Shafted: How the Bush administration reversed
decades of progress on mine safety.

Ken Ward Jr.

As Published in Washington Monthly

On the afternoon of September 23, 2001, thirty-two miners were repairing drilling machines and hoisting tunnel supports into place in the No. 5 mine of Jim Walter Resources Inc., in Brookwood, Alabama. The No. 5 is North America’s deepest coal mine, tracking the six-foot-high Blue Creek seam almost half a mile beneath the rolling hills just east of Tuscaloosa.

Investigative Report: Promises and poverty

Starbucks calls its coffee
worker-friendly, but in Ethiopia,
a day's pay is a dollar

Text and Photos by (APF Fellow) Tom Knudson –
Bee Staff Writer

GEMADRO, Ethiopia – Tucked inside a fancy black box, the $26-a-pound Starbucks Black Apron Exclusives coffee promised to be more than just another bag of beans.

Not only was the premium coffee from a remote plantation in Ethiopia "rare, exotic, cherished," according to Starbucks advertising, it was grown in ways that were good for the environment – and for local people, too.