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Winter Wonderland is back at Tilles Park in Ladue for its 38th year, but some changes are in place.

It's the season for giving and many cities are putting up holiday giving machines.

The funeral is today for former Maryland Heights Police Chief Tom O'Connor.

Ferguson police have canceled an endangered person advisory for a missing 42-year-old woman.

Mellow (7223 Manchester Road, Maplewood; mellowdiscgolf.com), a new disc golf shop in Maplewood, opened its doors to the public Tuesday morning after a month of renovations. Whether you're a beginner, professional or simply looking for a family-friendly activity, Mellow aims to encourage everyone to stay active and introduce them to a sport they may potentially fall in love with, co-owner Roger Martin explains. 

WASHINGTON — Senators attempting to clinch a bipartisan agreement on immigration and border policy gave the clearest indication yet Tuesday they’ll work into the new year, further delaying aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. “We are closer than ever before to an agreement, but … we need to get this right,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris […]

The post US Senate negotiators see progress in immigration talks, but no deal likely until 2024 appeared first on Missouri Independent.

by Ruth Talbot

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The quality of care that residents receive in a nursing home can be profoundly affected by who owns it, studies have shown. It’s not always clear who should be held accountable, though: Many nursing homes are owned by companies that are owned by other companies, obscuring who has the ultimate decision-making power. As more nursing homes are sold, information about an incoming owner’s performance in other homes becomes more relevant, as it may provide insight into how their latest acquisitions will fare.

To help navigate the confusing world of nursing home ownership, ProPublica’s Nursing Home Inspect now publishes detailed ownership information for facilities and an upgraded search to help you sift through the information.

The data comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which publishes “affiliated entities” for nursing homes — lists of people or companies that have an ownership stake in or operational control over multiple nursing homes. CMS’ goal is to provide a better understanding of an owner or operator’s performance across all the nursing homes they are associated with. Some entities are affiliated with only a handful of homes, while others, like Genesis HealthCare or The Ensign Group, are affiliated with hundreds of homes across multiple states. Because CMS does not provide this data in a way that’s easy for most people to use, we’ve added it to our Nursing Home Inspect tool.

Our new affiliated entity pages allow users to easily explore data on each company or person who is responsible for nursing homes, listing all homes associated with that entity and showing recent serious deficiencies —  failure to meet care requirements — found at those homes. You can even view a list of all affiliated entities nationwide.

We also added detailed ownership information to individual nursing home pages, allowing users to see who has an ownership stake in the home, as well as who has managerial control over the facility and how long they have held that position.

To go along with these additions, we’ve also expanded the database’s advanced search capabilities so journalists and others can quickly identify affiliated entities that have a history of serious deficiencies or other problems. For instance, users can search for all serious deficiencies associated with Life Care Centers of America.

Separately, users can also now filter searches by F-tags, which are a system for specifying the types of compliance issues that may be found during a CMS inspection. These tags allow users to narrow their search beyond broad categories such as “infection control deficiencies” to more targeted queries such as deficiencies associated with reporting COVID-19 data to residents and families or ensuring staff are vaccinated against COVID-19.

ProPublica plans to continue enhancing Nursing Home Inspect with new data and features in the coming months. If you write a story using this new information, come across bugs or issues, or have ideas for improvements, please let us know!

A group of women who first met while attending Central High School in the early ’50s continues to claim one another as close friends.

Country crooner Brett Eldredge returns this week to the Fabulous Fox for Glow, a Christmas show that has become an annual tradition. Eldredge, who has landed a series of Top 10 albums and singles on country radio since 2013, has carved out a unique place for himself within contemporary country music.

The show of support followed accusations that police beat up the bar owner.

by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was co-published with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

“My sisters have died,” the young boy sobbed, chest heaving, as he wailed into the sky. “Oh, my sisters.” As Israel began airstrikes on Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, posts by verified accounts on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, were being transmitted around the world. The heart-wrenching video of the grieving boy, viewed more than 600,000 times, was posted by an account named “#FreePalestine 🇵🇸.” The account had received X’s “verified” badge just hours before posting the tweet that went viral.

Days later, a video posted by an account calling itself “ISRAEL MOSSAD,” another “verified” account, this time bearing the logo of Israel’s national intelligence agency, claimed to show Israel’s advanced air defense technology. The post, viewed nearly 6 million times, showed a volley of rockets exploding in the night sky with the caption: “The New Iron beam in full display.”

And following an explosion on Oct. 14 outside the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza where civilians were killed, the verified account of the Hamas-affiliated news organization Quds News Network posted a screenshot from Facebook claiming to show the Israel Defense Forces declaring their intent to strike the hospital before the explosion. It was seen more than half a million times.

None of these posts depicted real events from the conflict. The video of the grieving boy was from at least nine years ago and was taken in Syria, not Gaza. The clip of rockets exploding was from a military simulation video game. And the Facebook screenshot was from a now-deleted Facebook page not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

Just days before its viral tweet, the #FreePalestine 🇵🇸 account had a blue verification check under a different name: “Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary.” It changed its name back after the tweet and was reverified within a week. Despite their blue check badges, neither Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary nor ISRAEL MOSSAD (now “Mossad Commentary”) have any real-life connection to either organization. Their posts were eventually annotated by Community Notes, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, but these clarifications garnered about 900,000 views — less than 15% of what the two viral posts totaled. ISRAEL MOSSAD deleted its post in late November. The Facebook screenshot, posted by the account of the Quds News Network, still doesn’t have a clarifying note. Mossad Commentary and the Quds News Network did not respond to direct messages seeking comment; Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary did not respond to public mentions asking for comment.

An investigation by ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows how false claims based on out-of-context, outdated or manipulated media have proliferated on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The organizations looked at over 200 distinct claims that independent fact-checks determined to be misleading, and searched for posts by verified accounts that perpetuated them, identifying 2,000 total tweets. The tweets, collectively viewed half a billion times, were analyzed alongside account and Community Notes data.

ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism identified more than 2,000 tweets by verified accounts that contained debunked claims based on out-of-context media. Quds News Network made five of those posts and continues to post about the conflict. Some of its English-language accounts on Facebook and Instagram have been suspended. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

The ongoing conflict in Gaza is the biggest test for changes implemented by X owner Elon Musk since his acquisition of Twitter last year. After raising concerns about the power of platforms to determine what speech is appropriate, Musk instituted policies to promote “healthy” debate under the maxim “freedom of speech, not reach,” where certain types of posts that previously would have been removed for violating platform policy now have their visibility restricted.

Within 10 days of taking ownership, Musk cut 15% of Twitter’s trust and safety team. He made further cuts in the following months, including firing the election integrity team, terminating many contracted content moderators and revoking existing misinformation policies on specific topics like COVID-19. In place of these safeguards, Musk expanded Community Notes. The feature, first launched in 2021 as Birdwatch, adds crowdsourced annotations to a tweet when users with diverse perspectives rate them “helpful.”

“The Israel-Hamas war is a classic case of an information crisis on X, in terms of the speed and volume of the misinformation and the harmful consequences of that rhetoric,” said Michael Zimmer, the director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society at Marquette University in Wisconsin, who has studied how social media platforms combat misinformation.

While no social media platform is free of misinformation, critics contend that Musk’s policies, along with his personal statements, have led to a proliferation of misinformation and hate speech on X. Advertisers have fled the platform — U.S. ad revenue is down roughly 60% compared to last year. Last week, Musk reinstated the account of Alex Jones, who was ordered to pay $1.1 billion in defamation damages for repeatedly lying about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones appealed the verdict. This week, the European Union opened a formal investigation against X for breaching multiple provisions of the Digital Services Act, including risk management and content moderation, as well as deceptive design in relation to its “so-called Blue checks.”

ProPublica and the Tow Center found that verified blue check accounts that posted misleading media saw their audience grow on X in the first month of the conflict. This included dozens of accounts that posted debunked tweets three or more times and that now have over 100,000 followers each. The false posts appear to violate X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy, which bars all users from sharing media that may deceive or confuse people. Many accounts also appear to breach the eligibility criteria for verification, which state that verified accounts must not be “misleading or deceptive” or engage in “platform manipulation and spam.” Several of the fastest-growing accounts that have posted multiple false claims about the conflict now have more followers than some regional news organizations covering it.

We also found that the Community Notes system, which has been touted by Musk as a way to improve information accuracy on the platform, hasn’t scaled sufficiently. About 80% of the 2,000 debunked posts we reviewed had no Community Note. Of the 200 debunked claims, more than 80 were never clarified with a note.

When clarifying Community Notes did appear, they typically reached a fraction of the views that the original tweet did, though views on Community Notes are significantly undercounted. We also found that in some cases, debunked images or videos were flagged by a Community Note in one tweet but not in others, despite X announcing, partway through the period covered by our dataset, it has improved its media-matching algorithms to address this. For tweets that did receive a Community Note, it typically didn’t become visible until hours after the post.

This last finding expands on a recent report by Bloomberg, which analyzed 400 false posts tagged by Community Notes in the first two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack and found it typically took seven hours for a Community Note to appear.

For the tweets analyzed by ProPublica and the Tow Center, the median time that elapsed before a Community Note became visible decreased to just over five hours in the first week of November after X improved its system. Outliers did exist: Sometimes it still took more than two days for a note to appear, while in other cases, a note appeared almost instantaneously because the tweet used media that the system had already encountered.

Multiple emails sent to X’s press inbox seeking comment on our findings triggered automated replies to “check back later” with no further response. Keith Coleman, who leads the Community Notes team at X, was separately provided with summary findings relevant to Community Notes as well as the dataset containing the compiled claims and tweets.

Via email, Coleman said that the tweets identified in this investigation were a small fraction of those covered by the 1,500 visible Community Notes on X about the conflict from this time period. He also said that many posts with high-visibility notes were deleted after receiving a Community Note, including ones that we did not identify. When asked about the number of claims that did not receive a single note, Coleman said that users might not have thought one was necessary, pointing to examples where images generated by artificial intelligence tools could be interpreted as artistic depictions. AI-generated images accounted for around 7% of the tweets that did not receive a note; none acknowledged that the media was AI-generated. Coleman said that the current system is an upgrade over X’s historic approaches to dealing with misinformation and that it continues to improve; “most importantly,” he said, the Community Notes program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.”

Community Notes were initially meant to complement X’s various trust and safety initiatives, not replace them. “It still makes sense for platforms to keep their trust and safety teams in a breaking-news, viral environment. It’s not going to work to simply fling open the gates,” said Mike Ananny, an associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Southern California, who is skeptical about leaving moderation to the community, particularly after the changes Musk has made.

“I’m not sure any community norm is going to work given all of the signals that have been given about who’s welcome here, what types of opinions are respected and what types of content is allowed,” he said.

ProPublica and the Tow Center compiled a large sample of data from multiple sources to study the effectiveness of Community Notes in labeling debunked claims. We found over 1,300 verified accounts that posted misleading or out-of-context media at least once in the first month of the conflict; 130 accounts did so three or more times. (For more details on how the posts were gathered, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Musk overhauled Twitter’s account verification program soon after acquiring the company. Previously, Twitter gave verified badges to politicians, celebrities, news organizations, government agencies and other vetted notable individuals or organizations. Though the legacy process was criticized as opaque and arbitrary, it provided a signal of authenticity for users. Today, accounts receive the once-coveted blue check in exchange for $8 a month and a cursory identity check. Despite well-documented impersonation and credibility issues, these “verified” accounts are prioritized in search, in replies and across X’s algorithmic feeds.

If an account continuously shares harmful or misleading narratives, X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy states that its visibility may be reduced or the account may be locked or suspended. But the investigation found that prominent verified accounts appeared to face few consequences for broadcasting misleading media to their large follower networks. Of the 40 accounts with more than 100,000 followers that posted debunked tweets three times or more in the first month of the conflict, only seven appeared to have had any action taken against them, according to account history data shared with ProPublica and the Tow Center by Travis Brown. Brown is a software developer who researches extremism and misinformation on X.

Those 40 accounts, a number of which have been identified as the most influential accounts engaging in Hamas-Israel discourse, grew their collective audience by nearly 5 million followers, to around 17 million, in the first month of the conflict alone.

A few of the smaller verified accounts in the dataset received punitive action: About 50 accounts that posted at least one false tweet were suspended. On average, these accounts had 7,000 followers. It is unclear whether the accounts were suspended for manipulated media policy violations or for other reasons, such as bot-like behavior. Around 80 accounts no longer have a blue check badge. It is unclear whether the accounts lost their blue checks because they stopped paying, because they had recently changed their display name (which triggers a temporary removal of the verified status), or because Twitter revoked the status. X has said it removed 3,000 accounts by “violent entities,” including Hamas, in the region.

On Oct. 29, X announced a new policy where verified accounts would no longer be eligible to share in revenue earned from ads that appeared alongside any of their posts that had been corrected by Community Notes. In a tweet, Musk said, “the idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.” Coleman said that this policy has been implemented, but did not provide further details.

False claims that go viral are frequently repeated by multiple accounts and often take the form of decontextualized old footage. One of the most widespread false claims, that Qatar was threatening to stop supplying natural gas to the world unless Israel halted its airstrikes, was repeated by nearly 70 verified accounts. This claim, which was based on a false description of an unrelated 2017 speech by the Qatari emir to bolster its credibility, received over 15 million views collectively, with a single post by Dominick McGee (@dom_lucre) amassing more than 9 million views. McGee is popular in the QAnon community and is an election denier with nearly 800,000 followers who was suspended from X for sharing child exploitation imagery in July 2023. Shortly after, X reversed the suspension. McGee denied that he had shared the image when reached by direct message on X, claiming instead that it was “an article touching it.”

Community Notes like this one appear alongside many false posts claiming Qatar is threatening to cut off its gas supply to the world. This note was seen more than 400,000 times across 159 posts that shared the same video clip, and it appeared on nine out of nearly 70 posts in our dataset that made this claim. (Screenshot of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

Another account, using the pseudonym Sprinter, shared the same false claim about Qatar in a post that was viewed over 80,000 times. These were not the only false posts made by either account. McGee shared six debunked claims about the conflict in our dataset; Sprinter shared 20.

Sprinter posted an image of casualties from the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, most of whom were civilians, and purported that it showed Israeli military losses during the ground war later in the month. Another post mistranslated the words of an injured Israeli soldier. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

Sprinter has tweeted AI-generated images, digitally altered videos and the unsubstantiated claim that Ukraine is providing weapons to Hamas. Each of these posts has received hundreds of thousands of views. The account’s follower count has increased by 60% to about 500,000, rivaling the following of Haaretz and the Times of Israel on X. Sprinter’s profile — which has also used the pseudonyms SprinterTeam, SprinterX and WizardSX, according to historical account data provided by Brown — was “temporarily restricted” by X in mid-November, but it retained its “verified” status. Sprinter’s original profile linked to a backup account. That account — whose name and verification status continues to change — still posts dozens of times a day and has grown to over 25,000 followers. Sprinter did not respond to a request for comment and blocked the reporter after being contacted. The original account appears to no longer exist.

Verification badges were once a critical signal in sifting official accounts from inauthentic ones. But with X’s overhaul of the blue check program, that signal now essentially tells you whether the account pays $8 a month. ISRAEL MOSSAD, the account that posted video game footage falsely claiming it was an Israeli air defense system, had gone from fewer than 1,000 followers, when it first acquired a blue check in September 2023, to more than 230,000 today. In another debunked post, published the same day as the video game footage, the account claimed to show more of the Iron Beam system. That tweet still doesn’t have a Community Note, despite having nearly 400,000 views. The account briefly lost its blue check within a day of the two tweets being posted, but regained it days after changing its display name to Mossad Commentary. Even though it isn’t affiliated with Israel’s national intelligence agency, it continues to use Mossad’s logo in its profile picture.

“The blue check is flipped now. Instead of a sign of authenticity, it’s a sign of suspicion, at least for those of us who study this enough,” said Zimmer, the Marquette University professor.

Verified Accounts That Shared Misinformation Grew Quickly During the Israel-Hamas Conflict

Several of the fastest-growing accounts that have posted multiple false claims about the conflict now have more followers than some regional news organizations actively covering it.

(Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Of the verified accounts we reviewed, the one that grew the fastest during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict was also one of the most prolific posters of misleading claims. Jackson Hinkle, a 24-year-old political commentator and self-described “MAGA communist” has built a large following posting highly partisan tweets. He has been suspended from various platforms in the past, pushed pro-Russian narratives and claimed that YouTube permanently suspended his account for “Ukraine misinformation.” Three days later, he tweeted that YouTube had banned him because it didn’t want him telling the truth about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Currently, he has more than two million followers on X; over 1.5 million of those arrived after Oct. 7. ProPublica and the Tow Center found over 20 tweets by Hinkle using misleading or manipulated media in the first month of the conflict; more than half had been tagged with a Community Note. The tweets amassed 40 million views, while the Community Notes were collectively viewed just under 10 million times. Hinkle did not respond to a request for comment.

All told, debunked tweets with a Community Note in the ProPublica-Tow Center dataset amassed 300 million views in aggregate, about five times the total number of views on the notes, even though Community Notes can appear on multiple tweets and collect views from all of them, including from tweets that were not reviewed by the news organizations.

Hinkle misleadingly claimed that China was sending warships in the direction of Israel, even though the ships had been in routine operation in the region since May. Hinkle also posted footage claiming to show Hezbollah’s anti-ship missiles, but the video is from 2019 and not related to the current conflict. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

X continues to improve the Community Notes system. It announced updates to the feature on Oct. 24, saying notes are appearing more often on viral and high-visibility content, and are appearing faster in general. But ProPublica and Tow Center’s review found that less than a third of debunked tweets created since the update received a Community Note, though the median time for a note to become visible dropped noticeably, from seven hours to just over five hours in the first week of November. The Community Notes team said over email that their data showed that a note typically took around five hours to become visible in the first few days of the conflict.

Aviv Ovadya, an affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society who has worked on social media governance and algorithms similar to the one Community Notes uses, says that any fact-checking process, whether it relies on crowdsourced notes or a third-party fact-checker, is likely to always be playing catch-up to viral claims. “You need to know if the claim is worth even fact-checking,” Ovadya said. “Is it worth my time?” Once a false post is identified, a third-party fact-check may take longer than a Community Note.

Coleman, who leads the Community Notes team, said over email that his team found Community Notes often appeared faster than posts by traditional fact-checkers, and that they are committed to making the notes visible faster.

Our review found that many viral tweets with claims that had been debunked by third-party fact- checkers did not receive a Community Note in the long run. Of the hundreds of tweets in the dataset that gained over 100,000 impressions, only about half had a note. Coleman noted that of those widely viewed tweets, the ones with visible Community Notes attached had nearly twice as many views.

To counter the instances where false claims spread quickly because many accounts post the same misleading media in a short time frame, the company announced in October that it would attach the same Community Note to all posts that share a debunked piece of media. ProPublica and the Tow Center found the system wasn’t always successful.

For example, on and after Oct. 25, multiple accounts tweeted an AI-generated image of a man with five children amid piles of rubble. Community Notes for this image appeared thousands of times on X. However, of the 22 instances we identified in which a verified account tweeted the image, only seven of those were tagged with a Community Note. (One of those tweets was later deleted after garnering more than 200,000 views.)

We found X’s media-matching system to be inconsistent for numerous other claims as well. Coleman pointed to the many automatic matches as a sign that it is working and said that its algorithm prioritizes “high precision” to avoid mistakenly finding matches between pieces of media that are meaningfully different. He also said the Community Notes team plans to further improve its media-matching system.

According to annotations on Community Notes on X that we found, a note for this image was displayed on at least 7,200 posts. We found 22 tweets with this image, but only seven had a Community Note. The second image has been deleted, but not before it garnered more than 200,000 views. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

The false claims ProPublica and the Tow Center identified in this analysis were also posted on other platforms, including Instagram and TikTok. On X, having a Community Note added to a post does not affect how it is displayed. Other platforms deprioritize fact-checked posts in their algorithmic feeds to limit their reach. While Ovadya believes that continued investment in Community Notes is important, he says changing X’s core algorithm could be even more impactful.

“If X’s recommendation algorithms were built on the same principles as Community Notes and was actively rewarding content that bridges divides,” he said, “you would have less misinformation and sensationalist content going viral in the first place.”

Methodology

ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism identified and analyzed more than 2,000 tweets by verified accounts that posted clearly debunked images or videos in the first month of the Israel-Hamas war. The posts, which encompassed more than 200 false claims, were published by more than 1,300 verified accounts and collectively received half a billion impressions. We then looked at Community Notes and account data associated with those tweets.

Since the metrics on tweets, accounts and Community Notes were viewed at various points in time, they may not be current; for example, the status of accounts or Community Notes may have changed and the number of impressions on tweets and notes might be different after the time frame of our analysis.

In this review, we focused on claims that could be unambiguously debunked, including those based on generative AI images that aren’t labeled as such, old pictures and videos presented as current, falsified social media posts and documents, footage from video games described as real events, doctored images and mistranslated videos. To compile our list of debunked claims, we reviewed fact checks from multiple news organizations, including BBC Verify, Logically Facts, two stories from The New York Times, The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. We also identified debunked claims by filtering Community Notes data by relevant keywords (Gaza, Palestine/Palestinian, Israel, IDF, Hamas/Hammas, Mossad, Iron Beam, Iron Dome), and verified the note using independent news organizations or reverse image searches to ensure that each was accurate. We did not include claims that could not be independently verified or that were contested under the fog of war.

We compiled tweets using X’s text search functionality and Google’s reverse image search. Reverse image search was able to identify both images and videos (using a frame from the video). The claims and tweets we compiled are a convenience sample, not an exhaustive survey of all media-based misinformation on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas war: The dataset relies heavily on images that Google has indexed as well as tweets that use identical or very similar language, which allows X’s search functionality to surface them. Additionally, the accounts mentioned in the story might have tweeted more false claims than those we identified. Tweets deleted prior to our searches are not captured in our dataset. (In its response, X provided us with 18 examples of Community Notes and tweets that were not in our dataset and could not be located because the tweets were not yet indexed by Google or could not be easily found by X’s search function.)

We also analyzed the accounts that were posting these tweets, using account data collected by researcher Travis Brown from July through November 2023. We used this data to determine account status, follower count, handles and usernames.

For Community Notes, we downloaded X’s open-source datasets and filtered by notes with the above-mentioned keywords. A single tweet can have multiple Community Notes and the same note can appear alongside multiple tweets. Our analysis ensured we took both relationships into account.

X’s Community Notes data contains the current status of a note as well as the time at which that status was set. It also includes when the Community Note was created and the note’s text. For some tweets that use repurposed media (i.e. media from a tweet that’s already been debunked by Community Notes) the note appears immediately due to improvements in X’s media-matching algorithm. This means that occasionally the time of creation or visibility of a note will be before the time the tweet was posted.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Elizabeth Yaboni of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism contributed research.

Buddy Holly’s life and career are the subjects of a new book, Words of Love, being released by Genesis Publications in collaboration with Holly's widow, María Elena Holly, and the Buddy Holly Educational…

Source

A would-be dictator does not deserve anxious consideration of his rights.

Mapping UnitedHealth’s consumption of our health care system—from the ’70s to today

Consumers can get the $7,500 federal rebate on any EV, no matter where its parts are made, if they lease, which auto dealers quite like.

by Maryam Jameel and Melissa Sanchez

Leer en español.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

One dairy farm worker said he was fired and thrown out of the house where he lived after he told his boss his hands were frostbitten from working outside in below-zero weather. Another said it took his supervisors nearly an hour to call an ambulance after he was crushed by a metal gate and left lying on a manure-covered barn floor. A third worker said her boss blamed her and refused to pay her medical bills after she was trampled and thrown over a fence by a bull. And yet another said his supervisor told him not to go to the emergency room after he tore open his finger when he fell trying to catch a runaway calf. He was told to call the veterinarian instead.

These are some of the stories immigrant workers will tell you about getting hurt on Wisconsin dairy farms — and what happened afterward.

Others will say everything is fine — “Just the usual” — until you ask the question five or six ways: Have you been kicked? Has a cow stepped on you? Have you fallen? Did you see blood? Do you have chronic pain in your back, arms or hands? Then, almost inevitably, the answer is yes.

Wisconsin’s celebrated dairy industry would almost certainly collapse without the immigrants who do the dirty, dangerous work that farmers across the state say U.S. citizens won’t. But when these workers get hurt — and they get hurt with such frequency that it’s considered a routine part of the job — the laws are stacked against them.

Many, if not most, of the state’s 5,700 or so dairy farms aren’t required to have workers’ compensation insurance because they have too few employees, while at larger farms the supervisors often brush off workers’ injuries. Employers can fire and evict injured workers almost without consequence. And the threat of being deported factors into any decision workers make to assert the limited rights they do have.

As a result, many workers get no medical care for their injuries, compensation or even time off to recuperate. Instead, they are at the farmer’s mercy and have to brace themselves for the possibility of losing their jobs and the roof over their heads.

“Once you’re no good to them, they get rid of you,” said a worker who was fired and, along with his wife and two children, evicted in November after he developed tendonitis in his hand from repetitive motions at work. “I wouldn’t want anybody else to go through this.”

What we know about the frequency of injuries on dairy farms is widely understood to be an undercount. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics relies on farms to self-report injuries, but it only surveys the largest farms. Wisconsin’s workers’ compensation system offers some insight, showing that just over 170 claims were filed in 2021, the most recent year available, according to the state officials. But that figure excludes injuries that occurred on small farms that don’t have workers’ compensation coverage, and those that were never reported. Often, workers say they are so afraid of losing their jobs that they tell hospital staff their injuries happened at home.

Over the course of the past year, ProPublica has interviewed more than 60 current and former workers who said they suffered injuries on Wisconsin dairy farms. All but a handful of them were undocumented immigrants; the others have work permits. Nearly every one asked not to be fully identified because they fear losing their job or being deported. Most asked that the farms where they got hurt not be named either; they or their relatives continue to work and live on those farms, and they are afraid of retaliation.

Few injuries leave a paper trail. Workers don’t always take photos of their broken legs or smashed teeth or torn-off fingers. Sometimes they don’t even know the name of the farm where they were kicked by a 1,500-pound cow. No medical records exist for injuries that go untreated. Farm owners, meanwhile, don’t consistently report injuries to authorities. Law enforcement records offer a glimpse of the worst farm accidents, but only when somebody calls for an ambulance. That rarely happens.

“It’s almost like people are disposable. And it’s horrific,” said Martha Burke, an employment discrimination and workers’ compensation attorney in Milwaukee. “Employers aren’t supposed to fire you for being injured, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”

Excluded from many basic protections that other workers are entitled to, Wisconsin’s immigrant dairy workers are left to fend for themselves. They ask the owners of the nearest Latino-owned grocery store for advice about finding a doctor or a lawyer or even a place to sleep. They buy painkillers one capsule at a time and rub a tingly blue lotion for cow udders on their bruised arms. Most said they work through the pain because they need the paycheck.

Some workers quietly leave their jobs — and Wisconsin altogether — to nurse their wounds with relatives. Some go home to Mexico or Central America.

“It was months of pain,” said a man who dislocated his shoulder when he slipped on a cow’s placenta. “The pain only went away after I left the farm.”

Farmer Andy Lodahl and his wife told their workers to get ready because a storm was coming and they would need to work “a lot of hours” in the cold, wind and snow. “Make sure you all have a lot of warm clothes,” they said they typed into a phone, then translated into Spanish and showed the workers.

It was late December 2022, and Lodahl said he and his wife let the workers end a shift early and gave them an advance on their pay so they could buy winter gear.

Seferino José García, 62, was familiar with Wisconsin’s brutal winters. An immigrant from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, García had worked on dairy farms on and off for about a decade before he was hired about two weeks earlier on this small farm about 45 minutes northwest of Milwaukee. He was one of three workers and, in an arrangement that’s typical on dairy farms, lived in a house on the property.

One morning, García and his co-workers wore thin cotton gloves over latex gloves to do a number of tasks outside, including shoveling snow and feeding calves. García said it was hard to wear gloves at all and maintain his grip. It was below zero with wind gusts of more than 30 miles an hour. García said he felt like the wind was going to carry him away.

Blisters began forming on his hands. At one point, he submerged them in hot water, but that made the blistering worse. Still, he kept working. He finished his first eight-hour shift around 11 a.m. and went back to the house. He said he called the farmers and told them he couldn’t return for his 3 p.m. shift.

“I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore,” García said in an interview. “I couldn’t feel my own body when I touched it.”

The farmers told García he couldn’t take the afternoon off; the cows needed to be milked. But García told his bosses he wasn’t able to work. One of his co-workers couldn’t either; his fingers were frostbitten, too.

Lodahl and his wife told them both to vacate the property immediately. (The third worker also had frostbite but continued working, according to Lodahl.) García grabbed what he could from the house and left.

Most workers we spoke to know somebody who lost their job after an injury or have experienced this themselves. Several also were evicted, including the man who couldn’t use his right hand after he developed tendonitis from the repetitive motions of driving a skid steer. Adding insult to injury: He said his final paychecks bounced, so he’s still owed two weeks of wages.

“I’ve never been treated so badly in all my years working on farms,” said the man, who in mid December was still sleeping in a nephew’s living room along with his wife and two daughters. “Maybe there are laws that protect you, but for people like us, we don’t know where we can turn.”

Most Wisconsin dairy workers are considered at-will employees, which means they can be fired without cause, though employers can’t fire them in retaliation for asserting certain rights such as filing a workers’ compensation claim. Meanwhile, several attorneys said workers’ rights in the face of eviction are gray. Those who can show that there’s a landlord-tenant relationship — if housing costs are deducted from their wages, for example — may get more time to move out. But few workers challenge firings or evictions.

“These folks don’t want problems,” said Gabriel Manzano Nieves, a lawyer who provided García with legal counseling but didn’t file a case. “They don’t want the police called on them. He’s obviously not going to push back too much under those circumstances.”

After he was fired and evicted, García drove to Lupita’s Market & Restaurant in the nearby city of Beaver Dam, where he usually bought his groceries. Meinardo Enriquez, the store owner, said he chided García for not wearing proper gloves. He squeezed the fluid out of some of his blisters to relieve the pain and encouraged García to get medical care.

That night, García slept in the laundromat next door. Before dawn, he headed to South Carolina, where he has a niece. He put a shirt on his lap to catch the blood that dripped from his hands. As he drove, he said he tried to push bad thoughts out of his head and focus on the positive. “I was thinking about my mother. My sisters. My children. My wife,” he said. “Oh, dear Lord, why did this happen to me?”

(Zeke Peña, special to ProPublica)

After he arrived in South Carolina, his niece took him to the hospital despite his protests. He was worried about the cost. García returned a few more times to be examined but stopped going in February when he ran out of money.

By April, he said the feeling had started to return to his fingers. He’d lost six of his nails and had been told the rest would fall off, too. He was giving himself physical therapy he’d been taught at the hospital. He wanted to find a job but didn’t know what he could do since his hands didn't work like they used to.

Lodahl, meanwhile, said that losing two workers unexpectedly put him and his wife under immense pressure right before Christmas. It took several days to replace them — days in which the farm owners had to work around the clock with their one remaining worker to keep everything running.

“The cows do not stop making milk because people made the choice to be insubordinate and not have the ability for self-preservation and not show up to work,” he wrote in an email.

Lodahl said he and his wife were justified in firing and evicting García and the other worker for refusing to do their jobs. The workers, they said, were to blame for not wearing better winter gear and getting frostbite.

(Workers who get frostbite and other injuries related to extreme temperatures can pursue workers’ compensation claims, state officials and attorneys said. But Lodahl’s farm didn’t employ enough workers to be required to have coverage.)

Before winter arrived this year, the Lodahls bought heavy gloves for their employees.

On another dairy farm near Milwaukee, a Nicaraguan woman worked for months without seeking medical care for an injury because she didn’t know how she would pay for it.

Carmen, who is 40, said she felt so much pain in her head, back and arms that she could barely think clearly. She said she didn’t know how she got injured but suspected it was related to the repetitive motions of attaching and detaching milking tubes to cow udders hundreds of times a day.

“I couldn’t even walk straight,” she said. But she felt she had “to keep my head down and swallow” the pain because she needed the money.

Carmen, a single mother, makes $12 an hour and works 10 hours a night, six nights a week. In addition to supporting her young daughter and her ailing mother back home, as of November she still owed $13,000 to the person who loaned her money to immigrate to the U.S. last year.

She said she hasn’t told her employer about the injury because she is afraid he will get upset and fire her. Carmen and her daughter live in a house the farm owners provide their workers.

Across the state, dairy workers face a variety of barriers to getting medical care: limited transportation, the challenges of finding someone to fill their shifts and the high cost of medical care without health insurance.

Many workers said their supervisors dismissed their injuries and told them to get back to work, even when they were unable to walk. Among them: a 52-year-old woman who said she was knocked unconscious by a cow two years ago on a large farm in western Wisconsin. When supervisors refused to take her to the hospital, a co-worker drove her, according to the woman and the co-worker.

Later, a doctor said she could return to work, as long as she took frequent breaks. But the farm owner told her he couldn’t accommodate her needs and fired her, she said. Today, the woman can’t work at all, sleeps in a friend’s trailer and relies on a food pantry. She walks with a cane and can’t afford any additional medical care. She also owes nearly $70,000 for the treatment she has already received.

“They haven’t paid the bills,” she said of her former employers. “They offered me $2,000 to go back to Mexico.”

Other workers said they had been humiliated, insulted or called racial slurs by their supervisors after saying they had been hurt. As a result, they didn’t press the issue and never got medical attention.

“You get scared to say anything because they get mad and start yelling and saying bad words,” said one 54-year-old worker who said a cow kicked him in the chest last year while he was milking it. “I healed on my own. I thought I would die.”

Even when supervisors allow workers to get medical care, they face other barriers. Workers typically make between $11 an hour and $15 an hour. Few get health insurance through their jobs. The state’s public insurance program, BadgerCare Plus, doesn’t cover undocumented adults unless they are pregnant or in labor. If they have a serious medical emergency, undocumented immigrants may qualify for some BadgerCare Plus coverage, but this option is not widely known by workers.

In addition, the state bans undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s licenses, as ProPublica has previously reported, forcing many workers to rely on friends, co-workers and supervisors for rides to the clinic or hospital.

Then workers have to weigh whether they can afford to take unpaid time off to see a doctor. Workers routinely log 70 to 80 hours a week, split among multiple shifts each day, sometimes with no days off. That’s especially true for recent immigrants who want to work more hours to help pay down the debts they owe to people who help them get into the U.S.

And while Wisconsin guarantees workers at least one day of rest each week, the law excludes the dairy industry.

Workers also have to find somebody to cover their shifts, and “the boss has to say that that’s okay,” said Lisa Schiller, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and nurse practitioner who runs a mobile health clinic with county health departments that visits dairy farms. She said she knows of some farmers who help workers get to their appointments or even fill their shifts themselves. But others don’t.

Several workers said they were pressured to return to work before they recovered, including a man who lost part of his finger and worried about getting cow feces in his healing wound. He said he overheard a supervisor tell the doctor not to perform surgery to close the wound because the worker was needed on the farm the next day. The worker said he was so shocked he asked a hospital interpreter if he heard right; she confirmed it, adding that he had the right to be treated without his supervisor present. The worker asked his supervisor to leave and got the surgery.

Others said their jobs got filled by another worker while they recovered.

Federal law allows many workers to take time off for their health needs without losing their jobs. But it applies only to employers with at least 50 workers, and few Wisconsin dairy farms are large enough to qualify. Meanwhile, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for workers whose injuries leave them with a disability or a perceived disability. But the federal agency that enforces the law covers only employers with at least 15 workers.

Workers at smaller farms who believe they were fired because of their disability can lodge a discrimination complaint with a state agency. The state does not track discrimination complaints by industry, though several attorneys said dairy workers rarely file them.

One worker said he needed six weeks to recover after a bull slammed into him, breaking his nose, jaw and several teeth. In that time, the farm hired another man to replace him as the lead worker in the milking parlor. When he returned to the farm, he had to work under his replacement.

He said he got frequent headaches and experienced blurred vision and felt pressured to quit. Eventually, he did. It took him more than four months to find another job.

Some farmers do make sure their workers get the treatment and recovery time they need after they’re injured. Several workers said a farm owner drove them to an emergency room or clinic and paid out of their own pocket for medication. Some said their supervisors didn’t hesitate to file a workers’ compensation claim so their medical care was covered.

One man, an immigrant from Nicaragua, described with awe his boss’ reaction after a cow kicked his hand against a metal post. The owner of the small farm in central Wisconsin, where he is the only employee, took him to a clinic, paid for the visit and gave him a week off to heal at full pay. When the worker tells friends on other farms what happened, he said “they can’t believe it. It’s something that rarely happens.”

For Alicia Fetzer, who is the business office manager for her family’s large farm in western Wisconsin, it’s a matter of basic humanity. She said the farm typically covers the costs related to minor injuries, leaving workers’ compensation claims for serious accidents.

But she knows not all farms can easily afford to do that. “I’m not dumb to the fact that we are very successful; therefore we have the funds to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to take this guy to the ER and we might be paying this bill,’” she said. “That doesn’t put me in a pinch.”

At many farms, the expectation is that workers will pay for their own care after work injuries. One man whose two front teeth were snapped in half after a cow kicked him last month said his employer gave him a piece of paper with the name and number of a dental clinic that treats uninsured residents. He called, scheduled an appointment, and is now waiting to be treated.

In the meantime, the man said he tries to keep his mouth closed when he’s outside so the winter air doesn’t hit his open teeth. “It’s uncomfortable,” said the man, who is 32. “When you’re here illegally, sometimes you just say, ‘Oh well.’ What are you supposed to do?”

Several workers said they have received treatment through free or sliding-scale clinics or hospital charity care programs. Rebecca Steffes, the nurse manager of a free clinic in Dodgeville, in southwest Wisconsin, said she routinely sees dairy workers come in with a range of injuries — from kicks or chemical exposure to lower back pain or carpal tunnel symptoms. The clinic helps workers with more serious injuries get charity care from a local hospital.

“I would really like the farmers to effectively take responsibility for their workers,” said Steffes, who grew up on a dairy farm in the state. “They are bringing them here. They are working here. We’ve got to create a system that also takes care of their workers and their families.”

Sometimes injured workers eventually get connected to medical care by the generosity of somebody outside the farm who happened to notice them. That’s what happened to Carmen, the Nicaraguan woman who is afraid to tell her boss she is hurt.

A few months ago, Carmen was walking with a limp and held her head with such obvious discomfort that the owners of the Mexican store where she cashes her checks convinced her she needed medical care. The owner called his mother and asked her to drive Carmen to a hospital.

Carmen told the doctor only about the pain in her arms and back that made it difficult to do her job. She didn’t mention her constant, throbbing headache or the irritation in her eye from having an iodine solution used to sanitize cow udders splash in her face. She was afraid of asking about too much and being billed for treatment she could not afford.

The doctor told Carmen that her shoulder and back pain were due to the repetitive motions of her job, as she had suspected. He prescribed medication for her pain and told her that the overnight shifts were putting additional stress on her body.

But she is still in severe pain. She said she can’t afford to return for follow-up care.

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