"Lead Astray"

In a piece for MotherJones, CIR correspondents Sara Shipley Hiles and Marina Walker Guevara reveal how the St. Louis-based firm, Doe Run, expanded its operations abroad at a time when it was facing increasing scrutiny and regulation in the United States, milking money from its Peruvian operation while claiming it couldn't afford to finish its mandatory cleanup plan there. Meanwhile, ninety-nine percent of La Oroya's children are lead-poisoned - a price some families think they have to pay to put food on the table.

U.S. News and World Report's David Kaplan writes about the killing of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the Russian government's shocking and atrocious lack of response to the execution-style slaying of journalists there. "For those of us in international journalism training, Anna was something of a legend--a relentless investigative reporter who refused to back down as Putin and his cronies have stifled, squeezed, and squelched that nation's once-promising independent media. We muckrakers in the West are fond of saying that we speak truth to power, but what we do is nothing compared with what Anna Politkovskaya did on a regular basis, exposing war crimes in Chechnya and hypocrisy in the Kremlin. Her work was required reading for anyone--journalists, political scientists, intelligence analysts

Farah Stockman, Michael Kranish, and Peter S. Canellos of The Boston Globe, with Globe correspondent Kevin Baron, examined the complete database of USAID prime awards from 2001 to 2005, containing more than 52,000 funding actions, to reveal that USAID gave more than $1.7 billion to 159 "faith-based" organizations. The percentage of USAID funds to NGOs that are faith-based doubled from 2001 to 2005, and 98.3% of the faith-based funds go to Christian groups. Bush's orders altered the longstanding practice that groups preach religion in one space and run government programs in another. The administration said religious organizations can conduct services in the same space as they hand out government aid, so long as the services don't take place while the aid is being delivered. The newspaper found many Christian groups are leveraging their proselytizing and missionary activities with US funding - doing the bare minimun, if that, to separate out their church and state functions.

The CBC's investigative unit obtained data from workplace safety insurance boards across Canada to track top national trends in the workplace of today. "Canada's record for reducing workplace fatalities over the previous 20 years was the worst. The project looks at health-care workers, mines, fatalities by province, and more. Audio reports are included in the package. The CBC says the project, the first of its kind, "is the result of three years of research. Journalists with CBC's Investigative Unit navigated freedom of information laws and negotiated for data from workplace safety insurance boards across Canada."

Robert Cribb, Fred Vallance-Jones and Tamsin McMahon of The Toronto Star analyzed the aviation data and found that "more than 80,000 passengers have been put at risk over the last five years when airplanes they were travelling in came dangerously close together in Canadian skies." Between 2001 and mid-2005, there were more than 800 incidents in which planes got too close to each other. "The investigation found a safety system straining at the seams. Experts — pilots, mechanics, airline workers and people who study aviation data — warn significant changes must be made to prevent a major catastrophe."

Alejandra Fernandez-Morera of the Scripps Howard News Service found there are significant invisible casualties of the Iraqi occupation. Almost 505 civilian contractors have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war. "Another 4,744 contractors have been injured, according to insurance claims by 209 companies on file at the Department of Labor." The investigation found that neither the Pentagon nor American corporations who hire contractors to support the U.S. military in Iraq will identify the Americans and foreign nationals who have died, citing privacy and security reasons. The unnamed civilians have become a significant part of the cost of the Iraqi occupation, accounting for at least one-sixth of U.S. fatalities suffered. Because the Pentagon has outsourced thousands of jobs, American contractors have become a new kind of Unknown Soldier.

Farmsubsidy.org is a project coordinated by the Danish International Center for Analytical Reporting (DICAR) and EU Transparency, a nonprofit organization in the United Kingdom. The Web site obtains detailed data relating to payments and recipients of farm subsidies in every EU member state and makes this data available to European citizens. Subsidies paid to farmers under the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy amount to approximately €43.5 billion a year, more than 40% of European Union's entire annual budget, or around €100 a year for each EU citizen. Coordinated from Denmark and the UK, the Web site is the product of intensive collaboration across more than 10 countries.

Lowell Bergman, Jane Perlez, Kirk Johnson with other contributing reporters of the FRONTLINE/World and The New York Times examined the growing conflict between the local people and the Yanacocha Mine in Peru along with tours of gold mines in the American West, Latin America, Africa and Europe to provide a rare look inside an insular industry with a troubled environmental legacy and an uncertain future. "Some metal mines, including gold mines, have become the near-equivalent of nuclear waste dumps that must be tended in perpetuity. " Hard-rock mining generates more toxic waste than any other industry in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency estimated last year that the cost of cleaning up metal mines could reach $54 billion.
The 6 month project revealed that with costs and suspicions of mining companies on the rise in rich countries, 70 percent of gold is now mined in developing countries like Guatemala and Ghana. See the " entire documentary and extra website features " including interview transcripts, FOIA documents
and " recent developments " .

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino of the Los Angeles Times report the J. Paul Getty Museum, the world's richest art institution, knew as early as 1985 that "three of their principal suppliers were selling objects that probably had been looted and that the museum continued to buy from them anyway." The Times obtained Getty documents that "include memos, purchase agreements, correspondence and other records going back 20 years."

Kevin McGran of The Toronto Star used federal and provincial records to show that "if you rent a U-Haul, you've got a 50-50 chance of getting a truck that won't pass a road safety check." Ontario police failed nearly half of such vehicles during road examinations between 2002 and 2004, and Ministry of Transportation data suggested a similar pattern at the federal level.