In the winter of 2021, a crushing storm took down Texas’s power grid. Millions of people were plunged into darkness, left without heat or water. More than 150 Texans died, most from hypothermia. Texas is the only state in the United States where the power grid is not under federal oversight. Scores of companies sell electricity in a lightly regulated open market - a system that collapsed under the weight of the storm. Did years of deregulation and prioritising profits for industry lead to...

Under Florida law, domestic violence victims can lose their children if the state thinks they didn’t do enough to prevent the kids from witnessing the abuse. The state calls it “failure to protect.” “I called for help. I wanted out, and I still got punished,” says Lena Hale, who lost custody of her two children after Florida’s child welfare agency deemed her an unsafe parent because she maintained a relationship with her abusive partner. Her ex-husband — the abuser — was later awarded full...

Why have so many women who were held at a Georgia immigrant detention center accused the same gynaecologist of abuse? At a privately run ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facility in the small town of Ocilla, more than 30 women have said a local gynaecologist subjected them to unnecessary procedures or failed to obtain their consent for his treatments. Some women say they faced retribution after speaking out, including being deported. The doctor, Mahendra Amin, denies all the...

When COVID-19 started coursing through the US state of California and staying at home became the safest thing to do, some homeless people took bold action: They found empty houses and moved in. In Los Angeles, a group called the Reclaimers have twice tried to take over vacant state-owned properties to use them for housing. Others have refused to leave their homes after evictions, which continue to happen despite pandemic-era moratoriums. As the pandemic threatens to exacerbate LA’s...

After Trump supporters staged the deadly Capitol attack in January, Republicans chose not to hold Trump accountable for his role in the insurrection. Indeed, many Republicans have continued Trump’s drumbeat of calling the election’s legitimacy into question. State lawmakers across the country have proposed hundreds of bills this year to limit voting rights, often justifying them with baseless claims of voter fraud. The party has also resisted censuring the most extreme voices within their...

In the United States, Chicago’s Black and Latino residents are far more likely to die from COVID-19 than their white counterparts. It is a pattern seen across the country. In this deeply segregated city, the virus’s uneven effects mirror existing racial and economic divisions. Before the pandemic, the life expectancy gap between majority white and predominantly Black neighbourhoods was as wide as 17 years. One of the reasons for that is unequal access to resources — from quality housing to...

As the Democrats take back the White House, what does the 2020 presidential election say about the future of US politics? Despite Joe Biden’s win, tens of millions of Americans chose Donald Trump for a second term. How the Republican party relates to this bloc of voters - along with the ideology Trump represents - is now central to its strategic direction. For the Democrats, an old guard embodied by Joe Biden and a new generation of progressives are in a contest for influence over the...

When the coronavirus pandemic hit the US, nursing homes became ground zero for the coronavirus. By November, more than 60,000 nursing home residents had died of COVID-19, accounting for roughly a quarter of all fatalities nationwide. Yet the nursing home industry had already struggled with chronic problems before the pandemic. From allegations of systematic understaffing to toothless government oversight, Fault Lines examines what made residents and workers so vulnerable. In When COVID...

Earlier this year, California officials brought busloads of imprisoned men from a coronavirus hotspot to the overcrowded San Quentin prison. They had not tested some of the transferred men for COVID-19 for a month. The bungled transfer sparked one of the country’s worst outbreaks. More than half the men imprisoned at San Quentin have been infected, and 28 have died. The pandemic put a spotlight on prison overcrowding, and in October, a court ordered San Quentin to drastically reduce its...

In the early months of the pandemic, meatpacking plants emerged as deadly hot spots for COVID-19. In the poultry industry, workers describe conditions that make physical distancing impossible inside plants - above all, the fast line speeds. Chicken companies have reduced calls to slow the line speeds and space workers further apart. Federal regulators responsible for safety at the plants have issued optional guidance during the pandemic, not enforceable rules. Fault Lines follows...

Do police reforms work? Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, 2020 has seen what is likely the largest wave of protests in United States history: all centred on the crisis of police killing Black people. For years, officials have introduced police reforms. But reforms have failed to stop police from killing Black people in astonishingly high numbers, people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Marqueese Alston - shot in Washington, DC in 2018. The failure of reforms has driven...

As COVID-19 surged in the United States and only those deemed “essential workers” were asked to go to work, the pandemic made clear that the workers most critical to American life are disproportionately people of color, and among the country’s lowest paid. Through video diaries and interviews shared over the course of several months, four of these workers shared their experiences of the pandemic in a country that offers little in the way of a safety net for its most vulnerable workers. Two...

Fault Lines examines rising levels of violence and threats against Jewish Americans and the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that often animate these attacks. Anti-Semitic hate crimes reached a five-year high in 2016. The next year, anti-Semitic incidents saw an unprecedented surge, and white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia chanting "Jews will not replace us." In 2018, the US witnessed the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in its history when a white supremacist opened...

As the United States has increased its use of airstrikes in the war in Afghanistan, it’s come with a heavy price as civilian casualties from airstrikes have reached record numbers. In “Afghanistan: Civilian Loss in the US Air War,” Fault Lines reports on what justice looks like for civilians who lost loved ones to airstrikes. The US military has a poor record of investigating civilian casualty allegations from airstrikes, leaving few options for civilians looking for justice when they...

In Houston, Texas, residents of two historically African-American neighbourhoods with high rates of certain cancers are seeking answers after toxic waste from a nearby railroad yard contaminated their environment. Some suspect the pollution is the cause of a cancer cluster discovered in their area in 2019. The groundwater beneath more than 100 properties is contaminated with creosote, a chemical mixture classified as a probable carcinogen that was used for nearly 75 years at the railroad...

The United States Democratic Party appeared deeply divided during the 2020 presidential primary election. Two candidates emerged as the front-runners and put forward very different visions for the country's future. Bernie Sanders energised large crowds, pushing for a Green New Deal to address the climate crisis, Medicare for All and tuition-free public college. Joe Biden led the centrist lane with support from the Democratic establishment. Moderates believed Biden had the best chance to put...

The coronavirus pandemic has upended lives around the world. In the United States, it has exposed the fact that this is one of the only developed countries in the world without paid sick leave. And it is one of the only countries in the world that does not guarantee any paid time off for new mothers. Fault Lines has travelled across the US to report on the country's paid leave crisis. We heard from families directly affected by a lack of paid leave: Ali and Derek Dodd, a couple in...

Brazil saw a dramatic increase in the number of fires in the Amazon with more than 80,000 fires so far this year alone. This past summer, the world watched in horror as images of flames engulfing swathes of land in the world's largest rainforest came out, leading to global calls for boycotts over President Jair Bolsonaro's handling of the crisis. The fires have come as deforestation has risen over the past years and is increasing even more as the Brazilian government weakens environmental...

In less than a year, the United States has seen two of the deadliest white supremacist attacks in its recent history. In October 2018, a white supremacist gunman stormed the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The perpetrator murdered 11 worshippers in what became the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. Just nine months later, a white supremacist opened fire at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and injuring dozens. Among the victims were new...

In 2019, nine US states passed laws effectively banning abortion in the earliest stages of pregnancy, before many women even know they're pregnant. Fault Lines travelled to Alabama and Georgia, two states that passed the most extreme bans, to meet bill architects and lawmakers, clinics and patients on the front lines, and reproductive justice advocates fighting the bans in court. These new laws are part of a strategy to instigate a challenge to Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling...

Jail deaths have surged in almost two dozen US states over the last decade. There have been steady increases in mortality rates involving complications from existing medical conditions. Jailers often have few resources to treat medical or psychological conditions. So, counties are increasingly hiring for-profit healthcare contractors to fill the medical needs of their inmates. Contractors like Corizon and NaphCare say they offer premium healthcare but critics allege that these companies cut...

In the United States, many people have to choose between financial insecurity or saving their own lives. The cost of nearly every major brand name drug is on the rise and as a result, millions of Americans are having trouble paying for their prescription medication. This includes Type 1 diabetics, for whom insulin is a life-saving drug. "For somebody like me it's like the oxygen you breathe. It is like the oxygen you and I breathe, except for me, I have to pay $340 a vial for that oxygen,"...

In a series of exclusive interviews with Fault Lines, several men across New York City come forward with painful memories of abuse by a Catholic priest. They say that Father John Paddack - who was ordained in 1984 and had been ministering in New York until he was suspended in July - molested them during confession and counselling sessions in different Catholic schools across the city. The men allege years of abuse by Paddack, sparking the latest revelations in a decades-old scandal that has...