See Special Report on cruise line standards by InvestigateWest here.

Friends of the Earth makes available this “environmental report card” of the cruise line industry that is searchable by destination.

FOE, a a national San Francisco-based environmental organization,  recognized Holland America and Norwegian Cruise Lines — two lines that send vessels from Seattle to Alaska  — as the cruise lines most attentive to environmental standards. Both companies earned a B- for their overall sustainability grades.

But the Cruise Line Industry Association protests that the assessment is flawed, saying:  “This ‘report card’ is not based on science, law, or the facts, and…  is rooted in FOE’s own arbitrary and flawed criteria.”

The worst environmental offender this year, FOE reports, is Crystal Cruises, a 22-year-old company which wasn't on the first report card issued in 2009. Crystal received an overall grade of an F,... (more)

(This special InvestigateWest report is underwritten by your donations via Spot.us.)

After a week aboard the Carnival Spirit, its passengers can’t help but hit the pier a little tired. They’re grinning too, even as they struggle with baggage and finding their hotels and taxis to the airport. Their vacations on the ship, standing 13 decks tall behind them, are still fresh in their minds. With its 16 lounges and bars, three restaurants and four swimming pools – one with a cascading water slide – the Spirit offered quite an adventure for the 2,124 people on board.

Owned by Carnival Cruise Lines, the biggest cruise operator in the world, the Spirit docks weekly in Seattle’s Elliott Bay. It’s the biggest of the ships home-ported in Seattle in 2010. And its size is also a symbol of the burgeoning Alaska cruise market increasingly making Seattle its home and expected to bring nearly 900,000 tourists through Seattle by the end of the 2010 cruising season in October.

Cruising pumps... (more)

From InvestigateWest's groundbreaking package of stories on the workplace dangers posed by chemo drugs, "Lifesaving Drugs, Deadly Consequences." Read the whole package here.

 Brett Cordes had been a practicing veterinarian for nearly a decade when he was diagnosed at age 35 with thyroid cancer.

One of the first questions his doctor asked him after he gave him the diagnosis was whether he handled chemotherapy agents.

“He said they see a link between chemo and thyroid cancers,” Cordes said, who today is healthy four years after his diagnosis and treatment.

“It changed my life. I quit my practice and made it my passion to improve oncology safety for vets.” (more)

Full story at InvestigateWest

From InvestigateWest's groundbreaking package of stories on the workplace dangers posed by chemo drugs, "Lifesaving Drugs, Deadly Consequences." Read the whole package here.

Karen Lewis knew what the possibilities were when a routine medical exam returned an abnormal white blood cell count on her four years ago.

“I worked in a cancer center,” she said. “I knew.”

The 57-year-old, long-time hospital pharmacist was soon diagnosed with a pre-cancerous form of blood cancer called Myelodysplastic Syndrome. Her doctor immediately ordered her to stop working with or around chemo agents. (more)

From InvestigateWest's groundbreaking package of stories on the workplace dangers posed by chemo drugs, "Lifesaving Drugs, Deadly Consequences." Read the whole package here.

Luci Power was among the first pharmacists in the United States to pressure her employer to take warnings about chemo handling coming out of Europe in the early 1980s seriously.

The alarm was triggered by a letter from Finnish researchers published in Lancet in 1979. That study found evidence of exposure in nurses preparing and administering chemo. Their urine contained higher amounts of chemo drugs than control groups.

The Australians had already moved to publish some English-language guidelines. Power learned of them through a friend and colleague. But when she asked for more protective equipment for her staff at the University of California, San Francisco, no one took her seriously, she said. She ended up creating make-shift “personal protective equipment” out of welder’s masks and other scavenged pieces.... (more)

From InvestigateWest's groundbreaking package of stories on the workplace dangers posed by chemo drugs, "Lifesaving Drugs, Deadly Consequences." Read the whole package here.

Bruce Harrison had been an oncology pharmacist since the late 1970s. He had seen the evolution – or lack of it – in safety awareness during that time, but he spent much of his career trying to change attitudes toward safe practices through research.

Harrison, who for years was a clinical pharmacy specialist with the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis, was also one of the authors of the strictest set of voluntary guidelines, issued in 2004 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, for the safe handling of chemo and other hazardous drugs for healthcare workers.

Practices that, had they been in place throughout his career, might have saved his own life. (more)

more at InvestigateWest

From InvestigateWest's groundbreaking package of stories: "Lifesaving Drugs, Deadly Consequences." Read the whole package here.

In the United States, there’s a lot of discussion about the difficulties of requiring hospitals and clinics to prove they are not contaminating their workers with toxic drugs.

But some other countries are already doing that.

“Contamination is everywhere, even at the best organized facilities,” said Paul Sessink, a chemist and toxicologist who has performed monitoring in about 300 hospitals around the world. European countries are moving to make worker safety regulations stronger, he said, while the U.S. appears almost exclusively focused on patient safety.

Full story...

From InvestigateWest:

  Secondhand chemo – like secondhand smoking – is an apt description for disease that occurs after chronic exposure to low doses of a drug intended for someone else. And like secondhand tobacco exposure, it can have deadly consequences.

 An InvestigateWest investigation has found that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration does not regulate exposure to chemotherapy in the workplace, despite multiple studies documenting ongoing contamination and exposures and their potentially deadly consequences for human health. Studies as far back as the 1970s have linked increased rates of certain cancers to nurses and physicians.

  In a partnership with public television station KCTS 9, we bring you a broadcast news magazine piece that explores this troubling issue through the life of Sue Crump, a Seattle-area pharmacist (see video clip below). Watch it here at KCTS or below (it's the second video). Different versions of the full... (more)

Federal Communications Commission Chairperson Julius Genachowski defended the FCC’s recently announced “Third Way” approach to regulating broadband Internet after a Republican lawmaker  introduced a bill that could handicap the agency's ability to ensure net neutrality.

Some free-Internet advocates cheered when Genachowski unveiled his ‘Third Way’ plan— which subjects the transmission component of broadband Internet to Title II common-carrier service regulations— earlier this month.

A response to an April 6 ruling by an appellate court that said the FCC lacked authorization to regulate the Internet service activities of Broadband giant Comcast, the ‘Third Way,’ Genachowski said, strikes a compromise between companies that want no Internet oversight and net neutrality advocates who say a laissez-faire Internet industry—which lets corporations call the shots on how fast, how accessible, and how costly broadband service will be—lends... (more)

Grades are in and several cruise ship lines that homeport in Seattle—including Celebrity Cruises, Royal Caribbean Int’l and Carnival Cruise Lines — didn’t even make Cs in sustainability, according to an environmental group rating the cruise ship companies.

Friends of the Earth, a national San Francisco-based environmental organization, released its Cruise Ship Environmental Report Card suggesting several cruise lines have a sub-par commitment to ocean water and air quality.

Cruise Line International Association (CLIA) maintains the report card — which graded 13 companies on their sewage treatment systems, their efforts to reduce air pollution, their compliance with state water laws and accessibility of their environmental information — casts an unfair light on the industry.

“For the second year in a row, we’ve found that cruise lines are doing less than they can to limit the environmental impacts of their ships,”  FOE's Clean Vessels... (more)

Bottom line - despite the return of wolf hunts to Idaho and Montana this year, wolf populations grew. Not by as much as in previous years, but by a respectable 3.2 percent in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington, reports the Sightline Institute in its Cascadia Scorecard.

The hunts marked the first time in decades recreational hunters were allowed to shoot the wolves. Hunters killed 134 wolves in Idaho and 72 in Montana. There were 1,386 left standing in the four states at the end of 2009.

But hunting wasn’t quite as lethal to wolves last year as lack of habitat and policies that protect livestock. Wolves have pretty much saturated the best habitat in high-elevation public forests in Idaho and Montana. That means they're expanding their range and getting into more conflicts with the cattle, sheep, dogs, llamas and goats that inhabit more domesticated territory... (more)

 If enough people pitch in $20, InvestigateWest will launch investigative reporter Lee van der Voo into examining this issue: How green are cruise ship tourist dollars? What is the impact on our oceans and coastal waters? Donate here to put van der Voo to work on this story. Below is InvestigateWest's latest Spot.us blog item supporting the story pitch.

Cruising season kicked off recently in Seattle and environmental groups are asking commissioners at the Port of Seattle to go green.

On the table is a potential ban on the discharge of treated wastewater from cruise ships while in port. Most ships only release the treated wastewater in federal and international waters miles off of Seattle's shore, but those who opt to release waste locally often do so while docked. These ships are subject to vessel inspection, toxicity tests and must open their books to the Washington Department of Ecology, showing where and when they release wastewater. But that wastewater is allowed to flow freely from boats... (more)

If there is anything that emerged from a recent, three-day Conference on War and Global Health at the University of Washington, it is that the full fury of war is felt long after the last bomb is exploded and guns go silent, when countries at war are forced to deal with health and social maladies that can linger for decades.

In this, there are no victors. The aggressor and the victim, victor and loser, end up suffering big time. And not just in terms of health consequences. The grave after-effects include total destruction of health supply infrastructure as well as the cost of long-term treatment and care for military and civilian casualties of conflicts.

It is often assumed that deaths, injuries displacement and other forms of social disruption characterize human conflict. But the conference underscored the fact that the gravest difficulties are borne years or even decades after the cessation of hostilities...long after media crews have re-directed TV cameras and laptops to other stories.

With a... (more)

Fellow nonprofit journalism center ProPublica produced this insightful report about how the state of Washington is brushing past the insidious and sometimes lethal risks of beryllium contamination during its stimulus-funded stampede to hire workers to clean up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. (more)

When news that a dead gray whale had washed up on the shores of Puget Sound in West Seattle recently, its stomach full of human trash, I immediately thought of a series of stunning but horrific photographs I had recently experienced -- Seattle photographer Chris Jordan's work on the albatrosses of Midway Island who unintentionally kill their newborns feeding them our brightly colored garbage.

The gray whale was dead, but had been in good health. A bottom feeder, it had ingested about 20 plastic bags, surgical gloves, plastic pieces, a pair of sweat pants, a golf ball, and other cast-off bits of our lives. It was the fifth dead gray whale to be found in two weeks on Puget Sound, according to the Cascadia Research Collective.  Several of those whales were malnourished. The photo above, by Cascadia Research of Olympia, WA,  shows researchers near the whale.

Jordan's photographs show image after image of albatross chicks who have died after their parents have flown out over the ocean, bringing... (more)

The Federal Commerce Commission’s goal of net neutrality moved a little farther out of reach this month, after US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled the FCC lacks the authority to regulate major broadband Internet providers.

The high court’s decision means the FCC has no legal grounds to step in, should Big Cable decide to slow their customers’ connection speeds, increase Internet costs, or filter certain pages from search results.

A customer could, of course switch her broadband Internet provider if she found her service too slow or too costly. The problem is that very little competition exists between major telecommunications companies in many regions of the country. As Timothy Karr points out, the FCC's National Broadband Plan reveals only four percent of Americans have more than two choices for wireless Internet providers.

And the FCC can’t prevent these Internet providers, companies like Comcast, Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc, and Time Warner, from making... (more)

Many college women say their experiences after being sexually assaulted -- often in date rape situations -- illustrate a culture of indifference and denial that results in one in five young women being assaulted during their college years, according to this recent series by InvestigateWest journalists Carol Smith and Lee van der Voo done in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity. They found that unclear and conflicted internal disciplinary systems can compound victims' suffering.

Now that it's Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the Center for Public Integrity provides an update and says the recent project, which was done with media partners around the nation, continues to resonate in significant ways:

The year-long investigation revealed that students found 'responsible' for alleged sexual assaults on college campuses often face little or no punishment, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down. Indeed, according to the Center’s probe, student victims can face...

It's really quite humorous, I know, when journalists get written up. And we pay a lot more attention to it than the rest of you all, I know. But still.

It's just over a year since the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed, where I worked as assistant managing editor for news and editor of the investigative team.

So I said to Linda Thomas of KIRO Radio something like this, comparing my job at the P-I to my current role as executive director and editor of InvestigateWest; "I loved my job at the P-I. It was a great job. But I was presiding over a dying industry. Now, I'm creating something new. I'm on the cusp of a transitioning news ecosystem. If I could snap my fingers and go back? No." (more)

RELATED:

It’s a dizzying, high wire act that’s now on display in Washington, D.C. It’s called putting a health care reform bill together. And just watching it happen is crazy-making. The vote could come as soon as this weekend.

President Obama is trying to rope them in – bringing together holdouts like abortion opponents who fear the bill expands access to abortion, and liberals arguing the bill does not go far enough to expand access to health care, in support of historic reform that could overhaul the nation’s health care system. And keeping track of the moving parts is a full-time job. (more)

FURTHER READING

Health care reform should be a litmus test (Mark Trahant)

Early Learning Challenge Fund dropped from healthcare reform (Paul Nyhan)

What the health bill means for you (Washington Post) (more)

Bill Lucey of The Huffington Post featured InvestigateWest [and Seattlepostglobe] in an article about nonprofit investigative journalism in an age of declining for-profit newsrooms.

Lucey, a former South Florida Sun-Sentinel reporter, began the interview by asking what it was like to watch the Seattle Post-Intelligencer close.  To be frank, it was horrible.  

But I've replaced that memory with a year of hard work... (more)

More here at InvestigateWest

  The P-I stopped publication almost exactly a year ago.

  (Photo and purse by Linda Thomas)

Students in Seattle, Bellingham, Olympia, Portland, Berkeley and in college towns across the nation Thursday raised voices and waved protest signs against rising tuition and fees that threaten access to higher education.

It was called a "National Day of Action." It was bigger on some campuses, where hundreds turned out, and smaller on others, like Bellingham, where only about 20 students turned out. At Seattle Central, a protest banner read: "MONEY FOR JOBS AND EDUCATION, NOT WAR." Nationally, tens of thousands of students protested. (more)

 more at

With a couple of Washington and Oregon state cheese recalls fresh in our memories this month, and a history of fatal E. coli poisoning that swept through a Washington state fast food chain in the 1990s, we should pay attention to a new report that food-borne illnesses such as E. coli and salmonella cost this country $152 billion annually in health care and other losses.

The report, from the Pew Charitable Trusts, is much higher than the earlier figure of $35 billion reported by the Agriculture Department in 1997. The government estimates that 5,000 of those who become ill die.

New food-safety legislation would give the federal Food and Drug Adminstration new powers to enforce food safety laws and prevent food contamination. (more)

more at InvestigateWest

Further reading:

Now it's red pepper you need to watch out for

An almost invisible path of food poisoning

If a school is failing, how do you fix it? Can you fix it without admitting anything is wrong with the teaching? How about the leadership? The district administration? The parents or the students? Whose fault is it anyway?

Schools on a list of the state’s lowest performing schools are in line to get some big federal dollars. President Obama this week announced he has $900 million in new federal grants available to school districts willing to take aggressive steps to fix their struggling institutions, or close them. That $900 million is on top of $4 billion in federal grants in the “Race to the Top” fund aimed at improving education nationwide. That program will make about $50 million available to Washington schools judged to be among the lowest 5 percent in student achievement. (more)