After a deadly crash kills ten people, The Dallas Morning News investigates the safety of the nation’s trucking industry.

Tag(s): Accidents , texas
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To understand more about larger-than-life businessman Bob Jones and his company, the National Center for Employment of the Disabled (NCED), OREGONIAN photographer Faith Cathcart headed to El Paso, Texas, with reporter Jeff Kosseff. "It just felt like this was a terribly important story, and I wanted to do it right," Cathcart recalls.

>> View a slideshow of Cathcart's images.

Tag(s): Bob Jones , Contracting , Disabilities , disabled , government contractors , texas
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Since 1971, the government has supported a program to channel federal funds to non-profits that train and employ workers who are blind or severely disabled. Known as JWOD (named after the law that created it, the Javits-Wagner-O'Day act), the program eventually came to have an over $2 billion dollar budget. But no one, it appears, was keeping track of where that money was going.

Enter Bob Jones, an opportunistic businessman in El Paso, Texas. When journalists from The Oregonian took a closer look at his non-profit -- JWOD's number one contractor, the National Center for the Employment of the Disabled -- they found he was using the system, and federal tax dollars, to his advantage. In 2005 alone, NCED had been awarded federal contracts worth $276 million.

JWOD requires that two-thirds of an employer's workforce be blind or severely disabled before it can qualify for federal funds. Jones slipped through the cracks by claiming his Spanish-speaking workers from over the border were "disadvantaged."

>> Read a selection of articles from The Oregonian’s original reporting and the paper's most recent articles on disability programs and the workplace.

Tag(s): Bob Jones , Contracting , Disabilities , texas
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In a city built on oil and industry money, Houstonians have a name for the odor that emanates from its numerous industrial facilities: “the smell of money.” But for some residents, it also marks a dangerous public health threat: high levels of toxic air pollutants that have been linked to cancer, kidney and liver damage, as well as respiratory illnesses. In one neighborhood, levels of the carcinogen benzene were so high that one scientist said living there would be like "sitting in traffic 24-7."

Following her nose, HOUSTON CHRONICLE reporter Dina Cappiello sought to prove definitively that, despite industry denials, the neighborhoods around refineries and petrochemical plants suffer from the smokestacks that release these chemicals in their midst. With help from neighborhood residents, she planted air pollution sensors around some of Houston’s worst polluters, documenting the public health menace of air toxins as well as the ineptitude of the state regulators charged with protecting the public from these very threats.

This week, EXPOSÉ premieres "The Scientific Method" online with the shocking results of the CHRONICLE’s investigation.

>> Read Dina Cappiello's original reports in the HOUSTON CHRONICLE.

>> What are the nation's most polluted cities? Which cities have the cleanest air? Check back tomorrow on the Blog to find out.

Tag(s): Dina Cappiello , environment , health , pollution , texas
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Tomorrow on the EXPOSÉ site: With a smell in the air, residue on their cars, and their eyes occasionally burning, residents of Houston's "fenceline" communities - those that border many of the cities petrochemical plants - have often wondered what it was they were breathing. And when HOUSTON CHRONICLE environmental reporter Dina Cappiello knocked on their door, they were about to find out.

>> Watch the full episode of "The Scientific Method" on the EXPOSÉ site tomorrow.

Tag(s): Dina Cappiello , environment , health , pollution , texas
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