Growing up in Southern Illinois, I knew many children whose basic needs went unmet. Reporting here decades later, I began to wonder why the system wasn’t doing more to help their families.

In Southern Illinois, many families suspected of neglect cycle through the child welfare system. Too often they don’t get the help they need.

“The problems at Parchman are severe, systemic, and exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision,” the report said.

A federal mandate for health care workers was supposed to close the vaccine gap. Weeks after the deadline, many remain unvaccinated, new data shows.

A meticulous review of arrest and charging data from Operation Lone Star, a Texas border security initiative, raised more questions than it answered.

Since 2005, Texas Govs. Rick Perry and Greg Abbott have launched a multitude of widely publicized and costly border initiatives, which usually kicked off during their reelection campaigns or while they were considering bids for higher office.

Secret IRS files reveal the top US income earners and how their tax rates vary more than their incomes. Tech titans, hedge fund managers and heirs dominate the list, while the likes of Taylor Swift and LeBron James didn’t even make the top 400.

There are many differences between the rich and the rest of us, but one of the most consequential for your taxes is whether most of your income comes from wages.

A process called coordinated entry, used by cities across the country, is meant to match homeless people with housing. In San Francisco’s version, the system could be making it harder for some populations to get indoors.