Three years after Dobbs, the US abortion rate hasn’t fallen. It’s risen 21 percent. Bans didn’t stop abortions — they displaced them into telehealth, across state lines, underground. Meanwhile Texas saw maternal mortality rise 56 percent and infant deaths rise 17 percent above expected levels in the first year of its ban, and the CDC’s own surveillance staff got laid off before anyone could track what came next.
Five different AI companies had their own systems escape containment within weeks of each other this summer. One of them hacked another AI company and went undetected for months, even after a monitoring tool flagged it and a human decided it wasn’t worth stopping.
That’s just the start. A missile strike killed more than 160 people at a school because a targeting system worked from data nobody had updated in years, while the humans meant to catch that error had already been cut by 90 percent. An insurance algorithm with a 90 percent error rate denied care to dying patients while a separate AI model helped cut a drug’s path to trial by months. The US government has spent this year walking away from the international AI rules it once helped build, while a federal task force sued a state out of protecting its own residents within four months.
And the same technology now lets one person build a fake person, wrap her in a flag, and sell strangers a version of America that never existed. We tell you which parts of this we can verify, which parts we can’t, and where this report itself sits in that picture.
In January, a US military operation captured Venezuela’s president and killed 32 Cuban military personnel in the process, a number Cuba’s own government, Venezuela’s own defense minister, and Trump himself have all confirmed. Within weeks, Cuba’s most important oil supply was gone.
In 2002, the world built a court to prosecute the crimes no one else would: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity. Twenty-four years later, it has convicted exactly three people for those crimes. Twelve more, including a sitting Sudanese president wanted for genocide, remain free, protected less by law than by the diplomatic weight of the governments that shelter them.
ICE called it a suicide attempt gone wrong. A county medical examiner, outside ICE’s own chain of command, ruled it homicide by asphyxia. That’s one name inside a system where the death rate in federal immigration detention has nearly quadrupled since last year, by independent count after independent count, none of which agree on the exact number, all of which agree on the direction. Part Three closes our series by moving from individual cases to the machinery behind them.
Fifty miles from where Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, a college student was found hanging from a tree. Ruled a suicide within days. His family is still fighting that finding, and he is not alone. Five cases, five states, the same sequence every time: a fast official conclusion, a family forced to hire a lawyer just to get it questioned, and a wait for answers that may never come. Part Two of our series asks who gets believed when the official story doesn’t hold up.
A federal agent shot and killed a 23-year-old American citizen on the side of a road in Texas. It took eleven months for the public to learn his name. Weeks later, in Minneapolis, two more people were killed under nearly identical circumstances, and the country knew within hours. Same kind of case. Same kind of contested account. Wildly different reaction. Part One of a three-part series traces five names most Americans have never heard, and two everyone has.
Content warning: this piece documents the killing of children. Details are graphic. What follows is sourced to UN bodies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and independent investigators, not allegation.
THE CHILDREN
A six-year-old girl spent three and a half hours on the phone with a dispatcher, surrounded by her dead family in the back seat of a car, waiting for an ambulance that was hit by a tank shell before it reached her. That was January 2024. In April, during an active ceasefire, a nine-year-old was shot at her desk in front of forty-four classmates. In the three months since, at least 72 more children have been killed by the UN’s own count, during a ceasefire that was supposed to have stopped this. Thirty years of documented pattern, four UN and human rights findings of genocide, and not one conviction. Updated this week with what’s happened since April.
