Electronics giant Foxconn has confirmed reports from Chinese anti-government websites that workers in the southern city of Wuhan threatened mass suicide earlier this month over a labor dispute:

Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) – Foxconn Technology Group, maker of parts for Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox, said some members of its 1 million-person workforce threatened to jump from a factory building earlier this month to protest an internal transfer of employees.

About 150 workers at Foxconn’s plant in Wuhan, southern China, demonstrated on Jan. 2 in opposition to the company’s plan to move them to a new production line, the Taiwanese company said in an e-mailed statement today. Foxconn didn’t say how many threatened to leap from the three-story building.

The incident was resolved the same day, after talks between the workers, executives and government officials, Foxconn said. Microsoft said in a separate statement that it investigated the issue.

Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, makes products coveted worldwide, including Apple iPhones and components for Microsoft Xboxes.

In 2010, at least 14 Foxconn workers committed suicide to protest brutal working conditions. The company reportedly increased wages and installed safety nets in response. According to some reports workers were asked to sign contracts not to commit suicide.

[Photo credit: Shenzhen High Tech Fair, by Bert van Dijk, Creative Commons.]

The American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative group profiled by our September Sidney Award Winners at the Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation, really doesn’t like unembedded journalists. Beau Hodai, a reporter for In These Times got kicked out of the hotel bar where ALEC was holding its conference, by uniformed police officers, even though he had registered as a guest:

At around 10:30 on the evening of December 1, I was sitting in the Waltz & Weiser Saloon, a high-end sports bar tucked into a cove below the sub-lobby of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Ariz.

I had been swapping newspaper stories with Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star on one of the saloon’s overstuffed leather couches as the bar filled with attendees of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit (SNPS).

ALEC had repeatedly refused to grant me media credentials. Nevertheless, I was a paying guest at the resort and thought I’d catch some liquor-loose-lipped lawmakers and lobbyists at the bar.

I was about to turn in for the night when I saw Phil Black, director of Kierland’s security team, talking with a group of Phoenix police officers outside the entrance to the bar. The cops–moonlighting (in uniform) for ALEC–had arrived close to an hour prior, glanced in at Ward and me, and stationed themselves just to the side of the door.

Black entered the bar and came up to me. “Would you mind coming with me, sir?”

Outside Waltz & Weiser, we were joined by the cops.

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

“The ALEC people don’t want you here,” said Black, “and we understand that your reservations were made under false pretenses.”

I asked Black, given the fact that I had not been accused of any crime, why I was surrounded by armed, uniformed cops. False pretenses? I had given the front desk my valid photo driver’s license and my credit card.

Black said that he and the police officers would escort me to my room and help me pack. I was told if I returned, or refused to leave, I would be arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

Hodai’s story is a collaboration with the Center for Media and Democracy.

[Photo credit: r3v || cis, Creative Commons.]

Workers at American Liquorice Company, the makers of those beloved strips of Americana known as Red Vines, have been out on strike for a month over health care and pension benefits, Rose Arrieta reports for In These Times.

[Photo credit: 2moose-mac, Creative Commons.]

Our 2011 Sidney Award Winners, of course. But that would make for a pretty anticlimactic list, wouldn’t it? You already know we think the world of them.

• Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer, by John Branch in the New York Times. A heartbreaking and painstakingly reported multimedia package about the life and death of 28-year-old NHL player Derek Boogaard, an “enforcer” whose history of head trauma probably contributed to his untimely death from a drug overdose.
• Birthright: What’s Next for Planned Parenthood by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker. How did Planned Parenthood become synonymous with abortion? The answer may surprise you. This essay uses early controversies over birth control as a lens to understand the modern anti-abortion movement. 
• The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers by Scott Carney, published by William Morrow. An anthropologist-turned-investigative journalist travels the world to document the  commodification of the human body and its functions. 
• A Vicious Cycle in the Used Car Business, by Ken Bensinger in the LA Times. This meticulous investigation details how national chains of self-financing used car dealerships exploit the poor and repackage their bad loans as subprime securities.
• The High Price of Looking like Woman by Laura Rena Murray in the New York Times. Local reporting at its best. Murray delves into the underworld of unlicensed silicone injectors who prey on transgender women in New York seeking feminine curves on the cheap. This story is especially powerful because it illustrates how transphobia and discrimination push vulnerable women into this potentially lethal black market.
• Deep Intellect: Inside the Minds of Octopuses, by Sy Montgomery in Orion Magazine. The author seeks understand how octopuses can be so smart, yet so different from humans–physically and evolutionarily. His search brings him to embrace an octopus. He also interviews octopus scientists, a scuba diving philosophy professor, and an aquarium volunteer who found his post-retirement calling as an octopus whisperer.
• The Luckiest Woman in the World: Three Ways to Win the Lottery by Nathaniel Rich in Harper’s. Wannabe grifters take note.
• Is The SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?, by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. Ditto.