The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein
Sign up to get Sidney's Picks in your inbox
Andrew Whitacre, Creative Commons.
The Sidney Hillman Foundation is very proud to announce that veteran journalist and political commentator Charlie Pierce has won the September Sidney Award for “Love and Death in New Orleans, a Decade After Hurricane Katrina,” a haunting feature for Esquire.
Read more about Pierce’s reporting process in The Backstory with Lindsay Beyerstein.
Lindsay Beyerstein.
An independent inquiry casts doubt on the Mexican government’s claim that the bodies of 43 missing normal school students, who disappeared from the state of Guerrero last fall, were incinerated in a rubbish pit in Cocula:
The Mexican government said that the students were killed and incinerated in a rubbish dump because they were mistaken for members of a drug gang. However, the 500-page report released on Sunday underlines the inconsistent and at times contradictory confessions of detainees, who have since claimed they were victims of torture, as well as questions the justifications given by the federal authorities for not acting to stop the attacks.
“This report provides an utterly damning indictment of Mexico’s handling of the worst human rights atrocity in recent memory,” said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch.
The report is the result of a 6-month inquiry by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. Forensic experts told investigators that the official account was physically impossible. In their opinion, it would have been impossible to cremate so many bodies so completely with so little fuel. People who were supposedly involved in the disposal of the bodies told IAHRC investigators that they produced the official story under torture. Medical records seem to validate the torture allegations.
Andeecollard, Creative Commons.
Origami gavel, Glenn Sapaden, Creative Commons.
The Best of the Week’s News
Territory controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as of October, 2014. Karl-Ludwig Poggemann, VICE, Creative Commons.
BuzzFeed News wins the August Sidney Award for their sweeping investigation into abuses of guest workers under the H2 visa program. H2 visas exist to supply short-term labor for jobs that Americans supposedly won’t do. H2 jobs run the gamut from crayfish shelling in Louisiana to running carnival rides in Vermont. The program attracts workers from Indian, Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, as BuzzFeed News discovered, the structure of the program invites abuse. Workers are tied to a single employer. If they are unsatisfied with their pay or working conditions, they have no recourse. BuzzFeed found that thousands of H2 workers complained of abuses ranging from wage theft and false imprisonment to sexual abuse.
The winning story is the work of investigative reporter Jason Bensinger, senior investigative editor Jessica Garrison, and data editor Jeremy Singer-Vine.
Find out how BuzzFeed News got the winning story in The Backstory.
The Best of the Week’s News
Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hillman judge Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses his acclaimed new book, “Between the World and Me,” with Lindsay Beyerstein on the Center for Inquiry’s radio show and podcast, Point of Inquiry.
Hades2K, Creative Commons
The Best of the Week’s News
Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons.
Harvard law professor Larry Lessig explains why we shouldn’t pin our hopes for campaign finance reform on a constitutional amendment, as desirable as useful as such an amendment might be.
Instead, Lessig argues, we should focus on increasing the percentage of campaign donations funded by small-dollar contributors. Attracting small donations could shift the balance of power away from large monied interests, towards ordinary citizens. He points out that it’s much easier to incentivize small contributions than it is to change the constitution to limit large ones.
