Today, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and FRONTLINE/World launched "Carbon Watch," an investigative collaboration that will track the evolving, soon-to-be trillion-dollar global carbon market. The project will take an ongoing, in-depth look at the often hidden interests behind the proposed solutions to the climate change crisis.

This investigation will be presented on multiple platforms – print, radio, television and online – all aggregated on Carbon Watch. The Web site, produced by CIR and FRONTLINE/World, will provide the public with extensive ongoing reporting on the markets created by cap and trade, from original stories to background information, blogs and dispatches from reporters around the world.

"Climate change is one of the key issues of our time," said Robert Rosenthal, Executive Director of CIR. "Through this unique collaboration with FRONTLINE/World, our goal is to make it possible for the world to experience what is happening in real-time through blogs, videos and in-depth reporting. ‘Carbon Watch’ provides the public with a compelling multimedia platform and a central place to learn about these critical decisions that will affect our environment, the global economy and the balance of power for years to come."

The project is being led by CIR’s award-winning Senior Correspondent Mark Schapiro. "Carbon Watch" launches today with Schapiro’s first story, "The Money Tree," a video report from Brazil. The video, produced in association with Mother Jones magazine – which features a print version of the story in its November/ December issue – follows the trail of a carbon offset project launched in a Brazilian forest by three U.S. companies: General Motors, Chevron and American Electric Power.

Schapiro is also the correspondent for a two-part radio series on this topic scheduled to air on American Public Media’s Marketplace in November. His ongoing coverage will include video and blog reports from the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. Further stories will be released in multiple outlets and on this Web site in the months to come.

"With 'Carbon Watch,' we've created a groundbreaking joint project in online investigative reporting that allows us to engage a worldwide audience on a complex and unfolding global story," said Sharon Tiller, Series Executive Director, FRONTLINE/World. "This multimedia initiative brings together the best of in-depth reporting and innovative storytelling to create a unique evergreen web destination that covers the business of climate change in a way that goes far beyond current media coverage."

For more information on Carbon Watch, visit pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/carbonwatch/.

Today in the American South, scores of civil rights murders remain unsolved, uninvestigated, unprosecuted, and untold. Those two legacies of violence and silence still haunt the region and continue to damage race relations in the United States.

Investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell has been re-opening many of these "cold cases" while reporting at The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. His work has resulted in convictions in four cases, and has revealed evidence in several others. Last month, Mitchell was awarded the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grant"—a $500,000 award. He talks about his work in an article published today by Editor & Publisher: "Aiding Justice in Civil Rights-era Murder Cases."

Mitchell is joined by several other reporters doing similar investigations on unsolved Civil Rights-era murder cases in a collaborative project that will launch next month by the Center for Investigative Reporting, Paperny Films, and WNET in New York. Stay tuned.

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.

In another sign that the Obama administration is preparing for — or at least thinking about — sweeping reforms of the nation's broken immigration system, the agency that polices the nation's immigration laws has created a new position to work on issues related to possible new legislation.

John W. Salter, who previously ran the Los Angeles legal office for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was recently named to the newly created post of ICE Special Counsel for Legal Affairs, ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley confirmed in an email to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Salter's other responsibilities include "working with ICE's Headquarters legal division to prepare legal guidance on complex areas of immigration law, monitoring the development of case law and analyzing the impact of these changes on ICE's litigation strategy and working on issues related to comprehensive immigration reform," Haley wrote.

The Obama administration has said that fixing the nation's immigration system will have to wait until next year. In the interim, the Department of Homeland Security, which has been tasked with planning for the legislative push, is drafting language for a possible bill, sources say.

Earlier the month, Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, told The New York Times that his agency is preparing for the possibility of giving "legal status to millions of illegal immigrants" as part of a legislative package.

Salter assumed his new duties on Sept. 28. He reports to the director of field legal operations. Salter had been the chief counsel in Los Angeles for ICE and the former INS since 1991, according to Haley. The Los Angeles chief counsel's office made big news over the summer with the ICE crackdown on illegal immigrants employed by LA-based clothier American Apparel.

The new ICE chief counsel in Los Angeles, the agency's largest field office, is James S. Stolley. From Haley:

Stolley oversees a staff of approximately 100 attorneys and 33 support personnel. During the course of his federal career, Mr. Stolley has held a variety of key legal positions. Most recently, he served as the Chief of Staff to ICE’s Principal Legal Advisor in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, he was the Deputy Chief Counsel for ICE in San Francisco, a position he assumed in 2002. Mr. Stolley received his law degree from the University of Maine School of Law. He began his government career as a trial attorney for the former INS in 1994 in San Francisco.

Let's break this down, abilities, credentials, and degrees aside:
ICE's principal legal advisor (top attorney) — whom Mr. Stolley served as chief of staff — is Peter Vincent (bio here). After graduating from the University of Virginia law school in 1995 (he took an bachelor of arts degree with high honors in political science from the University of California, Berkeley), he worked for about seven years in the legal department as a litigator for the multi-national engineering firm Bechtel Corporation before he joined the former INS in July 2002. His first INS job was in the San Francisco chief counsel's office, where Stolley was deputy chief counsel.

John T. Morton, assistant secretary for ICE (bio here), graduated from the University of Virginia law school a year before Vincent. He joined the federal government in 1994, first in New York as an INS trial attorney through the Justice Department honors program. He went on to become special assistant to INS general counsel David A. Martin, who took a leave of absence as a law professor at the University of Virginia from 1995 to 1998, to serve in that position.

Martin (brief bio here) is now the principal deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeand Security.

Quick question: Why would Salter leave a post he held for 18 years?

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, a human-rights investigator in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, was released last Wednesday after being held for about a week.

The El Paso Times has the story here.

A second high-ranking official in a two-month-old federal office that oversees immigration detention policy and planning has left the government, sources say.

Cree Zischke, tasked with addressing detainee health care issues for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office of Detention Policy and Planning, departed just weeks after her boss, Dr. Dora Schriro, left ICE in late September to become commissioner of New York City's jails.

“I am no longer with the ICE Office of Detention Planning and Policy (sic),” she wrote in an out-of-office auto-reply received on Oct. 14 by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Sources this week confirmed that Zischke is no longer with ICE, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, and has returned to the private sector. Calls seeking comment from Zischke were not returned.

Zischke came to ICE from the Arizona Department of Corrections, where she directed a program that addressed health and mental health services, among other concerns, according to her resume posted on LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking Web site.

She followed Schriro, her former boss in Arizona, to Washington, D.C., leaving her prison post in March. Before directing the ICE detention policy and planning office, Schriro had advised Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on immigration detention. Before that, she ran Arizona's prisons when Napolitano was governor of the state.

The New York Times reported in September that Schriro left DHS because of “the needs of a sick family member in New York, not any policy disagreements with the administration.”

Schriro left the position a little more than a month into her job as the director of the new ICE office, which was unveiled in early August. Phyllis A. Coven, who has spent 17 years in federal government, most recently with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, replaced Schriro as the office's acting director.

The decision — and timing — of both departures surprised advocates, Congressional staffers and other government employees, and left many speculating about the reasons.

Megan Bremer, managing attorney of the Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center, which offers legal services to detained immigrants in York, Penn., said advocacy groups like hers were optimistic about discussions over reform with Schriro and Zischke, and hoped the same efforts would continue.

“Folks in the Department of Homeland Security, like Cree, were really reaching out to advocates, sitting down across the table from us and listening,” she said. “PIRC is very disappointed that the kind of people who have the ability to create partnerships are leaving the government during this critical period of reform."

Immigration advocates had put stock in Schriro to overhaul the nation’s immigration detention system, first as a special advisor to Secretary Napolitano, then as the new office’s first director. After Schriro left advocates hoped that Zischke would continue what her former boss had started.

In early October Schriro released a 35-page report that outlined recommendations and potential reforms to the immigration detention system, which uses more than 300 facilities around the country to hold more than 30,000 detainees on any given day.

Among the announced reforms are new classification systems for detainees, including those with special medical needs, greater oversight of detention facilities and contracts, and an expansion of alternatives to detention.

The United States isn't the only country denying asylum to Mexican police officers, despite widely reported drug violence south of the border and allegations that the Mexican government cannot protect its own.

The Toronto Globe and Mail last week highlighted what it called a “model” Juarez police officer who unsuccessfully sought protection in his own country before fleeing to Canada.

According to the paper, Gustavo Gutierrez Masareno fled Juarez after he confronted the army on civil-rights abuses and began receiving death threats. The Chihuahua Attorney-General's office advised him to go into hiding because it couldn't protect him, he said. The paper also reported that other former Mexican police officers have had their asylum claims rejected by the Canadian government.

The New York Times followed a few days later with a long, front-page story on the risks investigators – police and journalists among them – have doing their jobs.

In collaboration with the Los Angeles Times, CIR reported in June on the difficulties that Mexican police officers have winning asylum in U.S. immigration courts.

The immigration cases of those officers profiled in the article remain in limbo. One is awaiting his court date later this year, another had his asylum application rejected and awaits a judge to decide his fate and the last one expects to file his asylum application shortly.

But not all investigators are seeking asylum. As reported earlier this week, a Mexican human rights activist who has temporarily fled his country is fighting to get released from immigration detention because although he is afraid for his life in Mexico, he doesn’t want asylum in the United States.

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, 63, directed the Juarez office of the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, across the border from El Paso. He had documented 170 incidents of abuse by the Mexican military, and because of this had his life threatened.

He had been moving back and forth across the border when he was arrested last week by Customs and Border Protection as he tried to enter the country on a visa. De la Rosa was later transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in El Paso. Both agencies are part of the Department of Homeland Security.

His attorney, Carlos Spector, said that as of today de la Rosa was no longer in ICE custody, but he hadn't been released with his visa.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that Sgt. Derwin Longmire, the Oakland police sergeant who led the investigation into the 2007 slaying of journalist Chauncey Bailey, "has been cleared of internal charges that he compromised the probe to keep the leader of Your Black Muslim Bakery from being implicated."

Longmire has been on paid leave for six months as an internal investigation looked into the state attorney general's conclusion that he had mishandled the probe of the Aug. 2, 2007, Bailey slaying. State investigators had found "Longmire's inquiry was 'inexcusably lacking' for allegedly failing to look into bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV's possible role in the killing," the Chronicle reports.

Oakland police officials apparently disagreed, and Police Chief Howard Jordan has ordered that he return to duty. Upon returning, he will serve a five-day suspension for minor problems with other homicide cases, the Chronicle reports.

Longmire's attorney Michael Rains told the Chronicle that Longmire "always believed that Bey had orchestrated Bailey's killing ... and did nothing to keep him from being charged. Any problems in the case were, at worst, caused by Longmire being 'sloppy and inattentive to detail.'"

Reporters at The Chauncey Bailey Project have reported extensively on the ties between Sergeant Longmire and the Bey family, some of whom were suspects in the murder case. An investigation by Thomas Peele, Bob Butler, and Mary Fricker last October found Longmire ignored evidence of Yusuf Bey IV's possible involvement in the Bailey slaying, and that he interfered on behalf of Bey IV in two other felony cases. See the CIR timeline of Longmire's ties to the Bey family and the mounting evidence connecting Bey IV to the Bailey murder here:

According to the Chronicle article:

Longmire and Bey IV had known each other for two years before the Bailey killing. Several police investigators interviewed as part of the state probe cited that friendship in faulting the decision to put Longmire on the case.

In a memo to [Police Chief Howard] Jordan, acting Capt. Sean Whent, head of the police internal affairs unit, said the state findings showed Longmire "deliberately did an inadequate investigation ... most likely due to a relationship" with Bey.

Even Jordan told state investigators in February that given Longmire's friendship with the bakery leader, "I don't see how you can form the conclusion that it's not affecting his ability to investigate the case thoroughly."

CIR board member Len Downie, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, is making waves with a new report on the numerous challenges facing journalism in the United States: "The Reconstruction of American Journalism." Downie coauthored the report with sociologist Michael Schudson, who has joint appointments at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and UC San Diego. They make a powerful case for  more "accountability news reporting" of the kind that CIR has been doing for several decades.

Downie and Schudson put forward a number of recommendations, including urging universities to assume a more central role in doing reporting that traditionally newspapers have undertaken, and making information collected by local, state and federal governments more accessible to promote more informed citizen journalism. 

Their most controversial proposal—by far—is that the federal government subsidize local news coverage. The FCC, they argue, "should direct some of the money from the telephone bill surcharge—or from fees paid by radio and television licensees, or proceeds from auctions of telecommunications spectrum, or new fees imposed on Internet service providers—to finance a Fund for Local News that would make grants for advances in local news reporting and innovative ways to support it."

This is a variation on arguments made over the years by various observers, including a compelling article by John Nichols and Robert McChesney in The Nation earlier this year.     

If the United Kingdom can do it by underwriting the BBC with television license fees, why shouldn't we do something similar in the United States? The idea is not as outlandish as it may seem, as Nichols and McChesney write. It is one that dates back to the nation's founding. 

According to Nichols and McChesney:

Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with "free markets." It was the result of public policy.

A Fund for Local News is a terrific idea. Whether it should—or could—be underwritten by the United States government is another question altogether. Let the debate begin.

A Mexican human rights investigator who has said his life has been threatened because of his efforts to document alleged abuses by the Mexican military is being detained by U.S. immigration officials after he tried to enter the country through an El Paso border crossing, his attorney said Friday.

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, who directed the Juarez office of the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission in northern Mexico, has documented about 170 incidents of abuse by the Mexican military, ranging from homicide to reckless driving, his attorney said.

De la Rosa, 63, last month fled his home near Juarez, which has been racked with drug-related violence the past two years, including nearly 2,000 killings since January. He has been in exile in El Paso since receiving a death threat, which he believes came from the military, as he drove home from work.

De La Rosa, however, doesn’t want asylum in the United States, his El Paso-based attorney, Carlos Spector, said.

“He doesn’t want to leave his country and abandon his life-long commitment. He wants to continue investigating” allegations of human rights abuses by the military, Spector said. “He doesn’t want to stay in any one place each night.“

The investigator was returning to El Paso on Thursday night around 6 p.m. when he was asked by a Customs and Border Protection officer if he was afraid for his life in his country.

De la Rosa, who has a special visa for border residents that allows him to be in the United States for up to 30 days at a time, answered that he was afraid, but he had no intention of asking for asylum, Spector said. He was then arrested. He is now being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in El Paso, ICE spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa confirmed today, but declined further comment.

Roger Maier, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection in El Paso, said that if a person expresses fear of returning to their home country an asylum officer must conduct an interview to determine if asylum is appropriate. U.S. officials said they had detained de la Rosa for his protection, according to Spector.

“There is absolutely no reason why they should be detaining him. He hasn’t been in the country for more than 30 days,” Spector said. “He has every right to be in this country.”

Spector suggested that the U.S. government is trying to compel de la Rosa to seek asylum so it can deny it, even though his case appears winnable.

“The United States government doesn’t force anyone to file (an asylum application) who doesn’t want to file an application,” said Maria Garcia-Upson,
a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Service, which adjudicates asylum claims.

Asylum officers give a detainee 48 hours to contact a family member or an attorney before a credible fear interview. Most credible fear interviews are conducted and decided upon within two weeks, she said.

The activist was in his car waiting at a stoplight on Sept. 4 when another car pulled up beside him, Spector said. The driver rolled down his window, pointed his finger and pretended to shoot him, saying "Quiet down or we are going to kill you."

The Mexican military has denied any involvement in the threat on his life. De la Rosa, who still occasionally travels into Juarez for meetings, has been negotiating with Mexican officials to receive protection and security measures so he can continue his work, Spector said.

The investigator was told that he would be out of a job if he didn’t report back to work by Oct. 6, according to Amnesty International, which has called on the Mexican government to investigate the alleged threat and to provide protection for the investigator and his family.

Calls for comment to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Mexican consulate in El Paso were not returned.