Guards watched his cell burn. Then they held the ambulance 28 minutes.
Guards watched his cell burn. Then they held the ambulance 28 minutes.
Plus: Meta's secret $50 billion Louisiana deal, Myanmar's rare earth mines, and a baseball diamond behind barbed wire.
Jul 27, 2026
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Jason Stephens spent half an hour locked in a burning cell while guards sprayed pepper spray through his food slot and walked away. Shannon Heffernan, reporting with WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, counted more than 70 fires at Illinois's Joliet Treatment Center in three years, a dozen of them men setting themselves alight. The prison opened in 2017 as a mental health model. Cellblocks had no sprinklers. Alarms sat disconnected. When firefighters finally loaded Stephens into an ambulance, guards refused to open the gate for 28 minutes. He died two weeks later, and the fires have not stopped.
Louisiana's revenue secretary crossed the State Capitol in April 2024 and asked a colleague to hand over his bill, without saying why. The fiber-optic rebate came out the other side as a data center rebate. Eli Tan and Maureen Farrell reconstructed the nine months Meta spent securing a $50 billion complex through nondisclosure agreements, skipped hearings, and a state senator who sold 300 acres nearby. Insurers would not fully cover it. Tracy Williams watched her trailer get crushed and slept in her car with four children. Meta can walk away after four years.
Min paid a broker $290 to get himself and his younger brother jobs at a rare earth mining site on Myanmar's border with China. His brother died in a landslide weeks later, and his body never came home. Emily Fishbein and Jauman Naw traced the industry that supplies most of the world's heavy rare earths, the elements inside wind turbines, electric vehicles, and advanced weapons. Workers described acid injected into mountains and rivers gone lifeless. One supervisor said a dead Myanmar worker was worth 100,000 yuan at most. A dead Chinese worker could be worth twenty times that.
The score was tied 10 to 10 in the top of the tenth, and Tets Furukawa was about to face his 42nd batter. He pitched from a mound built with lumber teenagers stole from a hospital site after dark. Lisa Heyamoto reconstructed April 18, 1945, when the high school team from the Gila River incarceration camp met the undefeated Arizona state champions. Kenichi Zenimura had cut a hole in the barbed wire and carved the diamond out of desert scrub. The two teams shook hands afterward and scheduled a rematch in Tucson. It never happened.
