Uranium Mill Workers Seek Compensation

(SHIPROCK, NM) — Grace Begay can’t leave her husband, Steven, 64, alone. She follows him around the house, afraid that he’ll black out again with no one there to help him. As he sits patiently describing his symptoms in Navajo through an interpreter, he holds his arms crossed to still the otherwise constant tremor in his hands. He has seen eight doctors in the past 17 years, none of whom can figure out what’s wrong with him.

Kneecapping

(BELFAST) — "Sometimes people were beaten up first, and there were fractures underneath, so you had to be careful when you removed the tar, " says Sister Kate O’Hanlon, the buxom and motherly head nurse at the emergency room of the Royal Victoria Hospital in West Belfast. "It wasn’t actually tar, it was thick diesel oil. The oil is not as bad as burning tar, but it all makes a real mess. You remove it with eucalyptus. The Supply Department said we were using more eucalyptus than anywhere else in the United Kingdom… Sometimes they threw paint on people instead of tar. We had to call the painting foreman in, he told us how to remove it. We use acetone.

Storefront Justice

(LOS ANGELES) — A pickup truck with a camper mounted on the back pulls up to a curtained storefront on Venice Boulevard. The driver and passenger, a couple in their twenties, enter an office furnished with three desks and a faded brown corduroy couch. A staff member welcomes them to the Neighborhood Justice Center, ushers them into a closet-like side room and introduces them to "your mediator, Sharon Shapiro."

The Lord Talking

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — Leavings. Fifteen years ago this summer, on a July afternoon, I shook hands with some people I knew well, helped heave a trunk into the back of a station wagon, rode twenty-five miles to a Central of Georgia railway depot, bought a ticket, and went home to Illinois. I was no longer Brother Garret, M.S.Ss.T., student for the missionary priesthood. I was Paul Hendrickson again. I had on that day an $80 starchy black mohair suit, a white shirt, black tie, black shoes, white cotton socks, and a burr haircut. I weighed maybe 135 pounds: most of that was Adam’s apple. As the train pulled off I waved to Father Damian, who had brought me in and now stood on the platform making comic faces. I wish he’d quit, I remember thinking. On the ride home I tried picking up a girl. She thought I was an undertaker.

(FT. MORGAN, CO) — When the insecticide salesman arrived at Fred Diehl’s Dairy in Dodge City, Kansas, it was undeniable that Fred had a problem. During the summer heat his sixty head of registered Holstein milk cows were so harrassed by flies their milk production was suffering.