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 ...
For InsideClimate News, Marcus Stern and Sebastian Jones report on possible reasons for recent explosions of oil transported by rail. An excerpt: The worry, according to a half-dozen industry experts who spoke with InsideClimate News, is that some producers are adjusting the pressure settings to leave in substantial amounts of natural gas liquids. “There is a strong suspicion that a number of ...
Author Nick Turse, who wrote Kill Anything that Moves with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has shared in the 2014 I.F. Stone “Izzy” Award for his relentless investigations into civilian war deaths. The Award was established by the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College. The award citation for Turse: In news pieces and a book published last year, Turse ...
Hella Winston, an independent journalist who has investigated sexual abuse cover-ups in the Ultra Orthodox Jewish communities of New York and New Jersey, reports that a Brooklyn criminal case against a whistleblower, the father of a sex abuse victim, has fallen apart. Winston has received two grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to look into cases that had been covered ...
From Diana Washington Valdez, in a special report for the El Paso Times, the frustrating search for clues to solve the murders of several women whose bodies were found, many years later, in shallow graves on the outskirts of Albuquerque. Families are upset that police have made so little progress. An excerpt: Relatives of several of the West Mesa murder victims, whose bodies were discovered in ...
For Daily Kos, the story of the continuing struggle for equality in insurance coverage and treatment for mental illnesses. As Mary Ann Swissler reports, federal law has required that insurance plans treat mental and medical coverage equally, since 2008. But the reality is quite different, according to her survey of patients. Excerpts: “In [a survey conducted by Swissler], 53 percent of the women ...