Writing for Mother Jones, and the Dallas Morning News, Ian Shearn and Laird Townsend report on a legal case with broad implications for human rights, involving American companies that conduct business in foreign lands. A Supreme Court ruling could open the door for ExxonMobil and other multi-national companies to face trial on human rights allegations. Shearn and Townsend report: “As the Supreme Court grapples ...
Reporting for Witness LA, Matthew Fleisher investigates campaign fundraisers that seem to influence assignments and upper level promotions in the Sheriff’s Department. “This summer, I received a phone call from a source in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who said he had information about Undersheriff Paul Tanaka’s pay-to-play scheme. “Pay-to-play exists in the LA Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “I know because I paid.” ...
From ig Publishing, a new book by Trevor Aaronson on the FBI’s manufactured cases of terrorism. Called The Terror Factory, the book expands on Aaronson’s award winning article published in Mother Jones. With a fellowship from the University of California-Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, and a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Aaronson exposed how the FBI concocted schemes, using informants to ...
Marilyn Berlin Snell reports from Thoreau, New Mexico, about the reasons behind a suicide epidemic among Navajo teens. “At the far end of the street, next to the Zuni Mountain pawn shop, is a dirt-packed and weedy cemetery. Plastic gladioli and roses decorate many of the graves, a few newly turned, offering the road’s only splash of color. Some of the ...
(Bobi, Niger State, Nigeria) – Reporting for Premium Times and the Daily Trust, Idris Akinbajo finds widespread fraud in the Nigerian federal government program intended to fight poverty and meet Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). His three-part series found that toilets built for school children were “actually pit latrines with no water. They were so poorly constructed that they were damaged by ...
From I-News in Denver, Colorado: “The number of wildfires in Colorado has exploded during the past decade. So has the number of people living in high-risk fire zones. And public policies for dealing with both actually risk making the state’s fire danger even worse. We analyzed data from the U.S. Census and the state, and found that one in four ...
From reporter Art Levine, an investigation of the story behind a Bain Capital success: “Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney in 1984, prides itself on turning around failing businesses. But lawsuits and critics allege that controversial profit-maximizing methods and the residential treatment industry don’t mix.” The story was published by Salon.com in partnership with The Investigative Fund at ...
Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock reports on why Alaska authorities had shelved the homicide investigation into the shooting death of a young boy, Durga Owens, in a remote area north of Fairbanks. Listen to her two-part report on Alaska Public Radio. ...
Reporting for MSNBC.com, Robert McClure of InvestigateWest finds that city and state parks around the country are being developed into golf courses, condominium – hotel complexes, and parking garages, all to raise funds for cash-starved government bodies. This, despite promises to maintain open and recreational space that relied on federal funds for land acquisition and improvements. The National Park Service has an oversight ...
Reporting for the Atlantic, Habiba Nosheen and Hilke Schellman describe the fate of girls in Pakistan: aborted and abandoned by families who prefer boys. The birth of a girl is cause for mourning in a country where parents calculate the cost of having male or female children. As their report explains: “A recent United Nations report on sex selection cites the Population Council’s research that ...