Author: Syndicated

Originally produced by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit online newsroom that offers investigative and enterprise coverage of agribusiness, Big Ag, and related issues through data analysis, visualizations, in-depth reports, and interactive web tools. Craig Koller grew up splashing through backyard creeks and biking gravel trails, sometimes through the Johnson Control Industries Fire Technology Center. Black smoke wafted overhead as it conducted controlled burns to test firefighting foam, producing a dangerous “forever chemical” known as PFAS. As a kid growing up in the northern Wisconsin port city of Marinette, Koller didn’t think much of being around the...

Senator Ron Johnson, as he predicted, got himself in trouble for saying he “never felt threatened” by those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, but he “might have been a little concerned” if they were “tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters. In response to critics who found his remarks to be racist, Johnson wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — “I Won’t Be Silenced by the Left” — that distorted a report’s findings on last year’s demonstrations against racial injustice. In his op-ed, Johnson cited the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data...

Conservative leaders within the United Methodist Church unveiled plans Monday to form a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church, with a doctrine that does not recognize same-sex marriage. The move could hasten the long-expected breakup of the UMC over differing approaches to LGBTQ inclusion. For now, the UMC is the largest mainline Protestant church in the U.S. and second only to the Southern Baptist Convention, an evangelical denomination, among all U.S. Protestant churches. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the UMC’s General Conference — at which the schism would be debated — has been postponed for two consecutive years, and...

Images of temporary housing where many lived in uncertainty and a mountain of disposal bags full of radioactive soil, those were part of the photographic collection taken by 73-years old Toru Anzai after the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011 forced him to evacuate from his home of many years in Iitate, Fukushima. Anzai started photography as a hobby when he was in his twenties, at a time when film cameras were still in their heyday. He recalled being especially fond of taking landscape photographs, capturing beautiful rural scenes or the sun rising from in between mountains....