Journalism students report on the Haitian population in the Dominican Republic

Seventeen students from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University traveled “to the Dominican Republic to investigate how immigration and border policies are affecting the country’s large Haitian population.” The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting recently published several reports on what the students found:

“Whitney Phillips examined how the Dominican Republic “has re-written its Constitution, re-interpreted old laws and passed new ones” to deny Haitians birthright citizenship (en Español), Lauren Gilger told the story of pregnant Haitian women crossing over the border to give birth, and Serena Del Mundo described how the island of Hispanola is losing much of its international AIDS funding.”

"Thousands of Iranians took to the streets in 2009 as part of the Green Movement to protest a disputed presidential election. The government crackdown that followed included some women being imprisoned, tortured and raped. This report shares some of their stories."

Jeffrey Brown with The Center for Investigative Reporting and PBS NewsHour reports on the aftermath of the Iranian protests, with startling accounts from the women on the front line.

After PRI's Ike Sriskandarajah found lion meat on the shelf at his neighborhood butcher and followed the trail to a dark corner of the exotic meat trade. Follow his investigation from his local butcher shop, to the harsh realities of "exotic mean with transcripts and the use of Document Cloud. Find out how "no federal agency regulates raising or killing lions for food; that the exotic animal trade is murky and somewhat illegal; and how we can eat almost anything."

Haiti Grassroots Watch - a collaborative journalism watchdog organization - is reporting on the recovery in Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake. "The effort focuses on 'watchdogging' the aid and reconstruction from the point of view of Haiti's majority, at the same time as it also provides historical and political context, examines structural causes and challenges, and seeks out Haitian academics, technicians and specialists who will add their voices to the voices of the Haitian people and their associations and organizations."

A six-month Associated Press investigation uncovered massive problems with a popular State Department program designed to foster cultural understanding. Reporters Bert Mohr, Mitch Weiss and Mike Baker found that foreign students pay recruiters thousands to help find employment, then don't get work or wind up making little or no money at menial jobs. Labor recruiters charge students exorbitant rent for packing them into filthy, sparsely furnished apartments. Other students are forced to work in strip clubs. The reporters discovered that the State Department has known about the problems for years but had done little to help. The investigation was based on dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of documents, including confidential memos of police reports sent to the State Department over the years.

Lee Davidson reported how Thai workers recruited to work on Utah pig and chicken farms were victims of human trafficking. Read "A Story of Modern Slavery in Utah."

An investigation by The New York Times reveals that "the federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington’s efforts to discourage investment there."

An investigation by Bryan Christy for National Geographic reveals that Anson Wong of Malaysia, "the Pablo Escobar of Illegal Wildlife Trade" is out of U.S. prison and has plans to specialize in a new tiger operation with help from his government.

In a pair of reports, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Mark Johnson and Meg Kissinger examined the overblown medical claims and misleading marketing strategies of China-based Beike Biotechnology, one of many overseas operations marketing experimental stem cell treatments to desperate American families. The two interviewed dozens of the top doctors and scientists in their respective fields and found that the company relies on faulty science and flawed theories, has misled patients about success rates and exaggerated its own medical credentials. On the marketing side, after interviews with the families of dozens of those who received treatments, the two found the company trolls for patients on the Internet and relies on a commission-based system for marketing agents who the company admits it has little control over.