News Gems

Dying of Neglect

Award-winning Washington Post reporters Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest just concluded a stunning series, "Careless Detention: Medical Care in Immigrant Prisons." Some 33,000 immigrants are crammed into these facilities, often for minor offenses, and many linger in detention for months or years. Goldstein and Priest use a wealth of personal testimonies and official documents to expose a shocking pattern of inadequate care.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers….

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse. Actions taken -- or not taken -- by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts who reviewed some death files for The Post.

The series includes videos, photo slideshows and an interactive map. Keep it in mind for next year's Pulitzers.

www.washingtonpost.com/carelessdetention

Trash Talk

The cologne-scented pages of the May GQ feature a wonderful story about, of all things, garbage. In "This is Paradise," Jeanne Marie Laskas describes with pungent detail the Puente Hills Landfill near Los Angeles and the philosophical men and massive machines who work there, burying some of the 250 million tons of garbage that Americans throw out each year. Here Laskas introduces the main theme of her story with this great nut paragraph:

A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie Fries, piled up right here off the 605 freeway. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we toss out a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack-cake wrapper, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for offending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures, remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.

The story is full of marvelous scenes, such as this one where Laskas visits the home of Joe Haworth, a retired environmental engineer who likes to visit the landfill, and his wife, Shelly:

We stop at the house and Shelly won’t let us in because it’s too messy for company, and so we sit in the backyard and sip Pinot Grigio and I marvel at the odd assortment of stuff in the yard and on the porch, a little crooked fake Christmas tree and an empty pond and little ceramic dwarfs. Shelly is as tall as Olive Oyl, with a handsome face and a jet-black mane, and she chain-smokes and speaks the same crazily observant language as her husband. The two get tangled in notions, in thinking about what it would be like if there were no more people on earth, in trying to remember names of species of lizards, or names of saints, until one of them has to run inside and get a book to look it up.

At one point, when Joe is inside trying to find his encyclopedia of movie actors, she turns to me and says: “Did you notice anything funny about landfill people? They’re the most ethical bunch of people. So many of them were Jesuit trained, so maybe it goes back to that, where doing your best for the common good is a paramount principle. But they approach their jobs in the most ethical way. They’re taking the worst two things we have—trash and sewage—and turning them into golf courses and wonderful things.

“Isn’t that weird? It’s like a cause for these people. I’ve noticed it from the beginning, having to go to all these dreadful conferences and things. I used to think, These should be our politicians. We should only elect people trained in landfill maintenance.” http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_6769

Medical Bills

When Tom McGrath's daughter Sarah had her appendix removed, the doctors and nurses did everything right. But when McGrath got the bill for her hospital stay, none of it made sense to him. "My Daughter's $29,000 Appendectomy" in Philadelphia Magazine is a brilliant account of McGrath's odyssey through the health care system as he tries to understand the bill. McGrath mixes equal amounts of humor, rage and bewilderment into his narrative, as he does in this passage: 

Over the next few weeks, unfortunately, I started seeing and hearing the lights and sirens that haunt a wanted man. Every day when I came home from work, a new bill or statement from my insurance company was waiting for me — most of them either indecipherable or contradictory. There was a bill for “anesthesia services” of $1,326, yet the amount due was only $1,060, though neither I nor my insurance company had paid anything so far. There was a bill for “radiology services” that seemed to indicate the $209 charge was covered by insurance, but another identical one that indicated it wasn’t. My favorite showed up in December: It listed a charge for room and board of $3,100, then another for “IH miscellaneous services” of — drumroll, please — $19,742.16. I wondered whether my five-year-old daughter had been force-fed Kobe beef throughout her hospital stay, or maybe had been ordering up porn on pay-per-view.

By personalizing the story, McGrath succeeds in making a complex topic understandable and even fun to read about. www.phillymag.com/articles/top_doctors_my_daughters_29000_appendectomy/

Filling In the Blanks

The National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. Peter Carlson of The Washington Post, in "Eyes Only: [redacted]," provides an excellent introduction to the archive's vital work:

Over the past 23 years, they have filed more than 35,000 FOIA requests and collected more than 5 million pages of government documents. Some of the documents are mind-numbingly boring, of course, but others are nothing short of astonishing:

A CIA guidebook called "A Study of Assassination," which advised right-wing Latin Americans on the most effective ways to bludgeon, stab and shoot their enemies.

A National Security Agency study revealing that the agency "deliberately skewed" its account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

A 2002 Pentagon PowerPoint briefing on plans for the upcoming invasion of Iraq -- code name "Polo Step" -- that assumed that only 5,000 American troops would remain in Iraq by the end of 2006.

Perhaps the most famous documents obtained by the archive were the CIA's so-called "Family Jewels," which detailed the agency's illegal wiretaps and attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. The archive filed its FOIA request for the "Family Jewels" in 1992. Fifteen years later, in 2007, the CIA finally released them, and they made headlines around the world.

The archive's website – http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv – is fascinating.

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/07/AR2008050703965.html

A Soldier Comes Home

The magnificent and moving "The Things That Carried Him" by Chris Jones in the May issue of Esquire narrates the nine-day journey that Sgt. Joe Montgomery's body took between his death in Iraq and his burial in an Indiana cemetery. Moving backward through time, Jones describes how Montgomery's death touches the people who encounter him on his final trip home: his family, his Army buddies, the funeral director's son who digs his grave, the soldier who plays "Taps" at his burial. Here Jones describes the long procession to Montgomery's home town after his body arrives at the nearest airport:

Now they pulled onto the I-65, this great long string of mourners and their memories. They were surprised to see every overpass -- U. S. 31, Commiskey Pike, the 250 to Uniontown, 600 South -- lined with flags and signs welcoming Joey home. Volunteer fire departments, dressed in full uniform, stood at attention in front of their shining trucks. Farmers drove across their fields of baby corn and soy to reach the shoulder and stood in the beds of their old pickup trucks. As reports of the procession spread -- traffic helicopters joined in, flying overhead -- and long-haul truckers shared the news over their radios, they pulled over and climbed out of their rigs, and cars filled with families did, too, all of them standing and saluting from across the grassy median, the northbound lanes stopped nearly as completely as the southbound.

Jones uses a tremendous amount of reporting to capture the details that make us feel like we are at these scenes with him. www.esquire.com/features/things-that-carried-him

Storm Damage

It's a reporter's nightmare: trying to cover a devastating natural disaster in a country controlled by a paranoid military junta. The news out of Burma this week has been spotty after a cyclone killed tens of thousands of people or perhaps more than 100,000 -- no one has a clear estimate because the ruling regime won't give access to aid workers or journalists. BBC News, however, is managing to provide the most thorough coverage I've seen of the disaster. For his "Eyewitness: No Help after Cyclone," Paul Danahar gives a first-person account of avoiding government soldiers while he visits wiped-out villages and sends his reports hidden in rice paddies. He tells us:

Normally when you cover a natural disaster the roads you are going down are choked with relief effort - with refugees going one way and with aid going the other. The roads we have been going down, straight into the Irrawaddy delta, are empty.

The BBC's package comes with an impressive collection of videos about the catastrophe. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7389576.stm

The cyclone is one of the most important stories of the year. What other good coverage of it have you seen?

Paths of Evil

"A Trail of Deception," by Justin Fenton of The Baltimore Sun, is an nicely written 3-chapter series on the multistate criminal career of Cindy McKay. Near the beginning of chapter 1, Fenton introduces McKay:

The mother of six, McKay was far closer to Ma Barker than the Madonna when it came to the matriarchal - a brazen, often-convicted thief who pilfered hundreds of thousands of dollars from small businesses, from a Catholic seminary, from a charity, from the aged, from lovers, from many who had trusted her. She outlasted two of the men in her life, both victims of unnatural deaths, and was the instigator - at the least - in a homicide that eventually landed two of her sons as well as herself behind bars.

Through it all, she demonstrated the nerves of a sapper coupled with an indifference to the harm she inflicted on others - employers, good Samaritans or her blood kin. Once she even claimed that her father was dead so that she could swipe title to his home. She was moxie married to malevolence.

So wary of her was one prosecutor that he implored a judge not to require her to pay back those from whom she had stolen. That, the prosecutor said, would only give her incentive to steal again.

Note how Fenton engages the reader at the start of each chapter, then ends the chapter with a deft teaser. And check out the interactive map, "On the Trail of Cindy McKay," which provides handrails while it summarizes McKay's career.

baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-cindymckay,0,4610665.storygallery

Throwing Their Dreams Away

To protect pitchers' arms, major-league managers usually restrict the number of pitches they can throw in a single game. But, as Tom Wyrwich of the Seattle Times shows in "Former High School Pitcher Hopes Rules Are Changed to Protect Young Arms," high school coaches rarely take such precautions, and overworked high school pitchers often suffer career-threatening injuries. Here is how Wyrwich begins his outstanding story:

No way. Jason Koenig was not leaving this game.

On a crisp, spring evening, with the sun fading toward the Olympic Mountains behind home plate, Koenig's baseball career at North Mason High School reached its peak — only moments before it disappeared.

For nine innings, Koenig went pitch-for-pitch with Yelm, the state's top-ranked Class 3A team, and two future pro prospects. He had no plans to take himself out.

Not after the fifth, when, while batting, a pitch drilled him so hard in the back he couldn't swing two innings later.

Not after the top of the seventh, after throwing 97 pitches — on one day of rest after a relief appearance.

Not after the top of the eighth, when his mother, Beth, grasped the chain-link fence behind the dugout and told coach Jay Hultberg, "Jay, he's at 117 pitches. He's done."

Not even after the 132nd pitch, which landed past the scoreboard in left field for a three-run home run.

Koenig threw 140 pitches in nine innings on April 27, 2001.

He never recorded another out. Instead, he joined the rapidly expanding ranks of adolescent pitchers who need arm surgery.

Many thanks to Kate Martin for recommending this story.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/highschoolsports/2004379811_youngarms29.html

Primary Politics

For depth of political coverage, it's hard to beat The Politico and politico.com. Since editors John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei launched the upstart Web site last year, it has quickly ramped up the quality and thoroughness of its coverage. For an example, see Matt Lewis' "Next Up: Romney vs. Huckabee," which explores how the two are still battling to become the heir to the conservative throne. I also admire The Politco's continuing and extensive coverage of lobbying's influence in Washington. www.politico.com/

But when it comes to primary night coverage, I turn first to CNN and cnn.com. Their election night map is tops, and I like the "Delegate Calculator," which lets you figure out the different ways Clinton and Obama can win enough delegates in the remaining primaries. www.cnn.com

For a fun yet informative look at politics, the Congressional Quarterly's "VP Madness" lets you play a game to predict who will become John McCain's running mate. The game is set up like the brackets for March Madness and allows you to choose among 32 contenders. Each contender comes with a thumbnail sketch describing his or background. The Congressional Quarterly promises to offer a similar bracket for the Democratic vice presidential pick if the party can ever decide on a presidential nominee. http://innovation.cq.com/vpmadness A big thank you to CQ's innovations guru, Ken Sands, who shared this idea on the Poynter Institute's "E-Media Tidbits." 

Who else do you turn to for political coverage? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

Flames on Planes

Reporter Phil Williams of WTVF Channel 5 in Nashville used the Freedom of Information Act to do an investigative story of national significance. Williams obtain Federal Aviation Administration videos and reports indicating that two kinds of wiring commonly used by some airlines are potential fire hazards. His "Unsafe to Fly?" investigation reveals that Kapton, a wiring used in MD-80s, can allow the current to jump from the insulation crack of one wire to another wire, causing it to burn like "sparklers on steroids." Williams also reports that another wiring called PVC/Nylon used in DC-9s and some other older planes "never passed the first flammability test that the FAA developed more than 35 years ago" and produces toxic smoke once it's on fire. This story had the potential to be overly sensationalistic, but Williams backs up his points with a stream of information and expert analysis. The Web package comes with a helpful sidebar outlining the kinds of aircraft used by different airlines and which ones use Kapton and PVC so that travelers can avoid the most dangerous ones. For the whole package, go to www.newschannel5.com/Global/category.asp?C=132748

Explosive Deals

The greatest threat of nuclear proliferation may not come from rogue terrorists but from white-collar businessmen trying to get rich, according to a joint investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and American RadioWorks. Their "Business of the Bomb" by Mark Schapiro and Michael Montgomery explores the illicit trade in machines used to enrich uranium and build bombs. Here Montgomery and Schapiro describe one such business in South Africa:

Tradefin is housed inside a huge warehouse in a cluster of small factories called Vanderbiljpark about 30 miles south of Johannesburg. It shares a dusty street alongside tile, tire and paint manufacturers. Inside is a complex of rusting tanks, lathes and rumbling conveyor belts. From the looks of it, Tradefin might as well be producing ball bearings. Gerhard Wisser told German investigators that the factory was producing a water-purification facility.

But when South Africa's Crimes Against the State police raided Tradefin in 2004, they found 11 shipping containers packed with machinery—fully labeled for reassembly in Libya. IAEA inspectors would later confirm that the machines were capable of capturing and transporting uranium gas after it's been enriched in thousands of whirling centrifuges, the final stage before it's capable of being used for a nuclear bomb.

The excellent package allows you to hear the audio of a marketing video by the notorious Pakistani engineer A.Q. Khan promoting his ability to provide nuclear weapons know-how. It also contains a sidebar by Schapiro and Emma Brown on how much of a threat is posed by suitcase smugglers of nuclear material from the former Soviet Union. The podcast version of this story is worth hearing although it took me a long time to download. Check out the whole package at www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/projects/businessofthebomb.

Hard to Swallow

Nationwide sales of bottled water have increased nearly 50 percent in the past five years. Behind the growth are some disturbing practices.

First the water must be bottled. Here, in a special report called "Water's Edge," Ivan Penn of the St. Petersburg Times describes how Nestle Waters North America does it in Florida.

Nestle came into Florida and managed to pull off quite the coup.

The company got a permit to take water belonging to Floridians — hundreds of millions of gallons a year from a spring in a state park — at no cost to Nestle.

No taxes. No fees. Just a $230 permit to pump water until 2018.

Nestle bottles that water, ships it throughout the Southeast — much of it to Georgia and the Carolinas — and makes millions upon millions of dollars in profits on it.

Then the water must be labeled.

In small print on its bottles, Nestle discloses where the water comes from — sometimes. Gallon containers of Deer Park Natural Spring Water sold in the Tampa Bay area, for instance, do not identify the source. A spokesman said this week that the company will change its labels to identify the sources on all their bottles.

But for now, a shopper at a Publix in St. Petersburg can find gallon containers of Deer Park and Zephyrhills natural spring waters on the same shelf. The Deer Park brand goes for $1.29 a gallon, the Zephyrhills for $1.19. What the shopper can't tell is that the Deer Park water was bottled in Pasco County, at the same plant — and with the identical water — as the Zephyrhills brand.

Finally the empty bottles must be recycled or trashed. Pamela LeBlanc of the Austin American-Statesman, in "Bottled Water's Problems Surfacing," provides some thought-provoking data.

In the United States, about 15 percent of custom plastic bottles, which include water, juice, tea and sports drinks (but not soda, which is counted differently), are recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The rest — an estimated 45 billion plastic bottles a year — go into landfills or become litter. That's almost 160 plastic bottles trashed per person per year, according to the institute....

The total energy needed to make, transport and dispose of one bottle of water is equivalent to filling the same bottle one-quarter full of oil.

Both writers cover much more ground than I've indicated here, and their informative articles are well worth reading.

http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/drinking-water/

statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/20/0420bottledwater.html

Nameless No More

Two top writers recently covered the Doe Network, which attempts to match missing persons with unidentified bodies. It's fascinating to compare their two stories.

The AP's Helen O'Neill, in "Amateur Sleuths Name Anonymous Dead," focuses on the Doe Network's tireless volunteers. Here she introduces Todd Matthews who for years tried to identify "Tent Girl," a young woman whose body was found wrapped in canvas.

At 37, Matthews is a sensitive soul who has always felt an affinity for the dead, perhaps because two of his siblings died just after birth. Matthews still chokes up when he visits the graves of Gregory Kenneth and Sue Ann. But at least he knows where they are buried.

Tent Girl haunted him. Who were her siblings? What was her name?

Matthews began searching library records and police reports, not even sure what he was seeking. He scraped together the money to buy a computer. He started scouring message boards on the nascent Internet.

In the process, Matthews discovered something extraordinary. All over the country, people just like him were gingerly tapping into the new technology, creating a movement -- a network of amateur sleuths as curious and impassioned as Matthews.

Dan Barry of The New York Times, in "A Name and Face No One Knew, but Never Forgot," concentrates on the efforts to identify a single murder victim. He begins his story this way:

After the murder, the body was swaddled in bed sheets and a Mickey Mouse blanket. It was placed in a van, driven far from any road in rural Henry County and dumped in a narrow creek bed, just as another July day was dawning.

The summer of 1998 baked on. Autumn arrived to rain-swell the creek and send skull bits floating down the bed of silt and stone. Winter followed to skim the mesh of gray twigs and pale bones with a veil of ice. Then, one February morning, two hunters running their beagles were stopped cold in their tracks; the living, finally, took notice.

If you would like to share your thoughts on these two articles, please click on the "comments" button below.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/129607

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/us/21land.html

Views From the Street

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/columnone/la-na-gas18apr18,1,5253613,full.story

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-restaurant18apr18,1,742932,full.story

The Crime of Reporting

Hurray for Barry Bearak of The New York Times! Two weeks ago we learned that Bearak was finally free from a Zimbabwean jail after being arrested in early April on charges of "committing journalism." In this Sunday's Times, Bearak gives us a riveting account of his capture, captivity and eventual release with the help of brave Zimbabwean human rights lawyers. His story, "In Zimbabwe Jail: A Reporter's Ordeal," is full of vivid details about the African country's rapid political and economic decline and what conditions are like in its jail cells and courtrooms. Here Bearak describes his trip to a bail hearing with his fellow convict, Stephen Bevan, a British freelance reporter.

The transport was an old pickup whose engine required a rolling start. He recruited Stephen to help push. I was excused because of my backache.

The courthouse is called Rotten Row, after a nearby street. It’s a circular five-story structure built around four elaborate saucers that once fed into one another as a fountain. With the nation insolvent, there’s no money to maintain either ornamentations or courtrooms. Floors are filthy. Microphone stands have no mikes. The building’s clocks are each stymied at 7:10.

Some long-time News Gems readers may remember that I named Bearak's magnificent story on the Indoensian tsunami, "The Day the Sea Came," as the third best story of 2005. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/world/africa/27bearak.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp