A death squad leader becomes a whistle-blower, a war-torn country experiments with democracy and investigative journalists reveal the secrets behind offshore tax shelters for the very wealthy. These are some of the stories featured in this week’s top 5 list.As part of an ongoing partnership with Salon, The I Files team is offering our picks for the best investigative videos available online. But these are just our opinions – please let us know if there are any we’ve overlooked so we can include them on future lists.If you’re interested in stories like these, please take a moment to subscribe to The I Files, YouTube’s one-stop investigative news source. Subscribing involves no cost, no spam and no annoying kid videos. The I Files is like an altruistic offshore tax haven, carefully assembling a hoard of great documentaries for your viewing pleasure, rather than the ill-gotten gains of kleptomaniac despots.Continue Reading… … Read More
Boston Globe intern warned Dzokhar Tsarnaev about media attention
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, an intern at the Boston Globe, has appeared in a video for the newspaper describing his relationship with Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the bombings of the Boston Marathon. Continue Reading… … Read More
Boston Globe intern warned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev about media attention
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, an intern at the Boston Globe, has appeared in a video for the newspaper describing his relationship with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the bombings of the Boston Marathon.Kanno-Youngs, who attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School with Tsarnaev in the class of 2011, said that he’d seen the photo of the suspect circulated by the FBI, but “even if the thought crossed my mind, it didn’t ring an alarm. It was too blurry, I thought it could never be.”The Globe intern said that Tsarnaev never discussed politics, and that he was “one of the most peaceful religious people I know.” Kanno-Youngs even had reached out to warn Tsarnaev after seeing the FBI photos “just to say be careful because these people might try and think it was you.”Continue Reading… … Read More
“And then the bomb went off”: Boston columnists react to Marathon explosions
Boston has a tradition of great city columnists. Here’s a sampling of what some of them are writing in today’s editions of the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.Kevin Cullen in The Boston GlobeThis is how bad this is. I went out Monday night and bumped into some firefighters I know. They said one of the dead was an 8-year-old boy from Dorchester who had gone out to hug his dad after he crossed the finish line. The dad walked on; the boy went back to the sidewalk to join his mom and his little sister. And then the bomb went off. The boy was killed. His sister’s leg was blown off. His mother was badly injured. That’s just one family, one story.Gerry Callahan in The Boston HeraldContinue Reading… … Read More
New York Times Company again prepares to sell Boston Globe
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The New York Times Co. said Wednesday that it is putting The Boston Globe and its related assets up for sale four years after it called off a previous attempt to sell the newspaper.
Mark Thompson, the Times’ chief executive, said in a statement a sale would be in the best long-term interests of both properties, “given the differences between these businesses and The New York Times.”
Thompson said the sale would help the company concentrate its attention and investments on The New York Times’ brand.
The newspapers’ differences are stark. The Times has a national – even international – audience, and has been adding digital subscribers at a rapid clip. Last year, it launched a Chinese-language website and has a loyal, growing subscriber base in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the Globe is focused on its readers in the New England region, and while its digital subscriptions have been increasing, analysts believe they aren’t rising fast enough to be meaningful. The Globe had 28,000 digital subscribers at the end of 2012, up 8 percent from three months earlier.
In comparison, the Times and International Herald Tribune had 640,000 paying subscribers online, up 13 percent over three months.
Mass. Lab Scandal Leads to Fears of the Guilty Being Freed, Not So Much About the Innocent Being Jailed
Annie Dookhan, a former state lab technician in
Massachusetts, is facing
27 different criminal charges in connection to a scandal
rocking the state’s justice system. Her behavior has tainted
potentially thousands of drug cases. The charges, announced today,
range from tampering with evidence to perjury (she apparently lied
about having a master’s degree) to obstruction of justice.I want to start with a paragraph toward the end of today’s
Boston Globe report in order to highlight what I think
is a bit of a disturbing trend in the way the effects of the
scandal are being talked about. Here’s the explanation of the kinds
of misbehavior attributed to Dookhan:
According to [Massachusetts Attorney General Martha] Coakley’s
statement, Dookhan allegedly “dry labbed’’ seized drugs, falsely
certifying that she performed the required testing of seized
suspected contraband when, in fact, she had not tested, but had
merely made a visual examination.
Dookhan also allegedly tainted samples by mixing substances she
knew were illegal drugs with samples she knew did not contain
illegal substances. She also allegedly forged the initials of a
supervisor on reports in an attempt to cover up her misdeeds,
prosecutors allege.
So she mixed drugs into clean samples. You would think that from
reading what Dookhan was accused of doing, the big fear would be
the state convicting innocent people on the basis of contaminated
tests.But here’s how that very same story begins:
Former state chemist Annie Dookhan, who triggered a crisis in
the state’s criminal justice system that has set convicted
drug dealers free and may cost tens of millions of dollars
to fix, is facing a 27-count indictment, Attorney General Martha
Coakley’s office said today. [Emphasis added.]
The emphasis is on setting drug dealers free. Here’s
CBS reporting:
No one can explain why she did it, but 160 convicted criminals
have already been freed, and local police are worried about a crime
wave if hundreds more have to be released.
Coakley, said, “All of our local police chiefs can and should be
worried about that, but we’re determined to get it right in
Massachusetts. We have to make sure the public has a sense the
system works.”
The argument presented further in the story is that many of
these convicts had criminal records already, so they’re bad people.
This apparently matters more than whether they were in fact guilty
of the crimes for which they were convicted. And the Boston Police
are apparently preparing for some sort of possible “crime wave”
that might happen if about 600 convicted prisoners are released.
The City of Boston’s population is 625,000, but that number swells
to millions if you include the Greater Boston
region.Hilariously, in one of the CBS videos, they point out that eight
of the 158 prisoners released by the scandal thus far have been
rearrested on new charges. Eight of them. That’s five
percent. … Read More
Nobel Prize-winning organ transplant pioneer Joseph Murray dies at 93
Dr. Joseph Murray, who won the Nobel Prize for performing the first successful organ transplant, has died at the age of 93, according to the Boston Globe. After suffering a stroke Thursday, Murray passed away at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he had performed the landmark…
