By Paul Kiel/ProPublica

This story was co-published with The Daily Beast.
Several years ago, Capital One gave Oscar Parsons, 46, his first credit card. At the time, he didn’t need a loan. But he banked at a Capital One branch near his Bronx apartment, and when it was offered, he thought, “Why not?”
Initially, he had little problem keeping up with the payments. But after a run of construction jobs came to an end, he fell behind and found himself ducking the bank’s collections calls, he said. Each time the company’s TV commercials popped up, asking, “What’s in your wallet?” Parsons thought: “It’s not enough to pay you back.”
This year, Capital One provided Parsons with another first: his first lawsuit. For failing to pay his $1,800 debt, the company took him to court. Currently on public benefits and in a job training program, Parsons has nothing Capital One can take. But should Parsons find work, Capital One could use a court judgment to seize money from his bank account or take a portion of his wages.

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Posted on December 30, 2015

By Michael Grabell/ProPublica

LAS VEGAS – A scantily clad acrobat dangles from the ceiling, performing flips and splits as machines puff smoke and neon lights bathe the dance floor in turquoise and magenta. Dancers in lingerie gyrate on poles to the booming techno. Actors dressed as aliens pose for selfies with partygoers. There’s an open bar and waiters weave through the crowd passing out chocolate truffles.
It’s the closing night of the National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference & Expo.

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Posted on December 29, 2015

By Robert Faturechi/ProPublica

The millions of dollars being spent on the presidential race by super PACs, secretive nonprofits and the candidates themselves could again make this election cycle the most expensive to date. Huge sums are also flowing into state and local races.
Here, in chronological order, are 10 stories from other newsrooms that got behind the cash flow to describe the latest uses and abuses of money in politics.

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Posted on December 25, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

The reporting is still under review, but the pundits have already been convicted.

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Posted on December 22, 2015

By T. Christian Miller/ProPublica and Ken Armstrong/The Marshall Project

News organizations have long chronicled problems with investigating reports of rape. Backlogs in rape kits. Cynical efforts to bury rape cases to make a police department’s crime fighting statistics look better. Failures to fully exploit the powerful investigative tool of DNA.
“An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a joint reporting effort by The Marshall Project and ProPublica, reinforced some of the most basic ways police could improve their handling of rape cases. These steps offer the promise of both catching the guilty and protecting the victimized.

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Posted on December 22, 2015

By T. Christian Miller/ProPublica and Tom Meagher/The Marshall Project

It has been no easy thing to establish the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in America.
Victims often choose not to report the crimes. Police in more than one major city have been exposed for misclassifying or burying reports of rape and other sexual assaults. Local police departments routinely fail to cooperate with the FBI’s efforts to compile annual crime statistics.
For decades, the problems included something as basic as defining what constituted rape. Operating under a definition of rape adopted in 1929, the FBI for close to a century didn’t count male victims. Or women who were too frightened to resist their attackers.
Terry Fromson, managing attorney for the Women’s Law Project, summed up the significance of the suspect statistics:
“The data fell short of giving an accurate picture of sex crime in our society,” Fromson said.

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Posted on December 21, 2015

By AccuWeather

AccuWeather, the global leader in weather information and digital media, today announced its partnership with L2, America’s leading provider of enhanced voter data, to identify unique insights between historical voter turnout and weather data with Superior Accuracy™ available in AccuWeather’s proprietary new Data Driven Decisions (D3) Election Analytics Ad Package.

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Posted on December 18, 2015

By Ned Parker/Reuters

ERBIL, Iraq – It was one of the most shocking events in one of the most brutal periods in Iraq’s history. In late 2005, two years after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, U.S. soldiers raided a police building in Baghdad and found 168 prisoners in horrific conditions.
Many were malnourished. Some had been beaten.
The discovery of the secret prison exposed a world of kidnappings and assassinations. Behind these operations was an unofficial Interior Ministry organization called the Special Investigations Directorate, according to U.S. and Iraqi security officials at the time.
The body was run by militia commanders from the Badr Organization, a pro-Iran, Shi’ite political movement that today plays a major role in Baghdad’s war against Islamic State, the Sunni militant group.
Washington pressured the Iraqi government to investigate the prison. But the findings of Baghdad’s investigation – a probe derided by some of its own committee members at the time as a whitewash – were never released.
The U.S. military conducted its own investigation. But rather than publish its findings, it chose to lobby Iraqi officials in quiet for fear of damaging Iraq’s fragile political set-up, according to several current and former U.S. military officials and diplomats.
Both reports remain unpublished. Reuters has reviewed them, as well as other U.S. documents from the past decade.
The documents show how Washington, seeking to defeat Sunni jihadists and stabilize Iraq, has consistently overlooked excesses by Shi’ite militias sponsored by the Iraqi government. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both worked with Badr and its powerful leader, Hadi al-Amiri, whom many Sunnis continue to accuse of human rights abuses.
Washington’s policy of expediency has achieved some of its short-term aims. But in allowing the Shi’ite militias to run amok against their Sunni foes, Washington has fueled the Shia-Sunni sectarian divide that is tearing Iraq apart.

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Posted on December 17, 2015

By Isabel Coles and Ned Parker/Reuters

MALA QARA, Iraq – Mohannad is a spy for Islamic State. He eavesdrops on chatter in the street markets of Mosul and reports back to his handlers when someone breaks the militant group’s rules. One man he informed on this year – a street trader defying a ban on selling cigarettes – was fined and tortured by Islamic State fighters, according to a friend of Mohannad’s family. If the trader did not stop, his torturers told the man, they would kill him.
Mohannad is paid $20 for every offender he helps to catch.
He is 14.

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Posted on December 16, 2015

By Karen Brettell, David Gaffen and David Rohde/Reuters

When health insurer Humana reported worse-than-expected quarterly earnings in late 2014 – including a 21 percent drop in net income – it softened the blow by immediately telling investors it would make a $500 million share repurchase.
In addition to soothing shareholders, the surprise buyback benefited the company’s senior executives. It added around two cents to the company’s annual earnings per share, allowing Humana to surpass its $7.50 EPS target by a single cent and unlocking higher pay for top managers under terms of the company’s compensation agreement.
Thanks to Humana hitting that target, Chief Executive Officer Bruce Broussard earned a $1.68 million bonus for 2014.

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Posted on December 15, 2015