Matt Drange
@mattdrange
Reporter. More interested in actions than words. Teaching @Laney_College. Volunteering @SPJ_NorCal, Biketopia Berkeley & @SABEW. Tips ⬇️
NEW: California AG's office opens rare investigation of a local school district - Rosemead's @ElMonteUHSD. The case follows protests, resignations, teacher arrests and at least 4 civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse. The latest fallout from my reporting: businessinsider.com/el-monte-schoo…
My colleagues @BusinessInsider and I spent months mapping 1,240 data centers (!!) nationwide and investigating data centers' impact on water, power, pollution, and local economies. The series is rolling out this week.
Dirty equipment, foul water, falsified records: The FDA allowed some of the most troubled factories in India to continue shipping generic drugs to the U.S. even when its own inspectors warned of life-threatening lapses in quality. @propublica propublica.org/article/fda-dr…
for the past year my (former) colleagues @BusinessInsider and i looked into the true costs of data center buildout across the country. bit by painstaking bit, we pieced together a database of permitted data centers & docs of water use + tax incentives. the series is rolling out🧵
Was very excited when Last Week Tonight asked @404media.co to help out with research/fact checking for an AI Slop segment that ran last night. I thought it turned out very good! Here's a few mentions of our reporting, and the full segment: youtube.com/watch?v=TWpg1R…
"Some of the people who have received the messages were so surprised they didn’t believe it was really Zuckerberg. One person assumed it was a hoax and didn’t respond for several days." By @MeghanBobrowsky @berber_jin1 and @bzcohen wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-a…
The State Department plans to start requiring that all applicants for student visas have their social-media accounts set to public so they can be scrutinized for anti-U.S. sentiment. washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
Another sign that the dollar’s dominance is in trouble: US importers are increasingly being asked by their foreign counterparties to settle transactions in currencies other than the US dollar, such as euros, RMB, Mexican pesos, and Canadian dollars. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
The feds arresting the city comptroller for demanding a judicial warrant while the mayor was across the street barring the press from public briefings for questions he doesn’t like is where we’re at
Mayor Eric Adams just barred @C_Sommerfeldt from coming back into the off-topic series. "Make sure security knows, he's not allowed back into this room," Adams says. Chris is rarely called on (on purpose) during off-topic.
"Ingallinera envisions his development as a special jurisdiction independent from the Bay Area and the state, a zoning that would require an emergency declaration from President Trump. Frontier Valley fits the template of a 'Freedom City.'" By @rachelswan sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl…
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Amazon's Andy Jassy tells employees bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
.@WSJ scoop: The State Bar of California has opened an investigation into the tactics used by Gloria Allred’s law firm in its dealings with clients. The investigation was prompted by an article in the Journal. wsj.com/us-news/law/ca…
Over the same recent period, CBP fielded 242 tips about other types of potential violations, such as the import of counterfeit or unsafe items, an increase of just 42 percent. wired.com/story/tariff-e…
NEW: California is trying to regulate its powerful AI giants -- again. A long-awaited report that came out minutes ago says companies are “simply inadequate at fully understanding” risks and harms. It has the potential to make big changes. theverge.com/ai-artificial-…
In response to a Chronicle investigation, a lawsuit accuses State Farm of using an ‘illegal scheme’ to leave California wildfire survivors underinsured By @susieneilson and @meganfanmunce sfchronicle.com/california-wil…
🤔 x.com/ashleevance/st…
It’s my understanding that three of the four members of the All In podcast were allowed to invest in Anduril’s latest round but no room was found for one Jason Calacanis
We teamed up with @business to investigate how the world’s largest tech companies send their “secret” passwords. We found a marketplace that feeds an opaque and sprawling network of untrusted middlemen – including a notorious surveillance enabler bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
New: Since January, dozens of companies have been mentioning deportations in SEC filings, saying they risk causing labor shortages & a recession. This is very unusual. For reference, between June 2020 and Jan. 2025, just 6 filings mentioned deportations: wired.com/story/companie…
scoop - talks between openai and msft have gotten so bad that openai is now considering accusing msft of anticompetitive behavior before federal regulators they are also fighting over the terms of openai's windsurf acquisition more below @WSJ wsj.com/tech/ai/openai…
In 2018, California became the first state to let DAs revisit old prison sentences that seemed unjust. Another 5 have since passed similar policies. But of the 1,000+ people resentenced, almost none are women. I wrote about an effort to change that. nytimes.com/2025/06/13/hea…