Category Archives: Multimedia

Who’s to Blame for a Factory Shutdown: A Company, or California?

August 1, 2022 Kurtis Lee

VERNON, Calif. — Teresa Robles begins her shift around dawn most days at a pork processing plant in an industrial corridor four miles south of downtown Los Angeles. She spends eight hours on her feet cutting tripe, a repetitive motion that has given her constant joint pain, but also a $17.85-an-hour income that supports her family.

So in early June, when whispers began among the 1,800 workers that the facility would soon shut down, Ms. Robles, 57, hoped they were only rumors.

“But it was true,” she said somberly at the end of a recent shift, “and now each day inches a little closer to my last day.”

The 436,000-square-foot factory, with roots dating back nearly a century, is scheduled to close early next year. Its Virginia-based owner, Smithfield Foods, says it will be cheaper to supply the region from factories in the Midwest than to continue operations here.

He prays for Chicago as violence takes children’s lives and Trump threatens with federal forces

July 30, 2020 Kurtis Lee

CHICAGO — Donovan Price bowed his head and prayed in the parking lot of the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“Please give her strength,” he whispered.

Inside the emergency room, doctors scrambled to save the life of a 10-month-old girl with a bullet lodged in her shoulder — a baby who while strapped into a car seat this week was shot by someone in a passing vehicle traveling along an expressway on the South Side of Chicago.

Price steeled himself for another vigil. The 53-year-old self-described street pastor has found a calling in consoling the families of victims of gun violence. He scans his phone — waiting for texts, Twitter messages, phone calls — and then drives to street corners or hospitals. He searches for grace, but it seems like every day word of another shooting finds him.

“We who live in this city,” he said, “have to figure out how to end this now.”

This troubled city cannot be fixed, Price said, unless the underlying causes of violence are addressed and locals, not outside federal forces, provide the answers.

Native women are vanishing across the U.S. Inside an aunt’s desperate search for her niece

January 31, 2020 Kurtis Lee

GROVE, Okla. — The woman’s oval-shaped face, on a crinkled 8 ½-by-11-inch flier, is easy to miss.

Taped on a wall inside a gas station off Highway 59 — amid a collage of business cards for lawn care and Bible tutoring services — it reads:

Name: Aubrey Dameron
Age: 25 years old
Height: 5’10
Weight: 140 lbs
Last Seen: Grove, Oklahoma 03/09/2019

Since Dameron disappeared from her northeast Oklahoma home nearly a year ago, her aunt, Pam Smith, has plastered dozens of placards around town. She has also organized search teams to scour fields and to drain a pond. And she has repeatedly pleaded for information in Facebook posts.

But so far, nothing.

“We just want to bring her home,” Smith said on a recent morning outside the gas station. “We want answers.”

‘This is our land’: Native Americans see Trump’s move to reduce Bears Ears monument as an assault on their culture

December 25, 2018 Kurtis Lee

SAN JUAN COUNTY, Utah — Thick red mud clung to Jonah Yellowman’s boots as he sidestepped down the embankment into a narrow valley of sagebrush. When he spotted perfect stems — not too dry, not too long — he snapped them from the waist-high bushes.

Every few months for much of his life, the 66-year-old Navajo spiritual leader has trekked from his nearby home to this slice of land in southeastern Utah, not far from the base of the Bears Ears buttes, to gather sage. Throughout the year, he uses the plant in ceremonies, often sharing it with people seeking wisdom or health, or as a way to offer thanks.

“This is our land and our herb,” Yellowman said. “It has to be protected. It’s all we have.”

Last year, President Trump signed proclamations slashing the size of Bears Ears National Monument by 85% and neighboring Grand Staircase-Escalante by about half, the largest combined rollback of federally protected land in the nation’s history.

With several lawsuits set to be decided early next year, the decision — a recommendation by outgoing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose short tenure included opening millions of acres of public land for drilling — struck critics as a clear example of what they characterize as a larger attack on indigenous communities. The scaling back of Bears Ears, they say, feels especially targeted, since it was a coalition of tribes that had lobbied to have the land designated as a national monument.

In December 2016, President Obama signed a proclamation protecting 1.35 million acres of land as part of the newly created Bears Ears National Monument, named for the distinctive buttes that resemble a bear peering over the horizon.

“The land,” Obama’s proclamation read, “is profoundly sacred to many Native American tribes.”

Journalist