law enforcement.

Modern-day stand your ground laws started in Florida. Reveal reporter Nadia Hamdan explores a 2011 road rage incident that wound up leading to an expansion of the law. She looks at how one case led Florida lawmakers, backed by the National Rifle Association, to enact a law that spells out that prosecutors, not defendants, have the burden of proof when claiming someone was not acting in self-defense when committing an act of violence against another individual. 

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From Russia to Sweden and the United States, there?s a growing network of White nationalist groups that stretches around the world. The reporting team at Verified: The Next Threat investigates how these militant groups are helping each other create propaganda, recruit new members and share paramilitary skills.

We start with a group called the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM. Its members are taking up arms in Russia?s war against Ukraine, which they say is a battle in a much larger ?holy war? for White power. Newsy senior investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt interviews a leader of the group who says RIM?s goal is to unite White nationalists around the world. The group even runs training camps where White supremacists from around the world can learn paramilitary tactics.

Russia?s White nationalists are making connections with extremists in the United States. Greenblatt talks with a neo-Nazi named Matt Heimbach, who was a major promoter of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon after Charlottesville, Heimbach invited members of RIM to the U.S. and connected them to his network of American White power extremists.

We end with a visit by Greenblatt to the State Department in Washington, where he interviews two top counterterrorism officials. They say they?re aware of the growing international network of White supremacists, but explain that White power groups are now forming political parties, which makes it more difficult for the agency to use its most powerful counterterrorism tools.

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When he was president, Donald Trump used the pardon power to help friends and political allies. Now we?ve learned from the Jan. 6 committee hearings that members of his inner circle asked for pardons to shield themselves from prosecution, before they were even charged with a crime. But what about the people who applied for pardons through the official process and are still waiting for answers? We go beyond the headlines and tell the story of a pardons system that?s completely broken down. 

We begin our show by looking at the rarest of pardons: when the person receiving a pardon is the president. When in office, Trump tweeted that he had the authority to pardon himself, a concept that first was discussed during the Nixon administration. In that case, former President Richard Nixon eventually was pardoned by the next president, Gerald Ford. In this story, we hear some rare archival tape in which Ford explains in his own words why he decided to pardon his predecessor.

In the next story, we look at the case of Charles ?Duke? Tanner, a boxer who was sentenced to life in federal prison after being convicted of drug trafficking. His arrest came during the war on drugs, which started in the 1980s, disproportionately putting tens of thousands of Black men in prison for decades. Tanner applied for clemency twice; his application was just one among 13,000 others waiting for a decision at the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney when this show first aired in 2019. That number has grown to nearly 17,000 as of today. We end with a heartwarming update in the Tanner story.

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Bitcoin is a novel form of currency that bypasses banks, credit card companies and governments. But as Elizabeth Shogren reports, the process of creating bitcoin is extremely energy intensive, and it?s setting back efforts to address climate change. Already, bitcoin has used enough power to erase all the energy savings from electric cars, according to one study. Still, towns across the United States are scrambling to attract bitcoin-mining operations by selling them power at a deep discount. 

Bitcoin?s demand for electricity is so great that it?s giving new life to the dirtiest type of power plants: ones that burn coal. In Hardin, Montana, the coal-fired power plant was on the verge of shutting down until bitcoin came to town. The coal that fuels the bitcoin operation is owned by the Crow Nation, so some of the tribe?s leaders support it. But in just one year, the amount of carbon dioxide the plant puts into the air jumped nearly tenfold. After our story first aired, the company that owns the computers that mine bitcoin in Hardin announced that it would move them to a cleaner source of power. The generating station is negotiating with other companies to take its place. 

Bitcoin?s huge carbon footprint has people asking whether  cryptocurrency can go green. Bitcoin advocates say it can switch to renewable energy. Others are instead developing entirely new types of cryptocurrency that are less energy hungry. Guest host Shereen Marisol Meraji talks with Ludwig Siegele, technology editor at The Economist, who gives his assessment of the challenges of making cryptocurrency environmentally friendly. 

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Quickly delivering donated organs to patients waiting for a transplant is a matter of life and death. Yet transportation errors are leading to delays in surgeries, putting patients in danger and making some organs unusable. This week, we look at weaknesses in the nation?s system for transporting organs and solutions for making it work better. 

More than any other organ, donated kidneys are put on commercial flights so they can get to waiting patients. In collaboration with Kaiser Health News, we look at the system for transporting kidneys and how a lack of tracking and accountability can result in waylaid or misplaced kidneys.

We then look at the broader issues affecting organ procurement in the U.S. with Jennifer Erickson, who worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Obama administration. She says one of the system?s weaknesses is that not enough organs are recovered from deceased people ? not nearly as many as there could be.

We end with an audio postcard about honor walks, a new ritual that hospitals are adopting to honor the gift of life that dying people are giving to patients who will receive their organs. We follow the story of one young man who was killed in a car accident.

This episode originally was broadcast Feb. 8, 2020. 

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Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that gave women in the U.S. the legal right to an abortion, has now been officially overturned. The Supreme Court rarely reverses itself. The ruling means states can set their own laws around abortion. Many plan to ban it outright. How did we get to this point? 

For decades, mostly White Evangelicals and Catholics joined forces to put political pressure on Republicans to oppose abortion access ? which has serious implications for communities of color. Reporter Anayansi Diaz-Cortes talks with Jennifer Holland, a history professor and author of the book ?Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement,? and Khiara Bridges, a reproductive justice scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, about the racial dynamics of the fight over abortion. 

Most abortions now happen with pills rather than a surgical procedure at a clinic. The ability to get the pills via mail and telehealth appointments has helped expand access to abortions. Now, religious anti-abortion activists are promoting the unproven idea that medication abortions can be reversed. Reporters Amy Littlefield and Sofia Resnick investigate the science and history of this controversial treatment called abortion pill reversal.

But there?s another religious voice that often gets drowned out by the anti-abortion movement. Reveal's Grace Oldham visits the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, which back in the late ?60s was part of a national hotline for people seeking an abortion. Callers could be connected with clergy members who would counsel them and give a referral to a trusted doctor who would safely perform abortions. We hear how the church is continuing its legacy of supporting abortion access today, helping people in Texas who want abortions get them out of state.

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Dr. Barnett Slepian was a conservative doctor and family man with strong religious beliefs. But he didn?t think doctors should pick and choose which services to provide, so he performed abortions at a clinic in Buffalo, New York. The anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue made him a target, harassing him and calling him a ?murderer? at his home in Amherst, New York, as well as at his private practice and the Buffalo clinic. In 1998, Slepian was the victim of a sniper attack. 

In this episode, in partnership with the CBC podcast ?Someone Knows Something,? reporters David Ridgen and Amanda Robb ? Slepian?s niece ? look into the network of anti-abortion extremists who targeted doctors and clinics in the 1990s.   

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In the early 2000s, rampant steroid use across Major League Baseball became the biggest scandal in the sport?s history. But fans didn?t want to hear the difficult truth about their heroes ? and the league didn?t want to intervene and clean up a mess it helped make.

We look back at how the scandal unraveled with our colleagues from the podcast Crushed from Religion of Sports and PRX. Their show revisits the steroid era to untangle its truth from the many myths, examine the legacy of baseball?s so-called steroid era and explore what it tells us about sports culture in America.

We start during the 1998 MLB season, when the home run race was on. Superstar sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled to set a new single-season record, and McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, was portrayed as the hero baseball needed: part humble, wholesome, working man and part action hero, with his brawny build and enormous biceps. So when a reporter spotted a suspicious bottle of pills in his locker in the middle of the season, most fans plugged their ears and refused to acknowledge that baseball might be hooked on steroids.

Joan Niesen, a sportswriter and host of the podcast Crushed, takes us on a deep dive into an era that dethroned a generation of superstars, left fans disillusioned and turned baseball?s record book on its head. The story takes us from ballparks and clubhouses to the halls of Congress to explain how baseball was finally forced to reckon with its drug problem.

This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in July 2021. 

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Year after year, wildfires have swept through Northern California?s wine and dairy country, threatening the region?s famed agricultural businesses. . Evacuation orders have become a way of life in places like Sonoma County, and so too have exemptions to those orders. Officials in the county created a special program allowing agricultural employers to bring farmworkers into areas that are under evacuation and keep them working, even as wildfires rage. It?s generally known as the ag pass program. Reporter Teresa Cotsirilos investigates whether the policy puts low-wage farmworkers at risk from smoke and flames. This story is a partnership with the nonprofit newsroom the Food & Environment Reporting Network and the podcast and radio show World Affairs.

Then KQED?s Danielle Venton introduces us to Bill Tripp, a member of the Karuk Tribe. Tripp grew up along the Klamath River, where his great-grandmother taught him how controlled burns could make the land more productive and protect villages from dangerous fires. But in the 1800s, authorities outlawed traditional burning practices. Today, the impact of that policy is clear: The land is overgrown, and there has been a major fire in the region every year for the past decade, including one that destroyed half the homes in the Karuk?s largest town, Happy Camp, and killed two people. Tripp has spent 30 years trying to restore ?good fire? to the region but has faced resistance from the U.S. Forest Service and others.

Twelve years ago, the Forest Service officially changed its policy to expand the use of prescribed burns, one of the most effective tools to mitigate massive, deadly wildfires. But Reveal?s Elizabeth Shogren reports that even though the agency committed to doing controlled burns, it hasn?t actually increased how much fire it?s using to fight fire. The Forest Service also has been slow to embrace another kind of good fire that experts say the West desperately needs: managed wildfires, in which fires are allowed to burn in a controlled manner to reduce overgrowth. To protect the future of the land and people ? especially with climate change making forests drier and hotter ? the Forest Service needs to embrace the idea of good fire.  

This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in September 2021. 

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As the nation reels from the recent mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, we look at why efforts to enact comprehensive laws to reduce gun violence are failing. 

Reveal?s Najib Aminy tells the story of a former lobbyist for the NRA, who explains how another school shooting years ago polarized the political debate about guns and all but eliminated the chances for compromise.

Then, host Al Letson speaks with reporter Alain Stephens from The Trace. Stephens has been tracking how technology is making guns more lethal and says one of the most troubling inventions is something called an auto sear. These tiny devices can turn pistols and rifles into machine guns. He also brings us up to date on his effort to force the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to share data about police guns that end up being used in crimes. Reveal sued the ATF on his behalf, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently came down with a decision.  

We end with a discussion with Reveal?s Jennifer Gollan, who last fall completed a groundbreaking investigation about homicides by intimate partners convicted of domestic abuse. Her reporting led to a rare moment of consensus on Capitol Hill and new provisions in the recently reauthorized Violence Against Women Act. 

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On Jan. 6, 2021, Jackson Reffitt watched the Capitol riot play out on TV from his family home in Texas. His father, Guy, had a much closer view. He was in Washington, armed with a semiautomatic handgun, storming the building. 

When Guy Reffitt returned home, Jackson secretly taped him and turned the recordings over to the FBI. His father bragged about what he did, saying: ?I had every constitutional right to carry a weapon and take over the Congress.?

Guy Reffitt was the first person to stand trial for his role in the riot, and the case has divided his family. 

This week, Reveal features the story of the Reffitt family by partnering with the podcast Will Be Wild from Pineapple Street Studios, Wondery and Amazon Music. Hosted by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, Will Be Wild?s eight-part series investigates the forces that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection and what comes next.

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The past few years have brought profits and growth to Amazon, but it?s come at a cost to many workers. Amazon warehouse employees are injured on the job at a higher rate than at other companies, even as the company has claimed to prioritize safety.

Host Al Letson speaks with Reveal?s Will Evans, who?s been reporting on injuries at Amazon for years. By gathering injury data and speaking with workers and whistleblowers, he has focused national attention on the company?s safety record, prompting regulators, lawmakers and the company itself to address the issue more closely.

Then, we bring back a story by Reveal?s Jennifer Gollan that looks at the most common type of injury at Amazon and other workplaces and why the government chose not to try to prevent it.

We end with a reprise of a story from reporter Laura Sydell about online reviews of products and businesses and how many of them are not what they seem.

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As the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, Florida is a case study in what can happen in states where abortion is easy to access. 

Florida is an unexpected safe haven for people seeking abortions in the South. The state has 55 abortion clinics ? more than seven other Southeastern states combined. But Florida is also increasingly an abortion battleground. Reveal found that calls to police from Florida abortion clinics for disturbances, harassment and violence have doubled since 2016.

Reporter Laura C. Morel spent months investigating the anti-abortion movement there and observed what it?s like to be an abortion provider in Jacksonville, where one particular clinic is under siege by a local anti-abortion group that has figured out a way to be near the clinic?s front door. Protesters rented a room in the same office park as A Woman?s Choice and now can legally, without trespassing, hold daily protests and even religious ceremonies on the private driveway that leads to the clinic. ?As abortion providers, we should not have to be harassed going to work every day,? clinic owner Kelly Flynn told Morel. ?I mean, no one's picketing the urologist that's doing vasectomies.? 

For doctors who perform abortions, threats of violence are not new. In the 1980s and ?90s, anti-abortion extremists bombed and blockaded clinics and murdered doctors. We hear from David Gunn Jr., whose father performed abortions and was murdered by a fundamentalist Christian in Pensacola in 1993. His death led to the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which makes it illegal to intimidate patients and staff at abortion clinics through force, threat of force or physical obstruction. But Morel found that this federal law, known as the FACE Act, does little to protect against the kind of harassment and intimidation providers face today. At A Woman?s Choice, only one person ? a man who called in a bomb threat ? has been prosecuted under the FACE Act. 

What qualifies as ?intimidation? varies by state. In California, it?s illegal to photograph patients and staff outside abortion clinics. But at A Woman?s Choice, protesters regularly photograph and film videos of patients, which staffers say makes them feel frazzled and afraid. If Roe v. Wade crumbles, abortion rights advocates warn that  this kind of anti-abortion activism will spread, especially in places where abortion will remain legal.

WBEZ reporter Shannon Heffernan brings us the story of Anthony Gay, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on a parole violation but ended up with 97 years added to his sentence. Gay lives with serious mental illness, and after time in solitary confinement, he began to act out. He was repeatedly charged with battery ? often for throwing liquids, like urine, at staff. 

Gay acknowledges he did some of those things but says the prison put him in circumstances that made his mental illness worse ? then punished him for the way he acted. With help from Chicago-based lawyers, Gay appealed to the local state?s attorney. What happens when a self-described ?law and order? prosecutor has to decide between prison-town politics and doing what he believes the law requires? 

Finally, host Al Letson speaks with Ear Hustle co-creator and co-host Earlonne Woods about the power of local prosecutors, including an upcoming recall election in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a recent episode from the Ear Hustle podcast that tackles the complicated politics of prison towns.

This episode is a partnership with the podcast Motive from WBEZ Chicago. 

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This month, atrocities in Ukraine have triggered new allegations of war crimes. While people around the world call for accountability, we look into why those who are suspected of committing war crimes in the past often walk free. Reporter and host Ike Sriskandarajah spent the past six months investigating the U.S. government's failure to charge accused perpetrators of the worst crimes in the world. The federal government says it is pursuing leads and cases against nearly 1700 alleged human rights violators and war criminals. Victims of international atrocities sometimes even describe running into them at their local coffee shop or in line at Walgreens.  

After the end of Sri Lanka?s civil war, families seeking accountability for state-sanctioned violence filed a suit against a man they say is a war criminal. A private eye was tasked with hunting down Gotabaya Rajapaksa (better known as Gota), Sri Lanka?s defense minister. The P.I. found the alleged war criminal in Southern California, shopping at Trader Joe?s. 

At the close of World War II, dozens of former Nazi leaders came to the United States. After decades of inaction, in 1979, President Jimmy Carter created a special unit within the Department of Justice dedicated to hunting down Nazi war criminals.  Decades after passing the first substantive human rights statutes that make it possible to prosecute war criminals for crimes like torture and genocide, the U.S. has successfully prosecuted only one person under the laws. Sriskandrajah talks to experts about why prosecutors often take an ?Al Capone? strategy to going after war criminals, pursuing them on lesser charges like immigration violations rather than human rights abuses. 

With little action from the government to prosecute war criminals, victims of violence are instead using civil lawsuits to try to seek accountability. Lawyers at the Center for Justice & Accountability have brought two dozen cases against alleged war criminals and human rights violators ? and never lost at trial. But when the lawyers share their evidence with the federal government, it often feels like the information disappears into a black box.

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Up and down the West Coast, cities are struggling with homelessness. Here's a hidden side: arrests. In Portland, Oregon, unhoused people made up at most 2% of the population in recent years, but over the same time, they accounted for nearly half of all arrests. Cities have long turned to police as the answer to make homelessness disappear. But arrests often lead back to the streets ? or worse. 

Reveal looked at six major West Coast cities and found that people living on the streets are consistently more likely to be arrested than their neighbors who live in houses. And places including Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are grappling with a major court decision. In 2019, the Supreme Court let a ruling stand that says it's cruel and unusual punishment to arrest people who are sleeping or camping in public places if there is no shelter available for them. In Portland, the city is building what it calls "villages" where people who are unhoused can stay temporarily. But there is pushback from residents who don?t want a shelter in their neighborhood, and do expect police to be part of the response to homelessness. Reporter Melissa Lewis tells the story of all these intersecting parts.  

She follows one man?s journey through the criminal justice system as he tries to disentangle himself from arrest warrants that keep accumulating. She talks with locals who are trying to build trust and connection with their houseless neighbors and others who are tired of seeing tents and call the police for help. And we learn the commitment that it takes to move off the street, one person at a time.  

This is an update of an episode that first aired in December 2021.

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In 2021, the Biden administration approved $4 billion in loan forgiveness for Black farmers and other farmers of color, as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. The aid was supposed to make up for decades of discrimination. However, White farmers have sued, and that aid has yet to be paid out as the issue makes it way through the courts. 

Eddie Wise is one farmer who claimed to face discrimination. He was the son of a sharecropper. In 1996, he and his wife, Dorothy, bought a farm with a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Twenty years later, the USDA foreclosed on the property and evicted him. 

John Biewen of ?Scene on Radio? teamed up with Reveal to investigate Wise?s claim of race-based discrimination. Wise?s story is one piece of the puzzle explaining how Black families went from owning nearly a million farms in 1920 to now fewer than 36,000.

The federal government has admitted it was part of the problem. In 1997, a USDA report said discrimination by the agency was a factor in the decline of Black farms. A landmark class-action lawsuit on behalf of Black farmers, Pigford v. Glickman, was settled in 1999. But advocates for Black farmers say problems persist.

This episode was originally broadcast in July 2017. 

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More than a year after the 2020 election, roughly a third of Americans continue to believe, without evidence, that the results of the election were illegitimate. And now, GOP candidates are tapping into the ?Big Lie,? campaigning for office on the promise to change how future elections are run.

We zero in on Michigan, a key swing state where Republicans are aiming to shape the future of elections. Reporter Byard Duncan talks with the Antrim County clerk, who was flooded with ugly calls and threats after her office accidentally assigned votes meant for Donald Trump to Joe Biden. While the error was quickly fixed, many in the GOP, including Trump, have used the county to sow doubt about the entire election?s results. Duncan reports on the race for secretary of state, Michigan?s top election official, and how the leading GOP candidate has repeatedly referenced Antrim County to question the integrity of elections. The Trump-endorsed candidate has outraised her Republican opponents by at least tenfold. 

There was no meaningful election fraud in Michigan in 2020. But some local election officials who voted to certify the election have paid a price. Reporter Trey Bundy tells the story of Wayne County official Monica Palmer, a Republican who was kicked off the local canvassing board after certifying the election. And she?s just one of many: Republicans have now placed new election officials on boards in eight of Michigan?s largest counties. At least half of them have cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election.

Finally, looking to the future, Republicans in Michigan are making it harder to vote. Since the 2020 election, the Michigan Senate, led by Republicans, has introduced nearly 40 bills to change its election laws, all of which propose new barriers to voting. Guest host Shereen Marisol Meraji talks with Branden Snyder, co-executive director of Detroit Action, a local activist group that organizes working-class Detroiters, about how his group is mobilizing against efforts to undermine the vote.

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Bitcoin is a novel form of currency that bypasses banks, credit card companies and governments. But as Reveal?s Elizabeth Shogren reports, the process of creating bitcoin is extremely energy intensive, and it?s setting back efforts to address climate change. Already, bitcoin has used enough power to erase all the energy savings from electric cars, according to one study. Still, towns across the United States are scrambling to attract bitcoin-mining operations by selling them power at a deep discount.

Bitcoin?s demand for electricity is so great that it?s giving new life to the dirtiest type of power plants: ones that burn coal. In Hardin, Montana, the coal-fired power plant was on the verge of shutting down until bitcoin came to town. The coal that fuels the bitcoin operation is owned by the Crow Nation, so some of the tribe?s leaders support it. But in just one year, the amount of carbon dioxide the plant puts into the air jumped nearly tenfold.

Bitcoin?s huge carbon footprint has people asking whether cryptocurrency can go green. Bitcoin advocates say it can switch to renewable energy. Others are instead developing entirely new types of cryptocurrency that are less energy hungry. Guest host Shereen Marisol Meraji talks with Ludwig Siegele, technology editor at The Economist, who gives his assessment of the challenges of making cryptocurrency environmentally friendly.

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For decades, Doctors Without Borders has been admired for bringing desperately needed medical care to crises around the globe and pioneering modern-day humanitarian aid. It?s an organization with radical roots, promising to do whatever it takes to deliver life-saving care to people in need. But now, it?s struggling to address institutional racism.

The organization, also known by its French acronym MSF, has about 63,000 people working in 88 countries. While foreign doctors parachuting into crisis zones get most of the attention, 90 percent of the work is being done by local health workers. 

In the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 current and former staffers wrote a letter calling out institutional racism at MSF. They say that MSF operates a two-tiered tiered system that favors foreign doctors, or expat doctors, over local health workers. 

Reporters Mara Kardas-Nelson, Ngozi Cole and Sean Campbell talked to about 100 current and former MSF workers to investigate how deep these issues run. We meet Dr. Indira Govender, a South African doctor who in 2011 accepted what she thought was her dream job with MSF in South Africa, only to get a front-row seat to the organization?s institutional racism. Even though she?s officially the second-in-command of her project, she says it feels like a select group of European expats and White South Africans are running the show.  

Then, Kardas-Nelson and Cole take us inside the inequities MSF staffers experienced during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. While expat doctors had their meals together and socialized, local health workers were left out. But inequities ran deeper. If expat doctors got sick, they would be evacuated out of the country, while local workers didn?t get that care ? they were treated at the same center where they worked. Kardas-Nelson and Cole reported the story from Sierra Leone in the Spring of 2021 and spoke to former National MSF clinicians.

Finally, we talk about what can change in humanitarian aid. Govender is part of a group of current and former MSF workers called Decolonize MSF. While she and others are pushing the organization to commit to changes that address racial inequities, some are skeptical about what will actually change. 

This week?s episode was created in partnership with the global news site Insider.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2021.

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The war in Ukraine is not new. Ukrainians have been living through ?the long war? of a threatened ? and brutally real ? Russian invasion for decades. We hear from 60-year-old Irina Dovgan, who refused to leave her home, with its blooming garden and many pets, when separatist fighters took over her region in 2014. She became an international symbol of the invasion after Russian-backed forces arrested, abused and publicly humiliated her. Now, Dovgan is living through a second invasion.  

Reporting from Ukraine, Coda Story?s Glenn Kates explains what it?s been like to live in Kyiv as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to invade. While many Ukrainians speak Russian and have deep ties to the country, Kates talks to Kyiv residents about how Putin?s threats of invasion and violence have shifted their sense of identity. As the invasion approaches, each person has to weigh the nearly impossible question of what they will do to survive.  

To understand what it?s like to be a journalist in Ukraine and Russia right now, host Ike Sriskandarajah speaks with propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev. Born in Ukraine and now a fellow at Johns Hopkins University and contributing editor at Coda Story, Pomerantsev describes how challenging Putin?s official version of events can land journalists in prison. Under a new law, even calling the invasion an ?invasion? could lead to a 15-year prison sentence. 

Finally, Reveal?s Elizabeth Shogren takes listeners back to a time when Russia was charting a different course. In 1989, Shogren was a Moscow-based reporter covering the Soviet Union?s first freely elected legislature. She talks with Russian reporter Sergey Parkhomenko about how, since Putin?s election in 2000, the Russian president has consolidated power by systematically squashing dissent inside the country. This month, Parkhomenko?s radio show and the whole independent Echo of Moscow network was taken off the air. The Kremlin?s harsh new censorship law, punishable by 15 years in prison, makes it illegal to call the war in Ukraine a ?war.? 

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A nanny in Nashville was having a picnic on a bike path with the kids she was caring for when a man emerged from his house and started cursing at them. The woman began recording and threatened to call the police. But it turned out the angry man wasn?t afraid because he was part of the police ? a captain with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. The nanny?s video went viral. It put a cop in the spotlight, cracked a hole in the ?blue wall of silence? and sparked a ?Me Too? moment that inspired women in the force to speak up about the captain and other high-ranking officers. 

Monica Blake-Beasley was one of the few Black women on the force and one of those who spoke out. When she came forward to report that another officer had sexually assaulted her, she says her colleagues closed ranks and protected not her, but the officer she had accused. Soon, Blake-Beasley began to feel like the department was retaliating against her. As Samantha Max of WPLN News reports, Nashville officers who dare to rock the boat are often disciplined, passed over for assignments or forced to leave altogether. Records show that Black female employees who were investigated for policy violations were suspended, demoted or terminated at more than twice the rate of White employees.

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Sugar is a big part of Americans? daily diet. But who harvests some of that sweet cane? 

Reporters Sandy Tolan and Euclides Cordero Nuel visit Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic who do the backbreaking work of cutting sugarcane for little pay. They live in work camps, or ?bateyes,? that are part of a vast sugar plantation owned by the Central Romana Corp. The company is the Dominican Republic?s largest private employer and has strong links to two powerful Florida businessmen, Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul. The reporters speak to workers who have no access to government pensions, so they?re forced to work in the fields into their 80s for as little as $3 a day. Through its sugar exports to the U.S. and other businesses, Central Romana generates an estimated $1.5 billion a year ? but some workers are so poor they can?t afford doctors? visits. 

In the 1990s, Tolan reported on human trafficking and child labor in the Dominican sugar industry. Conditions improved following pressure on the government from local activists, human rights groups, and the U.S. Labor Department. But major problems persist. And cane cutters say they must go into deep debt just to survive, leaving them trapped.  

After Reveal?s story aired in fall 2021, Congress took action. Fifteen members of the House Ways and Means Committee called on federal agencies to formulate a plan to address what they called the ?slave-like conditions? in the Dominican cane fields. Central Romana also took action: It bulldozed one of the bateyes our reporters visited. The company contends it was part of an improvement program, but residents say that with very little warning, they were told to pack up their lives. They were loaded onto trucks and moved to other bateyes, as their settlement was wiped off the map.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2021. 

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Washington, D.C.: The Difficulties of Firing Police Officers

A group of hackers attacked the Metropolitan Police Department in 2021, leaking 250 gigabytes of data and confidential files.

Buried in tens of thousands of records, Reveal reporter Dhruv Mehrotra found a disturbing pattern. Records of disciplinary decisions showed that an internal panel of high-ranking officers kept some troubled officers on the force ? even after department investigators substantiated allegations of criminal misconduct and recommended they be fired.

Aurora, Colorado: ?Excited Delirium? and Ketamine in Police Confrontations 

When Elijah McClain was stopped by police in Aurora, Colorado, in 2019, he was injected with a powerful sedative, ketamine, and died after suffering cardiac arrest. His death sparked widespread protests.

KUNC reporters Michael de Yoanna and Rae Solomon covered McClain?s case, and it made them wonder how often paramedics and law enforcement use ketamine and why. What they found led to real change.

St. Louis: The History of Prisoner Disenfranchisement Laws in Missouri

Prisoner disenfranchisement laws have been on the books since the founding of our nation and disproportionately affect voters of color. 

Reveal Investigative Fellow and St. Louis Public Radio journalist Andrea Henderson reports from Missouri, where about 63,000 formerly incarcerated people could not vote in the last presidential election. She speaks to a community activist who credits getting his right to vote restored as the start of putting him on his current path.

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To see what the future of abortion could be in the United States, look to Texas. Across the country, conservative foes of abortion rights have pushed ?heartbeat bills? that would ban abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, when an embryo's cardiac activity can be detected. Journalist Amy Littlefield and a team of law and journalism students from UC Berkeley investigate how this law went from being dismissed as a fringe idea, even by traditional right-to-life groups, to getting enforced in Texas. 

We hear the backstory of right-wing activists who have been pushing toward this moment for more than a decade by embracing an approach that uses science over religion to justify abortion restrictions. But the science is often skewed and misleading. To rally support for a ban on abortion, activist Janet Porter filled press conferences with red heart balloons and sent lawmakers teddy bears that play the sound of heartbeats. Mark Lee Dickson drove across Texas in his Ford pickup getting small towns to pass ordinances that create ?Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn.? It was all a precursor for what was to come. 

Now, the consequences of restricting abortion are playing out in the crowded waiting room of an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas, where staff are being overwhelmed by patients from Texas. To get an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, Texas patients not only must leave their state, but also navigate the rules of a different state with its own set of laws designed to make abortion hard to access.  

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If we want to quickly combat climate change, we need to deal with ?the other? greenhouse gas: methane. Methane leaks are heating up the planet and harming people who live where gas drilling takes place. 

Reporter Elizabeth Shogren introduces us to a NASA scientist who?s devoting his career to hunting down big methane leaks. Riley Duren and his team have figured out how to spot methane pollution from airplane flyovers, and in an experiment, his data was used to make polluters plug their leaks. Scientists have answers to the methane problem. The question is whether governments will step up to fund a comprehensive methane monitoring system. 

Next, Shogren zooms in on Arlington, Texas, a community that bet heavily on drilling for methane, the main ingredient in natural gas. There are wells all over Arlington, next to homes and shopping centers, even day cares and schools. Arlington?s children have unwittingly been part of an experiment to see what happens when gas wells and people mix. We follow one preschool that is trying to stand up to a large drilling company. Last year, the City Council voted to block new natural gas wells near the school?s playground, then reversed its vote. After protests, gas drilling has been blocked once again ? if only for a year. 

We end the show with a story from Reveal?s Brett Simpson about a serious source of methane that is often overlooked. Cows and other livestock produce 14% of the world?s methane emissions, in many places belching more of the gas than oil and gas wells. We meet a scientist who?s figured out how to reduce methane emissions from cows by 80%. 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2021.

The final chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction

of 43 Mexican students in 2014 looks at how an unexpected turn in Mexico?s politics leads to a new investigation with Omar Gómez Trejo as special prosecutor.

With the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president, Mexico?s investigation into the missing students is reopened, and Gómez Trejo gathers evidence to indict members of the previous government for manipulating evidence and forcing confessions. We hear an exclusive interview with a man who was the victim of torture and learn that a former top official in the original investigation is under indictment.

Reveal?s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and our partner Kate Doyle look at what current investigators are learning about the attack on the buses and what happened to the students who were taken away by local police. They visit Cristi Bautista, the mother of one of the missing students. Seven years after her son Benjamin disappeared, she continues to pray that she will one day know the truth about what happened to him.

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The second chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers? College in 2014 digs into the government cover-up of the crime.

Weeks after the disappearance, the Mexican government released its official story: Corrupt police had taken the students and handed them to members of a local gang. The gang had killed the students, then incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump. But parents of the students had their doubts. International experts begin to dismantle the government?s explanation of what happened to the young men.

One question hanging over the families is why their sons were taken. Thousands of miles away from where the attack took place, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent thinks he knows why the students were targeted.

The disappearance of the 43 students is part of a larger pattern of violence in Mexico, connected to the U.S. war on drugs. By the time the Ayotzinapa students were ambushed and taken, some 30,000 people had gone missing in Mexico, collateral damage in the war on drugs. Almost no one was prosecuted?instead, Mexican institutions were becoming a part of the corrupt narco system.

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It has been over seven years since 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers? College in Guerrero, Mexico, were taken by armed men in the middle of the night. They were never seen again. Their disappearance sparked mass protests, as the 43 became symbols of Mexico?s unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has been held accountable. The culture of impunity is so ingrained that families often don?t go to police for help, believing they?re either corrupt or too afraid to investigate.

In a three-part investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, Reveal?s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive take us inside the investigation into the attack on the students. They have help from Omar Gómez Trejo ? the man the Mexican president tapped to prosecute the crime. For more than a year, he kept audio diaries and had regular conversations with Diaz-Cortes and Doyle, giving them insight into a massive coverup by the previous Mexican administration and efforts by current investigators to piece together the details of the attack and bring to justice those responsible.

In December 1944, Frank Hartzell was a young soldier pressed into fierce fighting during the Battle of the Bulge. He was there battling Nazi soldiers for control of the Belgian town of Chenogne, and he was there afterward when dozens of unarmed German prisoners of war were gunned down in a field. 

Reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway travels to Belgium to tour Chenogne with Belgian historian Roger Marquet. Then he sits down with Bill Johnsen, a military historian and former dean of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to ask why the Patton Papers don?t accurately reflect Gen. George S. Patton?s diary entries about Chenogne. 

The massacre at Chenogne happened soon after the Malmedy massacre, during which Nazi troops killed unarmed American POWs. The German soldiers responsible were tried at Dachau, but the American soldiers who committed the massacre at Chenogne were never held accountable. Harland-Dunaway interviews Ben Ferencz, the last surviving lawyer from the Nuremberg Trials, about why the Americans escaped justice.

And finally, Harland-Dunaway returns to Hartzell to explain what he?s learned and to press Hartzell for a full accounting of his role that day in Chenogne. 

This episode was originally broadcast July 28, 2018. 

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From anti-vaxxers to QAnon, we look at how misinformation spreads online ? and the lives it disrupts. 

Reporter Stan Alcorn digs into the origins of ?Stop the Steal.? In 2016, it was the name of a right-wing activist group that spread the idea that the United States? democratic institutions were rigged against Donald Trump. In 2020, it re-emerged as a hashtag attached to baseless Republican claims of voter fraud, gained huge audiences on social media and became a rallying cry among the violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Next, reporter and guest host Ike Sriskandarajah looks into one reason people aren?t getting the COVID-19 vaccine: conspiracy theories. The World Health Organization calls it ?an infodemic,? where dangerous medical misinformation sows chaos and mistrust. So how do conspiracy theories spread? Sriskandarajah unravels the history of the lie that there is a tiny microchip in each vial of the COVID-19 vaccine. 

We close the show with a conversation between a mother and son who are divided over conspiracy theories. Lucy Concepcion is one of roughly 75 million Americans who believe the results of the 2020 presidential election were illegitimate. She also believes in QAnon. Her son, BuzzFeed reporter Albert Samaha, believes in facts. Samaha describes what it?s like when someone you love believes in an elaborate series of lies, and we listen in as he and his mom discuss their complicated and loving relationship.  

This episode was originally broadcast June 5, 2021. 

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An audio drama inspired by Reveal?s 2017 investigation into a deadly explosion at a Mississippi shipyard, produced by our partners at documentary theater company StoryWorks. This deconstructed mystery is based on real accounts, real events and real people.

This episode was originally broadcast in December 2019.

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In Portland, Oregon, unhoused people make up at most 2% of the population, but they account for nearly half of all arrests. Cities have long turned to police as the mechanism for making homelessness disappear. But arrests don?t solve a housing crisis. 

Reveal looked at six major cities up and down the West Coast and found that people living on the streets are consistently more likely to be arrested than their neighbors who live in houses. At the same time, places such as Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are now grappling with a major court decision. In 2019, the Supreme Court let a ruling stand that says it's cruel and unusual punishment to arrest people who are sleeping or camping in public places if there is no shelter for them to stay. In Portland, the city is trying to build more shelters, but there is pushback from residents who don?t want a shelter in their neighborhood. People are growing frustrated, and they want the problem to go away. Reporter Melissa Lewis tells the story of these intersecting parts after spending months talking to unhoused people who go to weekly dinners at a neighborhood park.  

Lewis follows one man?s journey through the criminal justice system as he tries to disentangle himself from arrest warrants that keep accumulating after he misses court dates and fails to check in with his probation officer. We also hear from locals who are trying to build trust and connection with their houseless neighbors and others who are tired of seeing tents and call the police for help. We also hear what it takes to move someone off the street, one person at a time.  

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In the mid-?90s, two high-end New York art galleries began selling one fake painting after another ? works in the style of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and others. It was the largest art fraud in modern U.S. history, totaling more than $80 million. Our first story looks at how it happened and why almost no one ever was punished by authorities.

Our second story revisits an investigation into a painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. More than half a century later, a journalist helped track it down through the Panama Papers.

This episode originally aired January 25, 2020.

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The final episode of Mississippi Goddam shares new revelations that cast doubt on the official story that Billey Joe Johnson accidentally killed himself.

This week marks the 13th anniversary of Johnson?s death. His family is still seeking justice. Our reporting brought up questions that the original investigation never looked into. Host Al Letson and reporter Jonathan Jones go back to Mississippi to interview the key people in the investigation, including Johnson?s ex-girlfriend ? the first recorded interview she?s ever done with a media outlet. The team also shares its findings with lead investigator Joel Wallace and the medical examiner who looked into the case.

Finally, after three years of reporting, we share what we?ve learned with Johnson?s family and talk to them about the inadequacy of the investigation and reasons to reopen the case.

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Black communities around Mississippi have long raised concerns about the suspicious deaths of young Black men, especially when law enforcement is involved.

Curley Clark, vice president of the Mississippi NAACP, calls Billey Joe Johnson Jr.?s case an example of ?Mississippi justice.?

?It means that they still feel like the South should have won the Civil War,? Clark said. ?And also the laws for the state of Mississippi are slanted in that direction.?

Before Johnson died during a traffic stop with a White sheriff?s deputy, friends say police had pulled him over dozens of times. And some members of the community raised concerns that police had been racially profiling Black people.

Reveal investigates Johnson?s interactions with law enforcement and one officer in particular.

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Amazon gathers a lot of information about its customers, from what they read and watch to what they search for and buy. And the company says customers trust it to keep their data safe. But internal memos and people who have worked inside Amazon paint a different picture.

Reveal found Amazon?s intense focus on growth left the company vulnerable to serious security risks. Amazon couldn?t track where all of its data was, according to a former executive. Customer service employees had the ability to look up the shopping history of celebrities, and some shady companies went through a back door to take the personal information of millions of Amazon shoppers. When Amazon found out, it kept it a secret from its customers.

Customer data wasn?t the only thing at risk. As a result of the company?s security struggles, corruption spread and independent sellers on Amazon?s marketplace have suffered attacks. Reveal explores the cutthroat world of Amazon sellers.

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Billey Joe Johnson Jr. and Hannah Hollinghead met in their freshman year of high school. Hollinghead says Johnson was her first love, and in many ways, it was a typical teen romance. Friends say they would argue, break up, then get back together again. Some people were far from accepting of their interracial relationship.

On Dec. 8, 2008, they were both dating other people. According to Hollinghead and her mother, Johnson made an unexpected stop at her house, moments before he died of a gunshot wound during a traffic stop on the edge of town.

But it appears that investigators failed to corroborate statements or interview Johnson?s friends and family to get a better idea of what was going on in his life on the day he died. Reveal exposes deep flaws in the investigation and interviews the people closest to Johnson, who were never questioned during the initial investigation.