Investigations
Somebody kept paperwork, and eventually somebody else read it.
Merck Pulled Vioxx From the Market in 2004 After Linking It to Tens of Thousands of Heart Attacks. The FDA Didn't Formally Revoke Its Approval Until 2022.
On May 20, 1999, the FDA approved Merck's application to sell rofecoxib under the brand name Vioxx, an arthritis and pain pill from the new COX-2 inhibitor class. Merck's own 1999 annual report put it on the cover: Vioxx was "the biggest, fastest, and
A Swiss Court Convicted Credit Suisse of Laundering Cocaine Money in June 2022, the First Criminal Conviction of a Major Bank in the Country's History. Nine Months Later, the Bank No Longer Existed.
On the weekend of March 18–19, 2023, the president of the Swiss Confederation, the head of the Swiss National Bank, and the chief executives of the country's two largest banks worked through two nights to close a deal before Asian markets opened Monday morning. The government invoked
Monsanto Scientists Ghostwrote a 2000 Study Clearing Glyphosate of Cancer Risk, Letting Three Outside Academics Sign Their Names. A Journal Retracted the Paper in December 2025, Twenty-Five Years and 614 Citations Later.
In March 2015, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization classified glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, as "probably carcinogenic to humans." Monsanto's chief technology officer, Robb Fraley, called the finding an outrage the same week. Internal company documents later showed
Nepal Asked China in May 2026 for Earlier Warning on Glacier Movements Along Their Border. Three Months Later, a Glacial Collapse Killed Over 1,000 People Downstream With No Warning at All.
On August 26, 2026, a piece of ice and rock roughly a third the size of Central Park broke off Langtang Lirung, a Himalayan peak on the Nepal-China border, fell more than a kilometer, and turned into a debris flood that traveled nearly 100 kilometers down the Trishuli River
BP Canceled a $128,000 Safety Test on the Well to Save Time. Eleven Hours Later, It Blew Out and Killed Eleven Men.
At around 11:15 a.m. on April 20, 2010, a Schlumberger logging crew packed up its equipment and left the Deepwater Horizon by helicopter. BP had flown them out to the rig four days earlier to run a cement bond log, the only test that could confirm whether the
Odebrecht Paid $788 Million in Bribes to Win Contracts Across Latin America. When It Came Time to Pay Its Own Fine, It Said It Couldn't Afford To.
In December 2016, the Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht admitted, under oath, to something no company had ever formally confessed to before: it had operated an internal department whose sole function was paying bribes. The unit had a name — the Division of Structured Operations — an org chart, a dedicated budget, encrypted
NSO Group Says It Sells Pegasus Spyware Only to Vetted Governments to Fight Terrorism and Crime. Citizen Lab Found the Software on the Phone of Jamal Khashoggi's Wife Months Before His Murder.
In March 2021, researchers examining the iPhone of a Saudi activist found a file disguised as a GIF sitting in the device's iMessage data. It was not a GIF. It was a PDF containing a compressed image format called JBIG2, engineered so precisely that the individual pixels of
Clearview AI Scraped Billions of Photos Without Anyone's Consent to Build a Facial Recognition Database. Its Legal Defense Is That the First Amendment Gave It the Right.
In January 2020, Kashmir Hill of The New York Times published a story about a company almost no one had heard of: a small startup called Clearview AI that had built a facial recognition app capable of identifying a stranger from a single photo, then surfacing every other picture of
Equifax Discovered Its Data Breach on July 29, 2017. Its CFO Sold Nearly $950,000 in Company Stock Three Days Later.
On July 29, 2017, an Equifax security engineer updated a network-monitoring certificate that had been allowed to expire ten months earlier, sat unnoticed for 19 months, and immediately watched suspicious traffic pouring out of a consumer-dispute database. The company would spend the next 40 days deciding when, and
AliExpress Ran Inaudible Audio Through Visitors' Speakers to Fingerprint Their Devices. It Only Got Caught Because It Broke Someone's Bluetooth Headphones.
In August 2026, a developer's Bluetooth headphones started misbehaving. They wouldn't switch cleanly between his laptop and his phone anymore — the multipoint pairing that's supposed to be seamless kept glitching, and only when he had an AliExpress tab open. Most people would have blamed
Traders Rigged a Benchmark Behind $300 Trillion in Contracts. A UK Court Just Ruled the Only Man Convicted of It Didn't Get a Fair Trial.
Regulators fined the banks behind the Libor scandal more than $9 billion combined. The one trader who went to prison for it just had his conviction overturned a decade later — and is now suing his old employer for $400 million.
Hooker Chemical Sold a Toxic Waste Dump to a School Board for $1 in 1953. Congress Needed 27 More Years to Write a Law About It.
Hooker Chemical buried 21,000 tons of waste, capped it, and sold it for a dollar with a deed that predicted exactly what would happen next. It took a leaked study and a five-hour hostage standoff to get anyone to act.