Amanda Wilson has the story of a North Carolina town that found new purpose after the Cannon towels mill shut down. That is: supplying human subjects for medical research projects far into the future. For Pacific Standard, she reports: The [Duke University] spinoff is a joint venture with LabCorp, one of the largest clinical lab testing firms in the U.S. In the partnership, Duke brings biological ...
Graham Kates of The Crime Report has found that environmental violations are rarely prosecuted by the federal government. An excerpt: …an analysis by The Crime Report of thousands of records compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), reveals that enforcement of corporate environmental crime remains extremely rare. More than 64,000 facilities are currently listed in agency databases as being in violation ...
Reporting from Fiji, site of an $8.7 million get-away from rising sea levels in the Pacific, Christopher Pala reports the purchase had no clear purpose: “…while [Kiribati president Anote] Tong’s warnings of impending doom for atoll dwellers have brought him a measure of fame abroad and even a panel that nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, in Kiribati they elicit ...
Matt Rusling reports from Kanchanaburi, Thailand for BorderlessNews on abusive labor brokers who supply workers for the food processing industry. An excerpt: “Aye” sat cross-legged on a concrete floor and described the violence she has witnessed since she started working at the fruit processing plant. “There are cases where people end up in hospitals – I’m talking broken legs, hands and fractured ...
The warning signs were there, but disregarded. Rone Tempest reports on state and federal dollars wasted on a failed Wyoming energy project that had promised to provide electricity throughout the American Southwest. An excerpt: The Two Elk saga is made up of intertwined stories: one man’s outsized dream; Wyoming’s desire to believe in energy castles in the air, kept aloft by taxpayer dollars; ...
Nick Baumann, for Mother Jones, tells the story of Naji Mansour, an American citizen living abroad who refused to become an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He and his family suffered the consequences. From the article: Two weeks into his detention, Naji’s jailers escorted him from his cell into a clean, bright room, where at last he saw ...
From Robert McClure for InvestigateWest and The Tyee, of British Columbia Canada, an investigation of the green energy claims from backers of burning “biomass” for fuel. In theory, the plants and trees burned are renewable, and therefore “green” as a source of energy. But the smoke produced clouds the sunny portrait of a carbon-neutral alternative. Photo credit: Paul Joseph Brown/ecosystemphoto.com ...
From Ian Shearn, published in The Nation, the story of a U.S. government decision to make a $3 billion loan which contradicted President Obama’s pledge to address climate change by phasing out fossil fuel subsidies. Shearn uncovered evidence that the project was the cause of a deadly landslide and has continuing disastrous impacts on the local environment and communities of ...
Reid Frazier has won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award, from the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) for his series “The Coming Chemical Boom.” His investigation aired on The Allegheny Front, a program carried by Pennsylvania public radio stations. In a series of reports to inform his audience on what might happen when the petrochemical industry comes to Pennsylvania as proposed, Frazier traveled to Texas ...
From Joseph Sorrentino for the Sante Fe Reporter and In These Times, the story of real estate con games that prey upon the poor in New Mexico. An excerpt: “People are losing their land and their money to suspect real estate deals. They’re also buying land thinking they can live there, only to learn too late that they can’t.” “Many people buying land in ...