AP Investigations

This photo provided by Abdul Nasser Saleh shows the deck of the cargo ship Al-Maha, abandoned by its owners, at the seaport of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in January 2024. (Courtesy Abdul Nasser Saleh via AP)

Stuck at sea for years, a sailor’s plight highlights a surge in shipowner abandonment

The United Nations over the last decade has logged an increasing number of crew members abandoned by shipowners around the world.

Monitors at Right Side Broadcasting Network in Opelika, Ala., display Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday, March 2, 2024. In less than a decade, RSBN has gone from upstart internet broadcaster to major player in Trump's MAGA universe, amassing more than two million subscribers on its YouTube channel and on Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Trump TV: Internet broadcaster beams the ex-president’s message directly to his MAGA faithful

FILE - Lara Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2024, at the National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md., Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

Lara Trump is taking the reins and reshaping the RNC in her father-in-law’s image

(AP Illustration/Marshall Ritzel)

US prisoners are being assigned dangerous jobs. But what happens if they are hurt or killed?

Instructor Dave Rose demonstrates a prone handcuffing position on a student during an Arrest & Control Instructor course in Sacramento, Calif., on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024. Rose has trained generations of officers that prone restraint is safe. His pupils are instructors who take his training back to their departments. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Risks of handcuffing someone facedown long known; people die when police training fails to keep up

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This combination of images from body-camera videos shows police encounters with, top row from left, Jeffrey Melvin in Colorado in 2018, Johnathan Binkley in Tennessee in 2019; bottom row from left, Bradford Macomber in Mississippi in 2016 and Samuel Celestin in Florida in 2019. (Colorado Springs Police Department, Knox County Sheriff's Office, Gulfport Police Department, Ocoee Police Department via AP)

AP Investigation: In hundreds of deadly police encounters, officers broke multiple safety guidelines

An Associated Press investigation found that police across the U.S. violated well-known guidelines for safely restraining people in hundreds of fatal encounters that didn’t involve a firearm.

Aboard a small fishing boat, Rohingya refugees faced abuse and other horrors. (AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)

‘They tortured us': Rohingya survivors of fatal capsize say captain raped girls, purposely sank boat

In March, Indonesian officials and local fishermen rescued 75 people from the overturned hull of a boat that was carrying Rohingya refugees when it capsized off Indonesia.

In this image from Richmond Police Department body-camera video, a paramedic, left, holds a syringe as he prepares to inject Ivan Gutzalenko, 47, with the sedative midazolam in Richmond, Calif., on March 10, 2021. (Richmond Police Department via AP)

How a 911 call for trespassing escalated to an injection of a powerful sedative and one man’s death

An investigation led by The Associated Press has found that the practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts.

FILE - A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Feb. 3, 2021. The hunt for COVID-19 origins has gone dark in China. An AP investigation drawing on thousands of pages of undisclosed emails and documents and dozens of interviews found feuding officials and fear of blame ended meaningful Chinese and international efforts to trace the virus almost as soon as they began, despite years of public statements to the contrary. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

Toxic: How the search for the origins of COVID-19 turned politically poisonous

The Chinese government froze meaningful efforts to trace the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, despite publicly declaring that it supported an open scientific inquiry, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Yevgeny. (AP Illustration/Marshall Ritzell)

Russian soldiers who quit Putin’s war get no hero’s welcome abroad as asylum claims surge

Growing numbers of Russian soldiers are trying to get out of the war in Ukraine. Overall asylum claims from Russians have surged in the U.S., France and Germany since Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago, but few are getting in.

Oleksii Yukov examines the body of a Russian soldier he collected on the frontline in the Sloviansk region, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023. The 38-year-old martial arts instructor leads a team of volunteer body collectors in Ukraine. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

The true toll of the war in Ukraine is measured in bodies. This man brings them home, one at a time

Oleksii Yukov says the same thing to all the mothers: We will bring your dead children home. The 38-year-old martial arts instructor leads a team of volunteers in Ukraine who collect both Ukrainian and Russian bodies.

Protesters raise their hands as they face police officers during a rally in Paterson, N.J., Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019, in reaction to the death of Jameek Lowery. Lowery, 27, who recorded a frantic video at police headquarters, wound up unresponsive after being taken to a hospital in an ambulance with police officers inside. He died two days later. (Danielle Parhizkaran/The Record via AP)

He didn’t trust police but sought their help anyway. Two days later, he was dead

Records show Jameek Lowery, a 27-year-old Black man from Paterson, New Jersey, died two days after he was restrained and repeatedly punched by officers.

Karen Goodwin holds a photograph of her son, Austin Hunter Turner, Friday, Sept. 22, 2023, in Bristol, Tenn. Turner died in 2017, at the age of 23, after an encounter with the Bristol Police Department. Goodwin and her husband and kids had always admired paramedics and police. But in body-camera videos, from the moment police arrived, Hunter was treated as a suspect resisting arrest – not as a patient who was having a seizure. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

For years she thought her son had died of an overdose. The police video changed all that

The frantic 911 call described a 23-year-old man suffering a seizure, foaming and shaking. When medics and police arrived, the tiny apartment in Bristol, Tennessee, became a chaotic scene.

In this image from Bristol Police Department body-camera video, Austin Hunter Turner, 23, lies restrained face down in an ambulance in Bristol, Tenn., on Aug. 29, 2017. In body-camera videos, from the moment police arrived, Turner was treated as a suspect resisting arrest – not as a patient who was having a seizure. An investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism and FRONTLINE (PBS) has found that, over a decade, more than 1,000 people died after police subdued them through physical holds, stun guns, body blows and other force not intended to be lethal. (Bristol Police Department via AP)

Key findings from AP’s investigation into police force that isn’t supposed to be lethal

Every day, police in the U.S. rely on common use-of-force tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them.

This combination of photos shows, top row from left, Anthony Timpa, Austin Hunter Turner, Carl Grant, Damien Alvarado, Delbert McNiel and Demetrio Jackson; second row from left, Drew Edwards, Evan Terhune, Giovani Berne, Glenn Ybanez, Ivan Gutzalenko and Mario Clark; bottom row from left, Michael Guillory, Robbin McNeely, Seth Lucas, Steven Bradley Beasley, Taylor Ware and Terrell "Al" Clark. Each died after separate encounters with police in which officers used force that is not supposed to be deadly. (AP Photo)

Why did more than 1,000 people die after police subdued them with force that isn’t meant to kill?

Every day, police in the U.S. rely on common use-of-force tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them.

A worker peels shrimp in a tin-roofed processing shed in the hamlet of Tallarevu, in Kakinada district, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024. Dr. Sushmitha Meda, a dermatologist at a nearby government hospital in the city of Kakinada, said she treats four to five shrimp peelers every day for frostbite and infection. It’s a preventable problem, she said. Cotton gloves covered with latex gloves can protect peelers’ hands, but few can afford a $3 box of gloves. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.)

AP finds grueling conditions in Indian shrimp industry that report calls ‘dangerous and abusive’

India is the top supplier of shrimp to the U.S., with Indian shrimp stocked in freezers at most of the nation’s biggest grocery store and restaurant chains.

50-year-old Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, is pictured with her children, daughter-in-law and grandson in their temporary modular house in Kolomyya, Ivano-Frankivsk region on Feb. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)

Russia forces Ukrainians in occupied territories to take its passports – and fight in its army

Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship.

FILE - The exterior of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is shown in Hailey, Idaho, on Sept., 19, 2023. (AP Photo/Jason Dearen, File)

Former Mormon bishop highlighted in AP investigation arrested on felony child sex abuse charges

A former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was featured in an Associated Press investigation into how the church protects itself from allegations of sexual abuse was arrested by police in Virginia this week after being indicted on charges he sexually abused his daughter w

FILE - The interior of the I-Soon office, also known as Anxun in Mandarin, is seen after office hours in Chengdu in southwestern China's Sichuan Province on Feb. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Dake Kang, File)

Behind the doors of a Chinese hacking company, a sordid culture fueled by influence, alcohol and sex

China’s hacking industry, leaked internal documents reveal, is vast in size and scope but also suffers from shady business practices, disgruntlement over pay and work quality, and poor security protocols.

FILE - Manuel Rocha sits in his office at Steel Hector & Davis in Miami in January 2003, joining the firm to help open doors in Latin America. On Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024, Rocha, 73, told a judge he would admit to federal counts of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, charges that could land him behind bars for several years. (Raul Rubiera/Miami Herald via AP, File)

Red flags, missed clues: How accused US diplomat-turned-Cuban spy avoided scrutiny for decades

Long before career U.S. diplomat Manuel Rocha was arrested on charges of being a secret agent of Cuba for decades, there were plenty of red flags.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro holds a small copy of his nation's constitution during ceremony marking the start of the judicial year at the Supreme Court in Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)

Exclusive: A secret US program spied on top Venezuelan officials to build drug cases

A secret memo obtained by The Associated Press details a covert operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that sent undercover operatives into Venezuela to surreptitiously record and build drug-trafficking cases against the country’s leadership – a plan the U.S. acknowledged from the sta

In this 1973 photo, three guards shake down and body search a prisoner and at the Cummins Unit of' Arkansas Department of Corrections in Grady, Ark. (Bruce Jackson via AP)

A hidden web links hundreds of popular food brands to work done by US prisoners

In a sweeping two-year investigation, The Associated Press found goods linked to prisoners wind up in the supply chains of everything from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour and Coca-Cola.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends the closing arguments in the Trump Organization civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court in the Manhattan borough of New York, Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024. (Shannon Stapleton/Pool Photo via AP)

Dissolving Trump’s business empire would stand apart in history of NY fraud law

Within days, Donald Trump could potentially have his sprawling real estate business empire ordered “dissolved” for repeated misrepresentations on financial statements to lenders.

This image from video posted by Hamas on Dec. 20, 2023, purports to show Hamas militants using machining equipment to make their own domestic copies of the AM-50 Sayyad, an Iranian-made a sniper rifle that fires a .50- caliber round powerful enough to punch through up to an inch of steel. Experts interviewed by The Associated Press said it would be nearly impossible for Hamas to manufacture a safe and accurate sniper rifle using the rudimentary equipment shown in the video. Watermark at upper left reads “military media.” (Hamas via AP)

Hamas fights with a patchwork of weapons built by Iran, China, Russia and North Korea

Iranian sniper rifles. AK-47s from China and Russia. North Korean-built rocket-propelled grenades. Anti-tank rockets secretly cobbled together in Gaza An Associated Press analysis of more than 150 videos and photos taken in the three months of combat since Hamas launched its Oct. 7 surprise attack o

U.S.-funded infrastructure in Gaza largely unscathed as death toll soars

The United States has spent more than $7 billion on humanitarian aid and building infrastructure in the Palestinian territories in recent decades, while sending more than $3 billion a year to Israel for its military.

Lisa Hohnstreiter holds a smartphone displaying a photograph of her mother, Nancy Harrison, and her brother, Friday, Nov. 24, 2023, in Warren, Mich. Not long after DeAngelo Martin was released from jail, he killed for the second time. On March 19, 2019, the body of Nancy Harrison, 52, was discovered in an abandoned house on Coventry Street. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

A serial killer set Detroit on edge. Police missteps over 15 years allowed him to roam free

DeAngelo Martin killed four women in Detroit and raped two others before he was captured in 2019. The Associated Press has found that Detroit police failed to follow up on leads or take investigative steps that may have averted the killing spree.

Workers bag cocoa beans at a warehouse inside the conservation zone of the Omo Forest Reserve in Nigeria, Monday, Oct. 23, 2023..(AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Cocoa grown illegally in a Nigerian rainforest heads to companies that supply major chocolate makers

As the world’s demand for chocolate grows, farmers in Nigeria are moving into protected areas of a forest reserve that’s home to endangered species like African forest elephants.

Rohingya child bride, R, age 16, holds her newborn baby while standing in an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Oct. 4, 2023. R left Bangladesh's refugee camps for Malaysia in 2022 to marry her 27-year-old husband as conditions in the camps deteriorated. R says she wasn't ready to have a baby, but felt lonely and is now glad to have the company. (AP Photo/Victoria Milko)

Young Rohingya girls fleeing violence, starvation find new horrors in arranged marriages in Malaysia

Scores of underage Rohingya girls fleeing violence and starvation in their homeland of Myanmar and in the refugee camps of neighboring Bangladesh are being forced into arranged marriages with older men in Malaysia who frequently abuse them.

Chelsea Goodrich poses for a portrait in Ketchum, Idaho, on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023. Goodrich's father, a popular Idaho dentist and former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, was excommunicated after sharing details about his relationship with her when she was a child during a religious confession. Recordings obtained by The Associated Press show that instead of helping prosecutors, the church used a legal playbook that has helped protect itself from sex abuse claims. Goodrich's father is today a free man, and she says she decided to speak out to protect other children. (AP Photo/Jason Dearen)

Recordings show how the Mormon church protects itself from child sex abuse claims

The recordings chronicle how a church official persuaded a member who claimed she was abused by her father to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

FILE - An FBI seal is seen on a wall on Aug. 10, 2022, in Omaha, Neb. A former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested in a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation, accused of secretly serving as an agent of Cuba’s government, The Associated Press has learned. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

Former US ambassador arrested in Florida, accused of serving as an agent of Cuba, AP source says

The Associated Press has learned that a former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested in a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation and is accused of secretly serving as an agent of the Cuban government.

(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)

Intercepted calls from the front lines in Ukraine show a growing number of Russian soldiers want out

In audio intercepts from the front lines in Ukraine, Russian soldiers speak in shorthand. They describe 200s to mean dead, 300s to mean wounded, and 500s to describe people who refuse to fight.

Longtime Florida social worker Connie Going looks at a computer screen with an image of her adopted son Davion in her adoptions office June 12, 2023, in St. Petersburg, Fla. Going said the Family-Match tool gives false hope to waiting parents by failing to deliver successful matches, and ultimately makes her job harder. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

Inspired by online dating, AI tool for adoption matchmaking falls short for vulnerable foster kids

Former social worker Thea Ramirez has developed an artificial intelligence-powered tool that she says helps social service agencies find the best adoptive parents for some of the nation’s most vulnerable kids.

This image from video provided by Bolaji John shows the burning Trinity Spirit anchored 15 miles off the coast of Nigeria, which caught fire on Feb. 2, 2022. The ship had no insurance, no flag, and had fallen into a state of disrepair. Five workers were killed and two others left unaccounted for in the blast. (Bolaji John via AP)

Deadly explosion off Nigeria points to threat posed by aging oil ships around the world

An explosion aboard the Trinity Spirit off the coast of Nigeria last year that killed five workers and left two others unaccounted for stands among the deadliest tragedies on an oil ship or platform in recent years.

This image from video posted to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12, 2023 shows a live-fire exercise dubbed operation “Strong Pillar” outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip. (Hamas via AP)

Hamas practiced in plain sight, posting video of mock attack weeks before border breach

Less than a month before Hamas fighters blew through Israel’s “Iron Wall” in an attack that would leave more than 1,200 Israelis dead, they practiced in a very public dress rehearsal.

FILE - The hall of historic Waiola Church in Lahaina and nearby Lahaina Hongwanji Mission are engulfed in flames along Wainee Street on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023, in Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii. (Matthew Thayer/The Maui News via AP, File)

An old car tire, burnt trees and a utility pole may be key in finding how the Maui wildfire spread

Melted remains of an old car tire. Two burned trees. A stump of an abandoned utility pole. These are among the pieces of evidence investigators are examining as they seek to solve the mystery of last month’s Maui wildfire.