The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "Turkey" ...
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Atalissa
For three decades a dozen mentally disabled men have been living together. Their living conditions were nowhere near ideal; they lived in a run-down bunkhouse and worked full-time in a turkey processing plant. They normally made about “$65 a month”, but sometimes received as “little as 40 cents an hour”. The series revealed possible “human trafficking, abuse and neglect, and financial exploitation of the mentally disabled”.
Tags: Henry's Turkey Service; US Department of Labor; health inspectors; mistreatment; West Liberty Foods; Muscatine County
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Politics, scholarship and the Armenian Genocide
The first story in the series documented the resignation of Donald Quataert, a distinguished American scholar, who stepped down from the chair of the Georgetown University-based Institute of Turkish Studies. Quataert said he had been forced out by a defunding threat from the Government of Turkey. Several board members also resigned and said political infringement of academic freedom was the reason. The second story in the series looks at evidence of a deliberate attempt to maintain Turkish state control of the U.S. nonprofit. Present and former Turkish ambassadors controlled the endowment that provided almost all the funding for the scholarly institute at the time of Quataert's resignation. Also, founding members of the institute as well as endowment trustees had been party to Ankara's decades-long campaign to suppress international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Tags: Armenian Genocide; Institute of Turkish Studies; Turkish scholars; improper financial control; Middle East Studies Association; public denial; politics versus academics
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Agriprocessors and Beyond: Inside the Kosher Meat Industry
This series of articles looked inside the kosher meat industry, a quietly guarded world worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The reporting began two years ago when the Forward's Nathaniel Popper wrote about the working conditions at the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse, Agriprocessors, in Postville, Iowa, setting off a wide-ranging debate in Jewish community. The paper has continued to follow the problems at Agriprocessors and reported early in 2008 on the debate withing the kosher industry about a widely used but apparently cruel method of kosher slaughter known as shackled and hoist. Then, in the middle of the year, federal agents, citing the Forward's reporting raided the Agriprocessors' plant in Iowa. Since the raid, the Forward has followed each legal development, but has also reported on elements of the story that were being overlooked. The first such article detailed the way in which Agriprocessors had handled immigrants and unions at its Brooklyn warehouse-sparking a case that went to the Supreme Court. The next set of articles investigated the working conditions in the rest of the kosher eat industry, with particular attention paid to the labor battles at Agriprocessors' biggest competitor, Alle Processing, which had been completely ignored. The article and chart on industry-wide conditions were the first effort to systematically set down the relative size and production of the major players in the kosher meat industry. The Forward also wrote a lengthy report on the immigrant workers from Agriprocessors who had been released from prison and ordered to testify in federal court against their supervisors, but were given no means to support themselves before the hearing date. After Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy, the Forward reported on the unnoticed consequences for the town and its inhabitants, from the lowly turkeys to the local bankers.
Tags: meat processing; kosher meat; agriculture; Agriprocessors; meatpacking; immigrant workers
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The Fall of Ohio's Attorney General
While top state officials from Elliot Spitzer to Rod Blagojevich fell from grace in 2008, no one was pushed out the door through dogged reporting by the press -- in this case, The Columbus Dispatch -- quite like Ohio's attorney general, Marc Dann. Information from a variety of sources and examination of voluminous e-mails and documents led to stories detailing sexual harassment and a shockingly unprofessional, party-like atmosphere of high-ranking Dann officials, including ribald festivities at the so-called "Dannimal House," the condo where he lived along with a pair of top aides. The Dispatch also broke stories about other misdeeds ranging from questionable campaign expenditures, shaky hiring practices and suspect purchases, as well as a proposed trip by Dann to a "law enforcement conference" in Turkey with his female scheduler. Although her trip, bankrolled by homeland security money, was nixed, the paper documented how Dann called her (on the taxpayers' dime via satellite phone) more often than his wife. Dann, 45, later admitted an affair with the scheduler, 28.
Tags: misconduct; attorney general; Ohio; Marc Dann; resignation; sexual harassment; campaign finance
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The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland
This book is the author's "account of a fifteen -year journey with the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, beginning in 1991 in refugee camps in the mountains and ending in 2005 n the corridors of power in the Green Zone in Iraq. It is an intimate portrayal of an independence-seeking people.."
Tags: international reporting; Middle Eastern politics; civil war; Iraq; ethnicity; Saddam Hussein
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Leave it to Beaver: As Forest Reclaims American East, It's Man vs. Beast
Animal populations in the American East are rising, and causing more and more damage. In particular, larger animals like bear, moose, coyotes, beavers, turkeys and deer are making a comeback. This population chance created a market for "wildlife damage-control professionals". These people, sometimes ex-trappers, make thousands of dollars removing wild animals that people complain about. Nuisance wildlife is now a multi-million dollar business. The article discusses which factors contribute to the growing population, how animals and humans interact, and how state wildlife agencies, along with private companies, are handling the problem.
Tags: nature; animals; beavers; trappers; reforestation; ProPaw
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Turkey Farm
The Washington Monthly looks at civil service tenure and the case for reforming it.
Tags: civil service tenure; MSPB; Merit Systems Protection Board; FEI; OPM
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ABC News Special 9/11 -- Nuclear Smuggling Project
Broadcast on the anniversary of 9/11, an ABC investigation illustrates the threat of nuclear terrorism by showing how a shipment of radioactive material can easily pass through the U.S. customs. The segment shows correspondent Brian Ross traveling with a suitcase of depleted uranium across Eastern Europe, which he later shipped from Istanbul, Turkey, to the United States. The test material cleared the U.S. customs and was delivered to a warehouse at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Tags: nuclear weapons; radiation; radioactive material; nuclear energy; safety; security; health; Osama bin Laden; al Qaida; TAPE; TRANSCRIPT
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Dishonorable Discharge
Pitch Weekly investigates Turkey Creek, a waterway that runs in both Wyandotte and Johnson counties. Right at the border of these two counties sits the Nelson Complex- "a sewage-treatment facility that serves some 130,000 residents" and dumps its waste into Turkey Creek. "The Nelson Complex has been operating under a permit that expired ten years ago . . . State and federal water-quality standards have been amended several times in an ongoing effort to protect the environment. But until its permit is renewed, the Nelson Complex remains beholden only to the older, weaker laws." While Johnson County's chief wastewater engineer says the water pumped out is clean, others disagree. The article details several studies and tests done on Turkey Creek which revealed unsafe amounts of waste.
Tags: pollution; sewage plants; Kansas Department of Health and Environment; Environmental Protection Agency; Clean Water Act; environmentalists; contaminants
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Turkey's War on the Kurds
At 25 million, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. With a similar language, religion, and culture, the Kurds have lived for thousands of years in an area that is now part of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the former Soviet Union. The civil strife in Turkey has received comparatively little coverage in the U.S. media. It is almost as though there are two sets of Kurds - the Kurds in Iraq, who seem to be viewed as the "good" Kurds because they oppose Saddam, and the Kurds in Turkey, who are "bad" because they oppose a U.S. ally. It doesn't seem to matter that there are four times as many Kurds in Turkey, or that both populations have suffered repression from their respective governments.
Tags: Kurds; civil war; Turkey; Iraq; Middle East