Asbestos is a known carcinogen, banned or restricted in 52 countries, but lobbyists and trade associations have kept the business alive by promoting its use in the developing world. A nine-month investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC was published this week by the Center for Public Integrity.

The ICIJ investigation, "Dangers in the Dust," has "tracked nearly $100 million in public and private money spent by these groups since the mid-1980s in three countries alone — Canada, India and Brazil — to keep asbestos in commerce. Their strategy, critics say, is one borrowed from the tobacco industry: create doubt, contest litigation, and delay regulation."

Stories take a closer look at the amount of asbestos production and/or use in India, Brazil, the U.S., Russia, Mexico, and China, and examine marketing campaigns that promote asbestos use and efforts to ban the substance. An interactive map defines the nations that are top asbestos producers, exporters, and consumers around the world.

>> View the full project online.

The three Americans who were arrested near the Iran-Iraq border about 11 months ago—Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd—are still being detained in Iran despite witness reports that Iranian guards crossed the border into Iraq to detain them, according to a new report from The Investigative Fund and The Nation Institute.

Accusations that the Americans crossed into Iran to spy were denied by those close to the them, the State Department, and others, who say that they were hiking in the mountains there, The Nation reported.

Until recently it was believed that the hikers accidentally crossed the border into Iran, but The Nation's five-month long investigation has revealed witnesses with a different story.

Two witnesses say that the Americans were taken into custody on Iraqi soil, and another two say that the guard "who likely ordered their detention has since been arrested on charges of smuggling, kidnapping and murder."

The Nation reported that witnesses saw guards from Iran's national police force use "'threatening' and 'menacing' gestures" in an attempt to get the three Americans over the border before guards crossed the border to apprehend them last July.

The Iranian lieutenant colonel who witnesses say was the only one who could order the Americans be detained and transferred to Tehran, was arrested last August in connection with the murder of an influential cleric and has since been sentenced to death. Other lawsuits have been filed against Lt. Col. Heyva Taab "alleging libel, theft, rape, kidnapping and murder," according to The Nation.

An Iranian official issued a statement earlier this month about the state of the Americans' case:

On June 11 Mohammad Javad Larijani, secretary general of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, said that the government's investigation was nearly complete and a trial for Bauer, Fattal and Shourd "should not be very far from now." In a statement issued on June 17, the mothers of the hikers called on Iran either to prosecute or release their children. "Iran has no legitimate reason at this stage not to release them or move forward with a fair trial in which our children can openly answer any allegations against them."

Click on the image to download the PDF.

Will the nonprofit model save investigative journalism? Is it sustainable? A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review explores this question, focusing on CIR's new venture, California Watch, along with the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica:

Most everyone agrees that it’s still early in the nonprofit investigative news experiment, and hard to know what will eventually happen. Many use the “Wild West” cliché to describe the environment. Numerous centers of various size and scope are up and running and publishing their work, writing their rules as they go and attempting to engage new readers through social networking and other methods enabled by the Internet. Several others are teed up, trying to raise enough money to launch. Their hurried steps and missteps will determine whether the nonprofit model develops and endures or returns to its previous perch on the margin.

Whether the nonprofit model sticks or slips in the U.S. is a question that is apparently of international significance. CIR's executive director Robert Rosenthal has recently been interviewed by several foreign-language publications. The Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese magazine, recently published this article (above) about nonprofit journalism featuring CIR's Rosenthal. Interviews with "Rosey," as he is called by those who know him, also appeared in the Spanish publication La Palabra Escrita and the German publication Digitale Mediapolis.

The Center for Investigative Reporting is proud to co-present Restrepo, directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22-May 6):

Restrepo
As unnerving as it is illuminating of the dangers, toils and absurdities of war, Restrepo is an intimate portrait of a platoon posted to Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the U.S. Army’s most dangerous assignments.

The film screens Friday, April 30 at 3:45 and Tuesday, May 4 at 9:30 pm at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas and Sunday, May 2 at 4:15 pm at the Pacific Film Archive.

More information on Restrepo and tickets, visit the SFIFF website or call 925-866-9559.

More About SFIFF53:
The 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF53) returns April 22-May 6 with more than 100 unique programs of the finest independent, documentary and international cinema, combining a range of marquee premieres, international competitions, digital media work and star-studded gala events into the best two weeks of the year. The Festival will honor film icons including Robert Duvall and Roger Ebert, open with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s dazzling caper Micmacs, feature the original score and live performance of Stephin Merritt to the silent epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, celebrate a comedic legend on Closing Night with the documentary Joan Rivers - A Piece of Work, with Rivers in attendance—and so much more. For tickets and information, visit sffs.org or call 925-866-9559.

Here at CIR we are as concerned about a sustainable future for investigative reporting as we are about producing high-impact journalism that is important to you. For more than three decades, CIR has relied largely on foundations to support our reporting. We are hard at work now to identify more diverse funding sources, including building our individual donor base. We know that our readers, viewers and listeners are a diverse group and that, if you chose to support our work financially, you will have equally diverse goals for your giving.

Some of you may be able to contribute $100, $500, or even $1,000 a year to support our hard hitting investigative work (you can do that over here. Others may be interested in supporting a specific investigation, like the Civil Rights Cold Case Project or The Price of Sex. Still others of you may want one simple way to support a variety of sites you like and depend on.

Introducing Kachingle, one of the first crowdsourcing services that you can use to support your favorite online news sites and blogs. Kachingle is simple, user-centric and user-controlled alternative to cumbersome subscriptions, paywalls, and pay-per-article plans some media outlets are considering. It requires virtually no effort on your part - you just become a Kachingler, giving $5 a month through PayPal, and then click the Kachingle medallion on the sites you want to support. No credit cards, no passwords. Kachingle will keep track of your visits to each of the sites you've selected and at the end of each month, your monthly pay-in to Kachingle (minus small service fees) will be distributed proportionally among your chosen sites based on your visits.

We hope you will become a Kachingler, helping to support journalism's future online, including the time and resource intensive investigative reporting that CIR produces. Your support alone won't save investigative reporting but if enough people decide to start supporting the journalism they care about, collectively we have the power to help ensure that this kind of reporting thrives in the future. Once you become a Kachingler, you can share which sites you support with colleagues, friends, and family (and soon Twitter followers and others), and turn them on to the sites you visit.

Join Kachingle -- and start supporting CIR and the other sites you like today -- by mousing over the medallion to the right of this blog post.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Craig Pyes will speak about prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy on Tuesday, February 2, from 4-6 p.m. More info here:

More than 160 detainees have died in American military custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, many classified as homicides. But were these deaths properly investigated? Craig Pyes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting launched an Army probe into two detainee deaths and their cover-up by a U.S. Special Forces team in Afghanistan, will argue that cases of homicide where abuse is suspected should be re-examined because the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) did not vigorously pursue suspected war crimes. Pyes will discuss his own multi-year investigation of a rogue Special Forces detachment in Afghanistan that adapted harsh interrogation techniques promoted by the Pentagon, that were later judged responsible for the vast majority of prisoner abuse. Ten detainees held at the base said they had been tortured, yet questions remain unanswered about the culpability of the Special Forces team six years later, despite the decision by the U.S. Army to close the criminal investigation - not once, but three times.

Craig Pyes is a human rights investigator and an award-winning investigative reporter with extensive experience in Afghanistan and other conflict zones. As a special investigator for the non-profit Crimes of War Project, Pyes looked into possible breaches of U.S. and International law in the armed conflict in Afghanistan. While working as an investigative reporter for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, he wrote about the looming threat of the al Qaeda terrorism network both before and after the September 11th attacks on America, and profiled the corrosive and national security effects of drug corruption in Mexico. During the civil war in El Salvador, he and a colleague were the only reporters to reveal the inner workings of Salvadoran death squads that had killed more than 40,000 people with impunity. Pyes has received two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Los Angeles Times, and the Latin American Studies Association. In 2002, he was a finalist for Harvard's Shorenstein Center's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Currently based in Los Angeles, he investigates human rights abuses for lawyers and non-profits, and is a court-appointed death penalty mitigation specialist.

An important new report sheds light on a common challenge faced by journalists around the world: fear of British libel laws. The UK's laws are far more friendly to litigants than those in the United States (and most other developed countries), and global figures and businesses--recently, in Iceland, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Ukraine--have increasingly sought to have their libel cases heard there, according to the report published last week by the Center for International Media Assistance. The report's author, Drew Sullivan, a founder of the Sarajevo-based Bosnia-Herzegovina Center for Investigative Reporting identifies a disturbing trend: Publications around the world, including those in the United States, must increasingly vet their stories according to British libel laws due to the potential for global distribution made possible on the internet.

Many thanks to Drew, who's work with the Balkan CIR we've highlighted in the past. He's pulled together the growing body of evidence that British libel laws--as well as those of Ireland, France and Australia--have created a form of "libel tourism", in which litigants search for venues most likely to gain a positive verdict, often irregardless of the truth of allegations in a story. One hopeful sign he's also identified: The state of New York recently passed a law ("Rachel's Law," prompted by the case of U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld, who refused to accept a UK judgment against her favoring a Saudi financier she'd investigated) which blocks state courts from enforcing civil damages from a UK libel suit if the judgment falls short of ensuring authors the same free speech rights they have in the United States. A similar bill passed the US House of Representatives last year, and is now making its way through the Senate--which would establish an important principle protecting US journalists (at least) from the far reach of British libel laws.

Download the report here.

About twenty percent of women who attend college will become victims of rape or attempted rape before they graduate, according to a new report funded by the Department of Justice. A nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that a culture of silence at many universities prevents many victims from reporting incidents.

The first and second articles in a series were published this week on CPI's website, along with audio slideshows—interviews with women who reflect on their own experiences. From CPI:

Many victims don’t report at all, because they blame themselves, or don’t identify what happened as sexual assault; one national study found that more than 95 percent of students who are sexually victimized do not report to police or campus officials. Local criminal justice authorities regularly shy away from such cases, because they are “he said, she said” disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol. That frequently leaves students to deal with campus judiciary processes so shrouded in secrecy that they can remain mysterious even to their participants.

Critics question whether faculty, staff, and students should even adjudicate what amounts to a felony crime. But these internal proceedings actually grow from two federal laws, known as Title IX and the Clery Act, which require schools to respond to allegations of sexual assault on campus and to offer key rights to victims.

Institutional barriers compound the problem of silence, and few victims in fact make it to a campus hearing. Those who do come forward can encounter secret disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations. At times, school policies and practices can lead students to drop complaints, or submit to gag orders—a practice deemed illegal. College administrators generally believe the existing processes provide a fair and effective way to deal with highly sensitive allegations, but the Center’s investigation has found that these processes have little transparency or accountability, and regularly result in little or no punishment for alleged assailants.

>> See the full project here: "Sexual Assault on Campus"

Long Island University is seeking nominees and submissions for The George Polk Awards, which are given for investigative work in print, radio, photojournalism, TV, and web. Entries must include two original clips or recordings (with two copies of printed text plus URLs for digital submissions). They should come with an explanatory letter and be postmarked no later than January 8, 2010.

The address for submissions is:
John Darnton, Curator
The George Polk Awards
Long Island University
The Brooklyn Campus
1 University Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11201-5372

Visit the website for more information.

At least 142 journalists have been killed in the field in the last three years, according to data collected by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Most of those killed were reporting in conflict zones—notably Iraq, Somalia, and Pakistan.

A new project from FRONTLINE/World seeks to address the challenges journalists face while reporting from countries gripped by civil wars and violent conflicts:

This fall, FRONTLINE/World gathered a small panel of journalists and media representatives in New York to share experiences and discuss the challenges of covering conflict zones and repressive regimes.... With more journalists becoming the target of kidnappings and murders, and as video and images spread with lightening speed, the conversation centered on the question of how to protect reporters, fixers and sources, as well as the urgent need to develop a set of security protocols.

Visit the web portal, "Covering Conflict Zones," to watch highlights from the discussion and join the conversation online.