Enlarge / Ralph de la Torre, founder and chief executive officer of Steward Health Care System LLC, speaks during a summit in New York on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2016. (credit: Getty | )

A Senate committee on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to hold the wealthy CEO of a failed hospital chain in civil and criminal contempt for rejecting a rare subpoena from the lawmakers.

In July, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) subpoenaed Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre to testify before the lawmakers on the deterioration and eventual bankruptcy of the system, which included more than 30 hospitals across eight states. The resulting dire conditions in the hospitals, described as providing "third-world medicine," allegedly led to the deaths of at least 15 patients and imperiled more than 2,000 others.

The committee, chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), highlighted that amid the system's collapse, de la Torre was paid at least $250 million, bought a $40 million yacht, and owned a $15 million luxury fishing boat. Meanwhile, Steward executives jetted around on two private jets collectively worth $95 million.

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Enlarge / Harvard Business School was targeted by a faculty member's lawsuit. (credit: APCortizasJr)

Earlier this year, we got a look at something unusual: the results of an internal investigation conducted by Harvard Business School that concluded one of its star faculty members had committed research misconduct. Normally, these reports are kept confidential, leaving questions regarding the methods and extent of data manipulations.

But in this case, the report became public because the researcher had filed a lawsuit that alleged defamation on the part of the team of data detectives that had first identified potential cases of fabricated data, as well as Harvard Business School itself. Now, the court has ruled on motions to dismiss the case. While the suit against Harvard will go on, the court has ruled that evidence-backed conclusions regarding fabricated data cannot constitute defamation—which is probably a very good thing for science.

Data and defamation

The researchers who had been sued, Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joe Simmons, run a blog called Data Colada where, among other things, they note cases of suspicious-looking data in the behavioral sciences. As we detailed in our earlier coverage, they published a series of blog posts describing an apparent case of fabricated data in four different papers published by the high-profile researcher Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School.

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On July 28, millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote in the country’s highly anticipated presidential election. For the first time in years, there was hope that the opposition would unseat the long-ruling antidemocratic leader Nicolás Maduro and restore a sense of future post-Chavismo—late President Hugo Chávez’s populist political project of a “socialist revolution” that has slid into authoritarianism—to a once-prosperous nation wrecked by prolonged economic collapse, political repression, and a massive exodus of people that has had repercussions across the region.

But in the wake of the vote came terror. The electoral authority—controlled by a pro-government majority—declared Maduro, the political successor of Chávez, the winner, despite questions about the integrity of the process. The opposition disputed Maduro’s claim with evidence that their candidate, little-known former diplomat Edmundo González, had won by a wide margin. (The United States government agreed.) The Carter Center, which sent an expert group to Venezuela to observe the election, said it “did not meet international standards” and couldn’t “be considered democratic.”

The fraudulent election has sharpened the focus on the utter collapse of what used to be the richest nation in South America. Deadly antigovernment protests have since erupted across Venezuela, and several countries have pressured the Maduro government to present verifiable proof of his reelection to no avail. “Venezuelans are ready to throw off the dictatorship,” the popular leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, who was barred from running and backed González, wrote in an op-ed. “Will the international community support us?” Back in 2023, Machado had predicted two possible outcomes for the election: “landslide victory or an obscene fraud.”

Venezuela’s fate is not restricted to South America but has been bound up in the US election this year. With the southern border as a central issue, much has been made of the spike in migration from Venezuela to the United States during the administration of President Joe Biden. On the right, the surge has been played up as a way to hit the left twice: a socialist government in Latin America failed; the poor policies of a Democratic administration led to the border being overrun. At the Republican National Convention in July, Donald Trump suggested Venezuela—as well as El Salvador—was sending “criminals” to the United States.

But that misses a far more complex story, one that ranges from the long history of US involvement in the region to the specifics of the Trump era, when, as the Washington Post recently reported, despite warnings that it would cause massive migration, President Donald Trump pushed devastating sanctions onto Venezuela. (Trump also appointed Elliott Abrams, who played a role in the Iran-Contra affair and was linked to a failed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, as the special envoy to Venezuela.)

The results of years of economic mismanagement, exacerbated by US policies cracking down on the country, have been dramatic. One poll suggested as many as one-third of Venezuela’s population was considering migrating if Maduro, who has been president for more than a decade, held onto power for another six years. They would join the more than 7.7 million Venezuelans who have already left the country of fewer than 30 million since 2014. Most have fled to neighboring countries such as Colombia and Brazil, but thousands of others have made their way through the treacherous Darien Gap to the US-Mexico border. Many have been bused to cities like New York and Denver, where politicians have turned them into political pawns.

Since fiscal year 2021, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has registered more than 837,000 encounters with Venezuelan nationals. (The number of migrant apprehensions at the border has fallen significantly as of late in part as a result of increased enforcement by the Mexican government.) There are also currently 242,000 Venezuelans in the United States who benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and hundreds of thousands more who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, are potentially eligible based on “Venezuela’s increased instability and lack of safety due to the enduring humanitarian, security, political, and environmental conditions.”

Given all these factors, how did one of the region’s most prosperous and stable nations fall apart? The answer is more complicated than “extreme socialism,” as Elon Musk tweeted.

Once Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. By 1970, it had a higher income per capita than many European nations. But during the last quarter of the 20th century, Venezuela entered a period of economic contraction.

“There were a number of things that happened during that very long period,” says Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and author of the forthcoming book The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020. “Mostly they had to do with the country not being able to adopt reasonable economic policies and policy reforms because of conflict between its elites.”

Home to the most proven oil reserves in the world, Venezuela enjoyed a boom from exporting its oil. But then global prices plunged, going from $100 a barrel in 2014 to less than $30 two years later. Chávez, who led Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, directed oil revenue to massive social spending programs that benefited the poor. But heavily dependent on that commodity, the country hadn’t sufficiently saved or invested and fell into debt. After Maduro took over in 2013, the economy went into free fall.

In the years since, Venezuela has experienced some of the highest inflation rates worldwide—with a staggering 130,060 percent in 2018. Compounding the crisis for Venezuelans has been a devastating shortage of basic goods, food, and medicine. An estimated 80 percent of the population lives in poverty and the monthly minimum wage of 130 bolivars is equivalent to about $3.60 in the United States. A survey in 2017 found that 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds due to lack of nutrition. Between 2012 and 2020, the economy contracted by 71 percent—more than any other country in modern history not in war and more than double the magnitude of the Great Depression. Crude oil production by the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) also plummeted, reaching a 75-year low during the pandemic.

Adding to the economic downward spiral was government mismanagement and corruption. As Marcela Escobari, who served as assistant administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, explained, years of “expropriations, underinvestment in the oil industry, massive foreign indebtedness, and the gradual undermining of institutions overseeing government expenditures” have hurt the economy badly.

But so did the various sanctions imposed by the United States over almost 20 years. While the Obama administration resorted to targeted sanctions against Maduro’s allies, Trump opted for a “maximum pressure” strategy. He broadened economic sanctions in response to escalating human rights abuses and corruption by the Maduro government. In 2018, Maduro secured a second term after what was generally considered illegitimate elections. Dozens of countries, including the United States, recognized Juan Guaidó as interim president. In late 2022, amid waning support for Guaidó, Venezuela’s opposition National Assembly voted to dissolve the shadow government. Guaidó went to exile in Miami, while an unpopular Maduro has stayed in power and replicated his 2018 response to the 2024 elections.

Starting in 2017, Trump barred the Venezuelan government from borrowing from financial markets, blocked assets, and prohibited US businesses from dealing with PDVSA, the state’s largest source of revenue. At the time, then–national security adviser John Bolton said the measures were necessary to mitigate “the poverty and the starvation and the humanitarian crisis.” But the United Nations human rights chief warned even then that the sweeping sanctions would more likely have the opposite effect and harm the most vulnerable groups.

“It’s one thing to sanction certain regime officials and not let them travel internationally and freeze their bank accounts in the United States,” Rodríguez, who estimates sanctions have contributed to around half of Venezuela’s economic contraction, says. “It’s another thing to hurt the Venezuelan economy because if you hurt the Venezuelan economy, you are hurting ordinary Venezuelans. You’re not hurting Maduro.”

According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had been warned that sanctions could heighten Venezuela’s economic and social crises and incentivize more migration, including potentially to the United States. “This is the point I made at the time: I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” Thomas Shannon, undersecretary of state for political affairs under Trump, told the Post.

Just how much the sanctions have pushed Venezuela to the brink is a subject that continues to be debated. Some analysts have argued that even before the 2017 sanctions, the economic recession, living conditions, and oil production in Venezuela were already on a negative trend and that pre-sanction underlying factors played a greater role in contributing to the country’s collapse than sanctions. As researchers with the Brookings Institute and the Harvard Center for International Development wrote, “Rather than being a result of US-imposed sanctions, much of the suffering and devastation in Venezuela has been, in line with most accounts, inflicted by those in power.”

Others argue that even if true, sanctions have only exacerbated existing problems. In a country heavily dependent on oil—accounting for 90 percent of all exports—the sanctions have been linked to a decline in production “of a dimension seen only when armies blow up oil fields,” one report about the human consequences of economic sanctions by the Center for Economic and Policy Research states. Diminished oil exports have had a negative impact on the country’s revenue and ability to import food and other essential goods with foreign exchange.

A US government watchdog report concluded that sanctions “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy, primarily by limiting revenue from oil production.” The UN Special Rapporteur found that no “strata of society has been untouched” by the negative impact of unilateral sanctions.

In a 2019 paper titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,” Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot argued that the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration “reduced the public’s calorie intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans.” By making it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, they wrote, sanctions contributed to “an estimated more than 40,000 deaths” from 2017 to 2018.

In the months before Venezuela’s presidential election, the Biden administration offered conditional energy sanctions relief in a stated effort to pressure Maduro into committing to a free and fair electoral process. But the White House later reinstated the sanctions because the Venezuelan government failed to uphold their end of the bargain on a deal that included allowing top opposition candidates to run in the presidential race.

“The [Biden] administration has thought of sanctions relief as a ‘switch’ that could increase Venezuela’s economic prospects and keep people in place,” says Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That strategy has failed, he adds, and lifting sanctions “would be to reward Maduro for what is being called the mother of all electoral frauds in Latin American history.”

For some observers, the path forward is a transition to democracy that allows for the normalization of relations with other countries and economic recovery—without sanctions. There have been some fragile signs of improvement. Inflation, while still high, was down to 190 percent last year and Venezuela’s oil exports increased by 12 percent. Luis Oliveros, an economist at the Universidade Metropolitana in Caracas told El Pais that oil production can continue to increase if sanctions stay flexible.

But uncertainty remains as Maduro tightens his grip on power despite the will of voters, blaming the unrest on “North American imperialism and the criminal fascists” and saying he wouldn’t “hesitate to summon the people to a revolution.” Rodríguez at the University of Denver sees one possible scenario where the pariah Maduro regime collapses in the face of mass protests. But more likely, he says, the “viable way out to avoid the consolidation of a full-fledged autocracy” is through a power-sharing agreement. Meanwhile, the US government has reportedly discussed extending Maduro a pardon offer to convince him to step down.

“The polls showing that large numbers of Venezuelans will migrate if Maduro remains in power prove that it isn’t about the economic situation so much as it is about Maduro,” Berg says. “That is to say, it’s about regime type. Without a change in government, Venezuelans will lose hope and migrate. Absolutely nothing changes in Venezuela until Maduro leaves.”

A Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia. (credit: Google)

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When lawmakers in Washington set out to expand a lucrative tax break for the state’s data center industry in 2022, they included what some considered an essential provision: a study of the energy-hungry industry’s impact on the state’s electrical grid.

Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed that provision but let the tax break expansion go forward. As The Seattle Times and ProPublica recently reported, the industry has continued to grow and now threatens Washington’s effort to eliminate carbon emissions from electricity generation.

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Rudy Sulgan)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here. 

Among the many obstacles to enacting federal limits on climate pollution, none has been more daunting than the Supreme Court. That is where the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions met their demise and where the Biden administration’s attempts will no doubt land.

A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.

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After being wrongfully detained by Russian security forces for more than a year on bogus espionage charges, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been released following a massive prisoner swap, the Journal confirmed on Thursday.

The swap—which also reportedly includes two dozen prisoners total from six countries, including former US Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American Radio Free Europe editor Alsu Kurmasheva—comes as a major win for the Biden administration and advocates of press freedoms. The WSJ in particular kept Gershkovich’s wrongful detention front and center in the media throughout his detention, reminding the world that journalism is not a crime. Among those efforts were the hashtag #IStandWithEvan and a front page dedicated to Gershkovich on the first anniversary of his detention. The page was largely blank with the headline, “His story should be here.”

In a statement, President Biden called the exchange “a feat of diplomacy,” adding, “Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over.”

Gershkovich’s family, and the families of some the other American hostages, joined Biden at the White House on Thursday afternoon to celebrate the news. “This is a very good afternoon,” Biden told reporters. He added that he and the families who joined him in person had just spoken to the newly-released Americans by phone from the Oval Office. “I told them, ‘welcome almost home,'” Biden said.

Biden added that Russia released 16 prisoners as part of the deal—including four Americans, five Germans, and seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners—and that eight Russians being held in the West were also being released.

In March 2023, members of Russia’s Federal Security Service—the country’s intelligence agency, also known as the FSB—detained Gershkovich while he was on a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg, according to the Journal. Gershkovich, whose parents fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s, had full press credentials from Russia’s foreign ministry and had reported from Moscow for Agence France Press and the Moscow Times before joining the Journal in January 2022. His arrest marked the first time an American journalist has been held on such charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War.

Russian officials never publicly presented evidence of their espionage claims against Gershkovich. Nonetheless, a Russian court last month sentenced him to 16 years in a Russian penal colony following what American officials described as a sham trial.

The Journal‘s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, celebrated the news in a post on X, calling Gershkovich’s release “a day of great joy and relief for Evan, his family, WSJ colleagues, and all those who campaigned so hard for his release. It is also a great day for press freedom.”

Tucker and Almar Latour, publisher of the Wall Street Journal Publisher and CEO of Dow Jones, credited “broad advocacy for his release around the world” for Gershkovich’s freedom. Gershkovich’s mother, father, and sister also thanked supporters in a statement, writing, “it’s hard to describe what today feels like. We can’t wait to give him the biggest hug and see his sweet and brave smile up close.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement that Gershkovich and Kurmasheva had been “detained and sentenced on spurious charges intended to punish them for their journalism and stifle independent reporting.”

“Their reported release is welcome,” Ginsberg continued, “but it does not change the fact that Russia continues to suppress a free press.” There are still over a dozen other journalists detained by Russia, according to the CPJ’s tracker, and, as of last December, more than 300 journalists are imprisoned around the world.

The Wall Street Journal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Enlarge (credit: Bernhardt Lang)

On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit denied a request to put a hold on recently formulated rules that would limit carbon emissions made by fossil fuel power plants. The request, made as part of a case that sees 25 states squaring off against the EPA, would have put the federal government's plan on hold while the case continued. Instead, the EPA will be allowed to continue the process of putting its rules into effect, and the larger case will be heard under an accelerated schedule.

Here we go again

The EPA's efforts to regulate carbon emissions from power plants go back all the way to the second Bush administration, when a group of states successfully sued the EPA to force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This led to a formal endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases during the Obama administration, something that remained unchallenged even during Donald Trump's term in office.

Obama tried to regulate emissions through the Clean Power Plan, but his second term came to an end before this plan had cleared court hurdles, allowing the Trump administration to formulate a replacement that did far less than the Clean Power Plan. This took place against a backdrop of accelerated displacement of coal by natural gas and renewables that had already surpassed the changes envisioned under the Clean Power Plan.

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Enlarge / Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), testifies before the House Appropriations Subcommittee at the Rayburn House Office Building on May 15, 2024, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Kevin Dietsch)

Firms that serve as intermediaries to negotiate and control prescription drug access in the US "wield enormous power," largely with "extraordinarily opaque" business practices, and may be "inflating drug costs and squeezing Main Street pharmacies" for profit, according to a searing interim report released Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission.

Amid a national focus on America's uniquely astronomical drug costs, the FTC is taking aim at firms that largely work deep in the bowels of the country's labyrinthine health care system, well hidden from public understanding and scrutiny: pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

PBMs were initially hired by various payors—employers, health insurance companies, government health plans, and others—to manage prescription drug benefits through various plans. But PBMs have evolved over the years to also negotiate rebates from drugmakers, set reimbursements for dispensing pharmacies, and develop drug formularies (the list of drugs that a health plan covers.) While those functions alone grant PBMs a large amount of power, consolidation and integration over recent years has concentrated that power in troubling ways, according to the FTC report.

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Enlarge / People and their pets rest at the Oregon Convention Center cooling station in Portland as the city is hit with extreme temperatures caused by a heat dome on June 28, 2021 (credit: Kathryn Elsesser / AFP via Getty Images)

Northwest Oregon had never seen anything like it. Over the course of three days in June 2021, Multnomah County—the state’s most populous county, which rests in the swayback along Oregon’s northern border—recorded highs of 108°, 112°, and 116° Fahrenheit.

Temperatures were so hot that the metal on cable cars melted and the asphalt on roadways buckled. Nearly half the homes in the county lacked cooling systems because of Oregon’s typically gentle summers, where average highs top out at 81°. Sixty-nine people perished from heat stroke, most of them in their homes.

When scientific studies showed that the extreme temperatures were caused by heat domes, which experts say are influenced by climate change, county officials didn’t just chalk it up to a random weather occurrence. They started researching the large fossil fuel companies whose emissions are driving the climate crisis—including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron—and sued them.

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Enlarge / Ozone-producing chemicals come from a variety of sources and don't respect state borders. (credit: John Edward Linden)

On Tuesday, a slim majority of the US Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling that places a stay on rules developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, meant to limit the spread of ozone-generating pollutants across state lines. Because it was handled on an emergency basis, the decision was made without any evidence gathered during lower court proceedings. As a result, the justices don't even agree on the nature of the regulations the EPA has proposed, leading to a blistering dissent from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was joined by the court's three liberal justices.

Bad neighbors

The rule at issue arose from the EPA's regular process of revisiting existing limits in light of changes in public health information and pollution-control technology. In this case, the focus was on ozone-producing chemicals; in 2015, the EPA chose to lower the limit on ozone from 75 to 70 parts per billion.

Once these standards are set, states are required to submit plans that fulfill two purposes. One is to limit pollution within the state itself; the second involves pollution controls that will limit the exposure in states that are downwind of the pollution sources. The EPA is required to evaluate these plans; if they are deemed insufficient, the EPA can require the states to follow a federal plan devised by the EPA.

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Enlarge / Grace Bisch holds a picture of stepson Eddie Bisch who died as a result of an overdose on outside of the U.S. Supreme Court on December 4, 2023 in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court heard arguments regarding a nationwide settlement with Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. (credit: Getty | Michael A. McCoy)

In a 5-4 ruling, the US Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an opioid settlement plan worth billions over the deal's stipulation that the billionaire Sackler family would get lifetime immunity from further opioid-related litigation.

While the ruling may offer long-sought schadenfreude over the deeply despised Sackler family, it is a heavy blow to the over 100,000 people affected by opioid epidemic who could have seen compensation from the deal. With the high court's ruling, the settlement talks will have to begin again and the outcome and possible payouts to plaintiffs are uncertain.

Between 1999 and 2019, as nearly 250,000 Americans died from prescription opioid overdoses, members of the Sackler family siphoned approximately $11 billion from the pharmaceutical company they ran, Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, according to the high court's ruling. In 2007, amid the nationwide epidemic of opioid addiction and overdoses, Purdue affiliates pleaded guilty in federal court to falsely branding the highly-addictive OxyContin as less addictive and less abusive than other pain medications. Out of fear of future litigation, the Sacklers began a "milking program," the high court noted, draining Purdue of roughly 75 percent of its assets.

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Enlarge (credit: hrui)

Earlier this week, the US Senate passed what's being called the ADVANCE Act, for Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy. Among a number of other changes, the bill would attempt to streamline permitting for newer reactor technology and offer cash incentives for the first companies that build new plants that rely on one of a handful of different technologies. It enjoyed broad bipartisan support both in the House and Senate and now heads to President Biden for his signature.

Given Biden's penchant for promoting his bipartisan credentials, it's likely to be signed into law. But the biggest hurdles nuclear power faces are all economic, rather than regulatory, and the bill provides very little in the way of direct funding that could help overcome those barriers.

Incentives

For reasons that will be clear only to congressional staffers, the Senate version of the bill was attached to an amendment to the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act. Nevertheless, it passed by a margin of 88-2, indicating widespread (and potentially veto-proof) support. Having passed the House already, there's nothing left but the president's signature.

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