#ProPublica won the prestigious #PublicService#Pulitzer for “groundbreaking & ambitious reporting that pierced the thick wall of secrecy surrounding #SCOTUS to reveal how a small group of politically influential #billionaires wooed justices w/lavish gifts & travel, pushing the Court to adopt its first code of conduct.” The prize is given to the staff of a news organization that performed “meritorious public service.”
"ProPublica won the prestigious public service Pulitzer Prize for what the judges described as 'groundbreaking and ambitious reporting that pierced the thick wall of secrecy surrounding the Supreme Court to reveal how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel, pushing the Court to adopt its first code of conduct.'”
An unsparing report on Massachusetts' administration of public housing, from #ProPublica and #WBUR. More than 180,000 people are on the wait list, while more than 2,000 apartments sit empty.
#ProPublica’s further reporting also revealed that Justice #SamuelAlito accepted a luxury Alaskan fishing trip w/ business mogul & #GOP donor #PaulSinger — & didn’t recuse himself when Singer had cases before the court. Following the controversy, the justices pledged to follow a broadly-written code of conduct.
ProPublica team wins 2024 Selden Ring Award for ‘Friends of the Court’
...
The reporters ultimately exposed the most serious ethical scandal in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court, revealing lavish travel and financial support that wealthy businessmen provided to the court’s current longest-serving justice.
@ProPublica has an in-depth look at a horrifying situation, in Idaho where Schools have been denied funding for repairs for almost 30 years. The schools are literally falling apart. Classes are being held in stairwells and closets, amid frequent power outages, and no one is doing anything.
According to The Federalist, ProPublica plans another "hit piece" on Clarence Thomas, by which they presumably mean ProPublica has more evidence of the corruption of a sitting Supreme Court justice.
Tribes in #Maine Spent Decades Fighting to Rebury Ancestral Remains. Harvard Resisted Them at Nearly Every Turn.
by Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu
Dec. 4, 5 a.m. EST
"Donna Augustine was in tears as she read the letter from Harvard University that winter morning in 2013. Looking around the room inside an elementary school on Indian Island, Maine, she saw other elders and leaders from the four Wabanaki tribes were also devastated as they read that the university was denying their request to repatriate ancestral remains to their tribes.
"The Wabanaki tribal nations — an alliance of the #Penobscot, #Passamaquoddy, #Maliseet and #Mikmaq — wanted to rebury the ancestral remains. But Harvard’s #PeabodyMuseum of Archaeology and Ethnology said, as it had in past years, that the tribes didn’t have enough evidence to show that they could be tied, through culture or lineage, to the ancestors whose remains the museum held.
"The denial felt like a rejection of Wabanaki identity for Augustine, a Mi’kmaq grandmother, who had spent years urging Harvard to release Native American remains.
"'Every one of us in that room was crying,' she recalled. 'We jumped through every hoop.'
"The group representing the only four tribal nations in present-day Maine had furnished a deeply researched report documenting their histories in the region, even sharing closely held stories passed down within their tribes from one generation to the next that told of their ancient ties to Maine’s lakes, islands and forests.
"Now they could see it hadn’t been enough for Harvard, which especially prized the remains of 43 ancestors buried for thousands of years near Maine’s Blue Hill Bay.
"Complicating matters for the tribes, another museum, the similarly named but smaller Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, housed on the campus of the #PhillipsAcademy, a Massachusetts preparatory school, held items from the same ancient burial site.
"Instead of sending a letter as Harvard did, the Phillips Academy museum director, Ryan Wheeler, had asked to meet with the tribes. Seated at the table that morning, he was initially uncertain what he would do. He would later say that it became evident during the meeting that the tribes exhibited a strong connection to the ancestors they sought to claim, both from the report they had provided and their reaction to Harvard’s decision.
"He recalled leaving the meeting certain he would repatriate. 'There was really no question about it,' he later said.
"What the Wabanaki committee and Wheeler didn’t know, however, was just how hard Harvard would push back. In the two years that followed, the director of the Harvard museum went to surprising lengths to pressure Wheeler to reverse his decision.
"A #ProPublica investigation this year into repatriation has shown how some of the nation’s #elite museums have used their power and vast resources to delay returning ancestral remains and sacred objects under the #NativeAmericanGraves Protection and Repatriation Act. By exploiting loopholes in the 1990 law, anthropologists overruled tribes’ evidence showing their ties to the oldest ancestral remains in museums’ collections. We’ve also shown that museums and universities have delayed repatriations while allowing destructive analyses — like DNA extractions — on ancestral remains over the objections of tribes.
"Harvard, where the remains of an estimated 5,500 Native Americans are stored at the Peabody Museum, used these loopholes over the span of three decades to prolong the Wabanaki tribes’ repatriation process while remaining in technical compliance with the 1990 law, our review found.
"For Augustine and her colleagues, few things were more frustrating than knowing that NAGPRA had empowered museums to decide whether Indigenous people had a valid connection to their ancestors. These were the same institutions that had collected the human remains and objects from ancestral burial sites. Despite NAGPRA’s intent to give Indigenous people say over ancestral remains, institutions still made the final decisions on whether to repatriate.
"'The wolves are in charge of how to deal with the sheep,' said #DarrellNewell, a former vice chief of the Passamaquoddy Tribe who helped create the Wabanaki Intertribal Repatriation Committee to accelerate negotiations with the institutions. 'It’s just not a good way.'
"Harvard in recent years has apologized and promised to speed repatriation, saying it aims to repatriate all #NativeAmerican remains and the items once buried with them within the next three years and recently doubled staffing in the Peabody Museum’s repatriation office. However, the school has yet to return more than half of the human remains it reported holding under NAGPRA, according to federal data from November. Only two institutions, of the hundreds that must comply with NAGPRA, hold more human remains than Harvard."
I had a discussion about #News sources today and decided to go through my own news list -- adding accounts and making note of those that haven't posted in a while. I also broke up my lists into different categories. Here is the list I came up with for "US and World News" -- in alpha order. Suggestions welcome!
@aljazeera
[bot] This is an unofficial repeater of the RSS feed of #AlJazeera international.
@axios
I am a bot that automatically posts Axios tweets to Mastodon.
@Independent
News, comment and features from The Independent.
@mongabay
Reader-supported news and inspiration from nature's frontline. Mongabay is a non-profit.
@NewsDesk
We share stories, explainers and analysis to offer context for the top news of the day. All posts are created and curated by Flipboard’s editorial team. Not a bot.
@npr_bot
This is an automated account which toots out the news stories that NPR posts on their website. NOT OFFICIAL. This account only a stopgap until NPR shows up here on the Fediverse! Created by @ai6yr
@openDemocracy
Free thinking for the world We're an independent media organisation covering world affairs and ideas.
@ProPublica just published their latest impact report. It’s a collection of information about the effect their journalism has had on the world. Their work is not only important, it’s verifiable.
Wow. A report by Roger Sollenberger from The Daily Beast reveals that the new Speaker, Mike Johnson, claims not to have ANY bank account or assets in his family worth $5,000. His financial disclosures for years have shown nothing. Is he really living paycheck to paycheck, or is he hiding his true net worth? I mean, the guy is in the top 12 percent of income earners. Something doesn’t smell right here.
SecureDrop 2.7.0 is scheduled to be released on November 2.
This release will include a migration to Sequoia-PGP as the supported encryption backend, continuous localization support, and several other improvements.
What the media won’t show you this Sunday: President Biden sat down with John Harwood. They covered 17 different issues facing our democracy.
I don’t post many videos. Often, a good 8 hours or so of them pass me in just a single day from those I follow.
This is 20 minutes and vital to what we’re all facing. Nobody else running is confronting these issues. The Republicans running are, of course, making all of them worse.
@SteveRogers
Most of everything else in the legacy media is an amplifier for fascism
Like... this Sunday afternoon 10/01/23 a host on #msnbc said #kevinmccarthy is acting (so true🙄) like His #shutdown save was his victory. The vote was like 209 D and, forgot... a lower number of R
So, let's see if the average media covers his "victory" as his way or the honest way
"The conservative legal movement in the United States is more powerful than ever. One largely unknown man has played a significant role in pushing the American judiciary to the right: Leonard Leo."
@ProPublica@vida_latina thank you #ProPublica and #WBUR for the investigation. Decent shelter is a #humanRight so I’m glad to have this clearer understanding of the situation here
Clarence Thomas Filing Acknowledges Harlan Crow Real Estate Deal, Private Jet Travel
Supreme Court Justice #Clarence#Thomas for the first time acknowledged that he should have reported selling real estate to billionaire political donor Harlan Crow in 2014, a transaction revealed by ProPublica earlier this year.
Writing in his annual financial disclosure form, Thomas said that he “inadvertently failed to realize” that the deal needed to be publicly disclosed.
In the form, which was made public Thursday after he’d received an extension on the filing deadline, Thomas also disclosed receiving three private jet trips last year from Crow. #ProPublica reported on two of those trips.