• A newly uncovered 2009 memo links 191 teachers in 70 D.C. schools to possible cheating on standardized tests.

• Workers are becoming casualties of the construction boom in Texas.

• Debtor’s prisons were abolished in the 1830s, but they’re making a comeback.

• The winners of the coveted IRE Awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors have been announced.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Kathryn Joyce travelled to Wichita to cover the re-opening of Dr. George Tiller’s abortion clinic for Religion Dispatches. The result is a chilling portrait of health care providers under unrelenting seige by anti-choice zealots who skillfully allude to the violence committed by the most extreme members of their movement in order to terrorize and demoralize health care providers. One murder is good for an infinite number of veiled threats.  

Tiller was assassinated in 2009 by an anti-choice extremist with close ties to local anti-abortion groups who continue to orchestrate intimidation campaigns against abortion providers and abortion-seekers. The assassin is rotting in jail, but the anti-abortion activists are capitalizing on his legacy.

One of the doctors who will work at the re-launched South Winds Clinic plans to ride to work lying on the floor of a vehicle to avoid potential snipers. 

The anti-choicers are waging all out psychological warfare on doctors who will be working at South Winds, a facility that will provide not only abortion, but full-spectrum women’s health care and family planning:

On Monday, Operation Rescue publicly released the name, photo and workplace of one of an out-of-state doctor, a woman in her early 30s, who will be working at the clinic. In audio the group posted, a man who sounds like Troy Newman posed as a reporter to speak to the young doctor, who said she’d been hoping to keep her name protected from “crazy people with guns.”

The anti-abortion siege has gripped Wichita for 22 years, ever since the so-called “Summer of Mercy,” but local women’s health advocates are determined to keep providing patients with their rightful access to health care. 

Sheri Farley suffers from an excruciating and debilitating condition known as “drop foot,” a form of nerve damage caused by five years of breathing glue fumes at an upholstery plant in North Carolina:

For about five years, Ms. Farley, 45, stood alongside about a dozen other workers, spray gun in hand, gluing together foam cushions for chairs and couches sold under brand names like Broyhill, Ralph Lauren and Thomasville. Fumes from the glue formed a yellowish fog inside the plant, and Ms. Farley’s doctors say that breathing them in eventually ate away at her nerve endings, resulting in what she and her co-workers call “dead foot.”

A chemical she handled — known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB — is also used by tens of thousands of workers in auto body shops, dry cleaners and high-tech electronics manufacturing plants across the nation. Medical researchers, government officials and even chemical companies that once manufactured nPB have warned for over a decade that it causes neurological damage and infertility when inhaled at low levels over long periods, but its use has grown 15-fold in the past six years. [NYT]

Some 40,000 Americans die prematurely each year from exposure to toxic substances at work, Ian Urbina reports for the New York Times, ten times as many as are killed in industrial accidents, yet the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) devotes less regulatory energy to making sure workers breathe clean air on the job. 

Backed by over 200 pages of source documents, Urbina’s feature is both heartbreaking and thought-provoking, it deserves to be widely read. 

[Photo credit: mag3737, Creative Commons.]

The finalists for the 2013 National Magazine Awards (ASME Awards) have been announced and we are delighted to see so many past Hillman Prize-winners and Sidney Award-winners on the shortlist:

• Sarah Stillman, winner of a 2012 Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, is a finalist for “The Throwaways,” a New Yorker story about how juvenile offenders-turned-informants have become canon fodder in the drug war. 

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, winner of a 2012 Hillman Prize for Analysis and Opinion, is up for his essay, “Fear of a Black President,” a meditation on Barack Obama’s attempts to grapple with race as our first black president, published in The Atlantic. 

• Pamela Colloff, winner of a 2010 Sidney Award, is up for “The Innocent Man: Part I” and “The Innocent Man: Part II,” the story of a wrongful conviction in the Texas Monthly. Colloff’s “Hannah and Andrew,” a Texas Monthly story of a mother accused of killing her son with salt, is also a finalist.

• Mac McClelland, winner of a 2010 Sidney Award, is in the running for “Shelf Lives,” a work of participatory journalism about terrible working conditions in the warehouse industry, published in Mother Jones. 

Best of luck to all the finalists.