Our Work

A cause for our times: Repeal gravity now!

Our Jim Gerstenzang, with his writing partner at Safe Climate Campaign, Dan Becker, joined up on this satirical bit:

Memo to: Fellow Members of Congress

From: Darrell Issa, Republican of California

Re: Support for legislation to abolish an antiquated law.

I urge you to join us in sponsoring the Hall-Latta-Flake-Issa-Upton-Noem-Goodlatte Act.

For too long, science has been trotted out to justify environmental protection, when it is actually being used to mask tax-and-spend policies that sink our economy. With that in mind, I ask you to support the next logical step in our Republican Caucus' crusade to abolish job-killing "environmental" laws and excessive regulations. Please join us in cosponsoring H.R. 32174, a bill to repeal the Law of Gravity.

Rick Schmitt and the pistol-packing public

Our Rick Schmitt has a telling look through the Center for Public Integrity at laws that have made it easier for people to carry guns in public. From his story:

In Ohio, it is now OK to possess a hidden, loaded handgun in cars and bars, public parks and parking lots. Gun owners have broad discretion in using deadly force against burglars and car thieves. A 12-hour gun training course is still needed to get a concealed-carry permit, one of the stiffest requirements in the country. But in 2008, a written test to renew a concealed-carry license was abolished as over-regulation.

Today, seven years after the Buckeye State first allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons, more than a quarter-million Ohioans have concealed carry permits. People debate the impact, although the fact that the identity of the permit holders is off limits to the general public makes that tough. A law giving reporters access to the information was scaled back after gun rights’ groups complained that the press had abused the privilege.

The sweeping changes are part of a little-known but dramatic expansion of user-friendly gun laws across the country. Rough estimates put the number of concealed carry permit holders at between 4 and 7 million nationwide.

Kathy Price-Robinson looks into energy audits - good time of year for it

Our Kathy Price-Robinson, who is based in New Orleans, traveled recently to Montana to sit in on an energy-audit class, and wrote about the experience for the website GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. From her story:

When I arrive for the five-day energy-auditing course at the Pure Energy Center in eastern Montana, I see instructor A. Tamasin Sterner outside the main house, clapping her hands and doing a little dance.

If you know Tamasin, a veteran energy auditor who famously counseled President Obama on the need for weatherization programs, you expect this show of exuberance.

And even if you haven’t met her, you can imagine Tamasin’s exhilaration. After attending spiritual retreats on this 212-acre wooded ranch for more than 20 years, Tamasin recently bought the property, which has cabins and lodging for about 30 retreatants, from her spiritual teacher. Her goal: to further develop it into a retreat, event and training center. This is the first women-only auditing course at the site.

Janet Wilson looks at links between local environment and a family's illnesses

Our Janet Wilson has a deeply reported piece out through California Watch on the suspected links between persistent illnesses among members of one Maywood, California, family, and industries adjoining their neighborhood (in this separater piece Janet explains her reporting). From her story:

The Martin family lives 10 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, in a neat yellow house in a city called Maywood. 

Starting a few blocks from their home, nearly 2,000 factories churn out Southern California’s hot dogs, pesticides, patio furniture and other products. Trucks rumble off the I-710 freeway into sprawling freight rail yards. Odors of rotting animal carcasses waft through the family’s windows on hot summer nights.

The Martins also have endured years of illness. 

From the time Anaiz Martin was born until she was a toddler, her father would carry her in his arms, his big mustache tickling her baby cheeks. This simple embrace carried a haunting consequence. By age 3, Anaiz weighed just 19 pounds and could barely raise her head. Her parents said they were told by doctors that Salvador Martin’s mustache probably held sickening levels of lead from his plating factory job.

The heavy metal attacked her neurological system, permanently robbing her of critical learning skills.

Two decades later, her family's woes continue. Anaiz, now 21, her mother and siblings – Adilene, 22, and Sal Jr., 18 – have suffered irritable bowel syndrome, an ovarian cyst, skin rashes, chronic nausea, diarrhea, asthma and depression.

Their mother, Josefina, frets constantly about what she thinks are likely causes: the air they breathe, the ground beneath their home and, most of all, the gunky black, brown or yellow water that has intermittently run from their faucets for years.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t take it anymore,’ ” Josefina, 45, said during an interview in the summer of 2010. “I try to keep myself up and going, but I am really upset all the time. I just want to know what’s going on with my family and all of this contamination.”

 

Rick Schmitt and the new era of piracy on the high seas

Our Rick Schmitt has a piece in the recent Pomona magazine diving into the legal backdrop of prosecuting piracy in the modern era. From his story:

It’s July 2011. Three young men dressed in gray prison garb shuffle into a federal courtroom in Norfolk, Va. They stand accused of hijacking a U.S.-flag vessel a half a world away and summarily executing the four Americans aboard while the military was attempting to negotiate their release. The dead include Jean Hawkins Adam ’66 and her husband Scott, the owners of a 58-foot sloop they called the Quest, and two friends.

Dusting off a statute that dates to the early 19th-century, prosecutors have charged the men with “piracy under the law of nations,” as well as kidnapping, hostage-taking and murder. Eleven of their shipmates have already pleaded guilty to piracy, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison. If convicted, the three alleged triggermen could face the death penalty.

The prosecution by the U.S. is a response to an eruption in modern day piracy in the Horn of Africa, where young Somali men have since the mid 2000s largely succeeded at holding the world at bay as they prey upon unarmed merchant ships and other vessels. In the lawlessness of Somalia, piracy has become an organized industry, institutionalized to the point where syndicates sell shares in planned attacks in exchange for a correspondent share of ransoms paid.

Despite heightened international awareness, and patrols from navies across the globe, the scourge has continued, largely unabated. While international law and treaties give countries the right to try pirates they capture in their own domestic courts, they have shown little disposition to do so except in cases that involve their own citizens or ships.

 

Leslie Carlson with a little click-and-learn

Our Leslie Carlson created this interactive graphic for a story by the Center for Health Reporting on preparations by hospitals for the eventuality of a significant earthquake. It turns out that hospitals along the riskiest faults, such as the San Andreas, are unprepared to remain open after a major earthquake - with some obviously serious potential effects on the communities they serve.

 

Robyn Norwood with a story of sadness, and hope

Our Robyn Norwood has this compelling piece in USA Today about a San Diego college soccer player and his family's quest to find his sister missing in Nepal. From her story:

SAN DIEGO – In the days before the San Diego State men's soccer team started readying for the season with drills and corner kicks, midfielder Morgan Sacco was 8,000 miles away in Nepal, hiking through terrain marked by landslides, leeches and snakes.

He was searching for his sister Aubrey, a 2009 University of Colorado graduate, world traveler and yoga instructor who disappeared in April 2010, while trekking alone in the Himalayas.

The family still has no answers, despite an earlier trip by Sacco's father and older brother to search for her, as well as the involvement of the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu, the FBI and the Nepali army and police.

"It was really emotional for all of us, but it was really good to see the terrain she had walked, the lodges she had stayed at," Sacco said. "But it was, again, really frustrating. We didn't find as many answers as we had hoped."

Jamie Reno on 9/11, and unanswered questions ten years after

Our Jamie Reno recently published a two-part series in San Diego;s North County Times on the region's links to the 9/11 terror attacks, and some unanswered questions abut the scope and some of the players in the conspiracy. From his first story:

Not only did three of the suicide hijackers live in San Diego and several more allegedly visit as they planned the attacks, but there were also many others in the region who assisted the terrorists. Some of these supporters had connections to the Saudi government, and some were never detained or properly investigated. None was ever convicted of any crimes related to 9/11, and most have since left the country.

The following are just some of the many links between San Diego and 9/11, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials, and the report of a joint congressional committee investigation into how the nation's intelligence agencies performed before and after the attack.

James Gerstenzang on cutting tailpipe emissions

Our James Gerstenzang writes in The New York Times Opinion section -- along with Safe Climate Campaign Director Dan Becker -- that President Obama must stick to his guns and order automakers to cut tailpipe emissions by 6 percent:

Automakers are pushing for the weakest standard and want the president to riddle it with loopholes. Americans want much better. A survey conducted in May for the Consumer Federation of America, for instance, found that 65 percent of Americans, including 62 percent of Republicans, supported a tough mileage standard — 60 m.p.g., which would come from installing technology that cuts carbon dioxide emissions 6 percent each year.

It is the biggest single step the president can take against global warming — and its benefits go beyond that. They would curb our appetite for oil, create jobs and start to check the flow of billions of dollars to OPEC and others.

Rick Schmitt on guns, and background checks gone awry

Our Rick Schmitt, writing for the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News  site, has this look at background checks for gun buyers that fail because state officials don't share significant personal mental health information with federal officials. From his story:

Like many states, Maine depends on the FBI to conduct background checks of people who want to acquire firearms from the state’s federally licensed gun dealers.

And like many states, Maine is a slacker in supplying the records that the FBI depends on to run those checks.

That’s how Raymond Geisel got his guns, including a Glock Model 17 pistol and a semi-automatic version of the AK-47 assault rifle. Geisel had previously been committed to a psychiatric hospital in Bangor, which made him ineligible under federal law to buy or possess a gun. But because state officials had not supplied records of his commitment to the FBI, Geisel passed background checks without being flagged.  

Eventually, the law caught up with Geisel. He was arrested in Miami in August 2008 for making threats against Barack Obama, who was campaigning in south Florida around the same time. Another gun that Geisel had acquired in Maine was subsequently recovered by federal agents in his hotel room, along with a combat-style hatchet, armor-piercing ammo and canisters of tear gas.