National

Lawyers Who Were Ineligible to Handle Serious Criminal Charges Were Given Thousands of These Cases Anyway - Soon after receiving his license to practice law in Maine in May 2015, Jeremiah McIntosh, 36, began a new career as a small-town lawyer in the northeast corner of the state’s rural Aroostook County.

“Power Companies Get Exactly What They Want”: How Texas Repeatedly Failed to Protect Its Power Grid Against Extreme Weather - In January 2014, power plants owned by Texas’ largest electricity producer buckled under frigid temperatures. Its generators failed more than a dozen times in 12 hours, helping to bring the state’s electric grid to the brink of collapse.

Why We Can’t Make Vaccine Doses Any Faster - President Joe Biden has ordered enough vaccines to immunize every American against COVID-19, and his administration says it’s using the full force of the federal government to get the doses by July. There’s a reason he can’t promise them sooner.

Dying on the Waitlist - In early December, Miguel Fernandez lay unconscious in the intensive care unit at a Los Angeles area hospital. A mechanical ventilator pumped oxygen into his lungs, which had been ravaged by COVID-19. The 53-year-old was dying.

A Federal Appeals Court Has Ruled in Favor of Releasing NYPD Discipline Records (New York, NY) - A federal appeals court on Tuesday affirmed a lower court ruling allowing New York officials to release police discipline records that had been kept secret for decades.

People Over 75 Are First in Line to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19. The Average Black Person Doesn’t Live That Long.

The IRS Cashed Her Check. Then the Late Notices Started Coming. - Kathy Brenneman hears plenty of taxpayer horror stories in her receptionist’s job at a tax preparation service in Waldorf, Maryland. But this past year, the spiraling crisis at the Internal Revenue Service collided with her personal life as well.

Cuomo Still Underreporting the Total Count of COVID Nursing Home Deaths (New York) - Hundreds of COVID-19 deaths among New York state’s nursing home residents still have not been formally acknowledged by the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, according to the Empire Center, a public policy think tank in Albany.

Fauci: Vaccines for Kids as Young as First Graders Could Be Authorized by September (Washington DC) - Children as young as first graders may be able to get the coronavirus vaccine by the time school starts in September, presuming trials are successful in those age groups, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with ProPublica.

Jeff Kosseff wrote the book on Section 230, the law that gave us the internet we have today. He talks with ProPublica Editor-in-Chief Stephen Engelberg about how we got here and how we should regulate our way out.