The way lenders and collectors pursue consumer debt has undergone an aggressive transformation in America. Collectors today don’t give up easy, often pursuing debts for years. It’s now routine for companies to sue debtors, then seize their wages or the cash in their bank accounts. For many people, these changes have profoundly affected their lives.

Driven by big business and insurers, states nationwide are dismantling workers’ compensation, slashing benefits to injured workers and making it more difficult for them to get care. Meanwhile employers are paying the lowest rates for workers’ comp insurance since the 1970s.

An 18-year-old said she was attacked at knifepoint. Then she said she made it up. That’s where our story begins.

A look at how the region is grappling with terrorism attacks — and how revolving-door prisons could be compounding the threat.

Never-before-released government prescription records shows that some doctors and other health professionals across the country prescribe large quantities of drugs known to be potentially harmful, disorienting or addictive for their patients. And officials have done little to detect or deter these hazardous prescribing patterns.

ProPublica is examining doping and unorthodox medicine in the big-money world of professional sports, and why it’s so hard to police.

The Colorado River is dying – the victim of legally sanctioned overuse, the relentless forces of urban growth, willful ignorance among policymakers and a misplaced confidence in human ingenuity. ProPublica investigates the policies that are putting this precious resource in peril.

About 150 Americans a year die by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. The toll does not have to be so high.

ProPublica is tracking the financial ties between doctors and medical companies.

ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot are exploring the effects of the chemical mixture Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans and their families, as well as their fight for benefits.

A landmark 1998 settlement with Big Tobacco awarded states billions of dollars a year to offset the health-care costs of smoking. What seemed like a boon become a debt trap for many state and local governments when they used it to promise investors billions in the future in exchange for cash advances.

Investigating America’s racial divide in education, housing and beyond.

In the first detailed examination of the relationship between Firestone and Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, this ProPublica/Frontline investigation lays bare the role of a global corporation in a brutal African conflict.

Payday loans represent only one part of a high-cost lending industry that targets lower income consumers, trapping many in deep debt. When regulators and lawmakers try to crack down, lenders tweak their products to get around the law.

Vast deposits of natural gas have brought a drilling boom across much of the country, but the technique being used, called hydraulic fracturing, is suspected of causing hundreds of cases of water contamination. Now environmentalists and lawmakers are pushing for closer oversight of the gas industry, which is pushing back.

ProPublica is exploring how this new model of schooling has raised questions about public transparency and private profits.

Investigating the Pentagon’s failing efforts to timely recover and ID those missing in action from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

The tragedy in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and more recent worries about a flu epidemic have left doctors, ethicists and health officials grappling with a difficult question: In times of medical crises, which patients should be given access to lifesaving treatments if the number in need far exceeds the ability of the system to cope?

Injection wells used to dispose of the nation’s most toxic waste are showing increasing signs of stress as regulatory oversight falls short and scientific assumptions prove flawed.

The number of internships in the United States has ballooned over the past few decades. But oversight and legal protection for unpaid interns hasn’t kept up.

As investors left the housing market in the run-up to the meltdown, Wall Street sliced up and repackaged troubled assets based on those shaky mortgages, often buying those new packages themselves. That created fake demand, hid the banks’ real exposure, increased their bonuses — and ultimately made the mortgage crisis worse.

More and more elderly Americans are choosing to spend their later years in assisted living facilities. But is this loosely regulated, multi-billion dollar industry putting seniors at risk?

More than 8 million Americans live in high-risk flood areas, and the number is expected to climb sharply as the climate changes. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, ProPublica is investigating the government’s response to disasters, and how coastal communities build and rebuild despite the threat.

U.S. counterterror operations have stretched beyond al-Qaida and the war in Afghanistan, with hundreds of drone strikes occurring in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. But many aspects of the effort are shrouded in secrecy – including casualty counts, who exactly the U.S. is targeting, and the administration’s legal justifications for the war.