Our Work

Scott Martelle on a National Book Award winner

Our Scott Martelle has this short interview piece in Orange Coast magazine on Thanhha Lai, a one-time journalist who won a National Book Award with her first novel. From his story: 

Lai studied journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, and spent 18 months in Orange County before eventually earning a master’s in fine arts from New York University. Now married with a 5-year-old daughter, she lives in New York City and is on leave this year from teaching at the Parsons design school. She focused her writing passion on her arrival in Alabama as a 10-year-old who spoke no English. “I was standing in this playground, not knowing what the kids were saying to me,” Lai says. “For the first time the words were taken from me. I was beyond frustration, and there was nothing I could do. Those feelings never go away.”

Her novel deals with her alienation and fear, family love and obligation, all propelled by the loss of her father, who served in the South Vietnamese navy and remains missing in action. As the south fell to the Communist north in 1975, Lai says her mother faced an impossible choice for herself and her nine children: “It was heartbreaking. Wait for her husband and risk nine lives ... or just go and believe, if he were alive, he would find his way to us. In the end, her children won.”

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.

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.

 

Chris Kraul, our busy man in Bogota

Our Chris Kraul, who is based in Bogota, Colombia, has been very busy lately. The other day he had a piece in Barron's on potentially good investments in Latin American banks. And he also has this interview piece for KPMG with the head of Fiat Argentina on trying to sell cars in Brazil. And he has this piece for the University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton site on Argentine ranchers switching to soy production, From his story:

In San Miguel del Monte, Argentina, fifth-generation cattleman Mario Caceres never wanted much more from life than to be a modern day gaucho tending his herd, which a few years ago topped 1,600 head of Angus cattle, the breed that has helped make his country synonymous with delicious cuts of beef.

But globalization, modernization and his country’s politics have intervened. Like hundreds of other Argentine cattlemen, Caceres is slowly leaving his cowboy life -- if not its spirit -- and becoming a farmer of row crops, notably soy, to meet increasing demand from food buyers in Asia as well as biofuel manufacturers in his native country.

Since the height of his cattle-ranching career in 2007, Caceres has converted half his two ranches’ 5,000 acres to soy and other row crops while reducing his livestock to 130 head -- a token number that he keeps, he says, largely for sentimental reasons. And he’s hardly alone. In the San Miguel del Monte district of Buenos Aires province, virtually all his neighbors on the eastern edge of the Pampas have converted in some degree or other to soy, corn, sunflower and wheat, Caceres says.

It's a microcosm of a trend spreading across Argentina. According to the Agriculture Ministry, the national herd this year will decline 22%, to 47 million head from the 2007 peak of 58.7 million head, and is expected to continue falling. 

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.

Chris Kraul and Colombian writers on their violent nation

Our Chris Kraul has this interesting piece from Colombia in today's Los Angeles Times looking at Colombian writers Juan Gabriel Vasquez and Hector Abad Faciolince, and how they deal with the nation's long-runnng crime problems. From his story:

Vasquez said that for years his efforts to write about his country's recent history fell flat. But something clicked in 2003 when, living in Spain, he witnessed the terrorist attacks on the Madrid subway, which left dozens dead. Experiencing "a fearful society that felt vulnerable" made him try again. "Vargas Llosas said we writers are like birds of carrion; we feed during times of conflict on the worst aspects of our societies," said Vasquez.

But the gestation period takes awhile, Abad said. "Borges counseled that the time to write poetry is not when you are in love but when you are remembering having loved."

Abad said nearly 20 years passed before he could write about the death of his father, a doctor whose medical training included a fellowship at UCLA under public health pioneer Dr. Milton Roemer. His initial efforts to tell the story of his father's murder by two young assassins invariably ended in tears. "Now, the wounds are scars and I can tell what happened," Abad said. "I would have betrayed by vocation if I had not told it."

Comparing Colombian books to unquestioned classics written after the Mexican Revolution such as "Los de Abajo" by Mariano Azuela and "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo, professor Hugo Ramirez in Bogotá says it's premature to talk of a new literature arising from his country's recent past. "We're still counting the bodies, evaluating the sociological damage," said Ramirez, who teaches literature at University of the Andes. "A sign that the time has arrived may be when we see writers take a humorous look at what happened, when we're able to laugh at war. But we don't have that distance yet."