Search Results for: Washington Post

Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 4

Longreads Pick

Here are 10 of our favorite stories right now from Gangrey, The Hairpin, Carrying the Gun, The Washington Post, Slice Magazine, and more.

Author: Mike Dang
Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 3, 2014

Virginia’s Unregulated Day Care Industry

Of the 43 deaths in unregulated homes, The Post’s review found that 22 were sleep-related, 10 involved physical abuse, three were accidental and one was natural. In seven cases, the causes were unclear in the available records. All but one of the sleep-related deaths involved risky actions taken by caretakers, records show. These included leaving infants to sleep in an unsafe setting or failing to check on them for extended periods.

In 2010, 7-month-old Finnigan Bales was found unresponsive in an upstairs bedroom in a Virginia Beach townhouse where Deborah Blaney ran an unregulated day-care operation. He had not been “checked on or fed for hours,” according to an investigation by the local branch of Child Protective Services.

Blaney had too many children in her care — seven — and eventually was convicted of operating a day-care program without a license, a misdemeanor. She was sentenced to serve 10 days in jail.

Finnigan’s mother, Megan Bales, said she and her husband interviewed Blaney and checked her references, but they learned that Blaney had no license only after Finnigan died.

“They don’t even know what time Finn passed away,” Bales said.

— A two-part investigation by The Washington Post looks into unregulated day care providers in Virginia. Since there is a the shortage of licensed day care providers in the state, unregulated day care providers—who don’t need to have any child care licenses or CPR training as long as they are caring for five children or fewer—fill in the gaps, especially for families who are unable to afford to place their children in licensed centers.

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Photo: U.S. Army

‘Must Be Hard to Live on That’: A Labor Day Reading List

According the the U.S. Department of Labor, the first Labor Day was celebrated in 1882 in New York City, and is now “dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” Here, five stories from the labor movement, and from workers just looking for a better opportunity for themselves.

1. “Temp Land: Working in the New Economy.” (Michael Grabell, ProPublica)

ProPublica’s Michael Grabell has been looking at the blue collar temp industry over the course of a year. His stories have included a look at the underworld of labor brokers, the lack of U.S. protections for temp workers, and the “temp towns” that dot America.

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Journalist Austin Tice Is Still Missing Two Years After Being Kidnapped

Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the death of Marie Colvin, in a blizzard of Syrian Army shells in Homs in February 2012, much of the Western media drew back from covering the country. Meanwhile, a lightly resourced, laughably paid, almost wholly uninsured cadre of freelancers, often armed with little more than a notebook and a mobile phone, infiltrated Syria anyway. A few were crazy narcissists or war-zone tourists, but most were serious reporters. Four-fifths of all journalists working in Syria, according to one estimate, are freelance and answering to no one but themselves.

Austin Tice was one of these. So was I. Our paths had even crossed. Three weeks before he disappeared, while cooling my heels in the Turkish border town of Antakya, waiting for someone to take me into Syria, I’d asked my hosts at a Free Syrian Army safe house whether any Western journalists had passed this way before. Just one, they said—an American named Austin who had stayed with them for a week. They kept in touch with him on Facebook—he was still inside.

— From a Vanity Fair story on journalists who’ve gone missing in Syria. Reporter Austin Tice, a former U.S. marine who was writing for The Washington Post and other publications, went missing in Syria two years ago today. Tice’s parents write: “Austin, please know that we love and miss you more than words can say.”

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— Watch a documentary on Tice produced and released by McClatchy Newspapers on the anniversary of his kidnapping:

Photo:

Dying With Dignity: A Reading List About the Right-to-Die Debate

Should patients suffering from terminal illnesses and unbearable pain be able to make the decision to end their lives? Helping the terminally ill end their lives is illegal in all but five states in the U.S. Here, five stories looking at the right-to-die debate.

1. “Helping Dad Die: A Daughter’s Story.” (Catherine Syer, Financial Times)

In the U.K., Britons with terminal illnesses or incurable diseases have nowhere to go if they want aid in dying. A daughter’s personal story about finding a way to ease her father’s suffering.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 1

Longreads Pick

10 stories we love right now, featuring The Awl, Harper’s, Grantland, the Washington Post, and more.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 27, 2014

Love and War

Longreads Pick

A legendary Special Forces commander was quietly forced to leave the U.S. Army after he admitted to a love affair with a Washington Post war correspondent, who quit her job to secretly live with him for almost a year in one of the most dangerous combat outposts in Afghanistan.

Tyson knew most of the visiting VIPs well from her long stint at the Washington Post, a job she quit to join Gant and write the book, and said she had to keep her presence in Gant’s combat “qalat” secret. News media “embeds” in Afghanistan with Special Operations forces rarely exceed a few days and she was not authorized by any task force to be in the Mangwel operation – much less for nine months.

“I stayed out of the picture,” she said in the ABC News interview with Gant in Seattle. “We didn’t want my presence there to be widely known, but at the same time a lot of people knew about it… I was glad for the opportunity to help the man I had fallen in love with, as well as to write about a potential solution to the incredible suffering I had witnessed over a decade almost.”

Source: ABC News
Published: Jun 24, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,286 words)

Making the Magazine: A Reading List

Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag. Share your favorite behind-the-magazine stories with us on Twitter or Facebook: #longreads. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: doug88888, Flickr

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…