Reporter Ben Greenberg talks to the hosts of The Takeaway, a national online news program, about a 2007 federal initiative to investigate and solve "cold case" murders from the civil rights era, and why so few cases are being pursued.

Listen to the program:

Join California Watch senior reporter Lance Williams for a live video chat this Thursday, July 8, at 3 p.m. Williams will discuss his investigative story about unsupervised San Francisco workers accused of cheating taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city electricians also allegedly entertained prostitutes at a city office.

To ask a question, go to the UStream page and enter your question in the chat box on the right. If you are not currently a UStream member, you will need to register. If you just want to watch, go to the California Watch page here to watch it live.

A flourishing and unregulated industry of pot delivery services is circumventing bans on storefront dispensaries and bringing medical marijuana directly to people’s homes, offices and more unconventional locations across the state, records and interviews show.

The unfettered delivery of marijuana through hundreds of these services highlights how quickly California’s fabled pot industry is moving from the shadows and into uncharted legal territory. These new couriers include enterprising farmers, business entrepreneurs and even a former Los Angeles pot dealer methodically switching her former clients to legal patients.

In newspapers and on the Internet, hundreds of “mobile dispensaries” advertise a wide range of strains and other products, such as brownies and cookies laced with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. One service delivers organic vegetables along with medical marijuana, as part of a “farm-direct” service.

Some operate in multiple counties, including jurisdictions where storefront dispensaries are banned, or make local deliveries to drop-off points, such as Starbucks parking lots and gas stations. At least three ship to clients around the state using private prescription-drug couriers.

Although delivery of medical marijuana is not a new phenomenon, advocates say the growth of these services could be a game-changer in the state’s pot war, which pits law enforcement, elected officials and community groups in some localities against dispensary owners and patients.

A question remains on whether these services are legal. Some local and federal officials say delivery services violate the 1996 Compassionate Use Act that legalized medical marijuana in California for qualified patients, as well as other laws. The services are viewed as a way to circumvent local regulations clearly banning dispensaries.

+ MAP: Medical marijuana delivery services in California
+ VIDEO: Delivering marijuana from plant to pipe
+ RADIO: Medical marijuana finds another avenue in LA

Read the full story at CaliforniaWatch.org

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.

Join Center for Investigative Reporting Executive Director Robert Rosenthal for a live video chat this Thursday, May 6 at 11 a.m. Rosenthal will discuss the Center's new project, California Watch, and take your questions about investigative reporting and the future of journalism.

The chat will happen live via UStream in the embedded player below. Just bookmark this page and return on May 6th to join the discussion.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

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.

We are happy to announce that "Carbon Watch" has been nominated for Best News & Politics Series in the 14th Annual Webby Awards.

Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.

As a nominee, we are also eligible to win a Webby People's Voice Award, which is voted online by the global Web community.

The voting closes April 29th, so FRONTLINE/World fans please cast your vote for us here.

Thanks for your support from all at the Carbon Watch team.

Carbon Watch is a joint project with Frontline/World and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

CIR correspondent Anna Badkhen documents her month-long trek across northern Afghanistan in a series of journals for Foreign Policy magazine.

She began her journey in Kabul, pondering the routes through war-torn territory: "When I show an Afghan aid worker in Kabul the road I want to take, one that humps over the Hindu Kush and descends into Afghanistan's northern plains, he shakes his head: This road is off limits. He knows what the map does not show -- that every ridge along the way can be a firing line; every gorge, an ambush; every valley, the backdrop for a massacre."

Read her first week of journal entries here: The Crossing

A collaboration between the Center for Investigative Reporting and PBS Frontline/World, Carbon Watch, has been nominated for 2010 Webby and Webby People's Voice Awards.

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. The Webby People's Voice Award is the winner that the online public votes for. Go here to vote for Carbon Watch in the News & Politics: Series category. Voting goes until April 29 and the winners are announced on May 4th.

Maia was trafficked to Moscow at 18. “They brought me to a group of 12 men, kept me there for four days, taking turns.” Moldova 2005 © Mimi Chakarova

For seven years, investigative reporter and photographer Mimi Chakarova has carried out painstaking, often dangerous, on-the-ground reporting into all aspects of the sex trafficking trade from Eastern Europe, including investigations into the countries of origin, the process of transit, and the initial allure and stark realities trafficked women face in the receiving countries. She has slowly built trust and developed relationships with young women in Eastern Europe who have been trafficked abroad. Over the years she has traveled through Eastern Europe, Southern Europe/Mediterranean regions and the Middle East for this project. Her work has won a 2008 Emmy Nomination and a 2008 Webby Award, and has appeared on PBS Frontline/World and CBS 60 Minutes. This long-term project was also awarded the Inge Morath Magnum Photo Grant for outstanding documentary work and has been supported by the Shifting Foundation and the Gruber Family Foundation.

CIR is now seeking production funding for Mimi Chakarova to complete a feature-length documentary that reveals the underground criminal network of trafficking in Eastern Europe and the intimate stories of its victims. The effort aims to shed light into this area of great darkness, which is difficult to report and thus rarely investigated in-depth.

Access has been the most difficult aspect of this reportage. Because of the criminal elements involved, it is not only a dangerous topic on which to report, but due to the shame involved—women are rarely willing to talk about what happened to them after they have been trafficked. Chakarova's background—a woman from Bulgaria—and her understanding of this field and long commitment to revealing it to the world make her one of the few journalists capable of the access necessary to report accurately on this trade. Through Chakarova's first person narration and rarely documented footage, this documentary will not only raise awareness and understanding of the hidden reality of sexual slavery, but will do so with sensitivity, compassion and exquisite visual storytelling.

Chakarova's stellar production team includes Stephen Talbot as executive producer and Stephanie Challberg as editor. View a sampling of her work in the multimedia project The Price of Sex: Women Speak, co-produced with CIR in 2009.

Chakarova will exhibit her photography and multimedia reporting at FiftyCrows Gallery in San Francisco in April. Please come support Chakarova's work at this event and help us spread the word:

The Price of Sex :: Photo Exhibition
April 10–May 15, 2010
OPENING RECEPTION: April 15 from 4-7:30 pm
FiftyCrows Gallery—Social Change Photography
49 Geary St., Suite 225
San Francisco, CA