This is an important story that hasn’t been written before.
Carol Smith, a skilled reporter and gifted writer, has documented something that had been rumored for years to be killing medical professionals, proven in peer-reviewed studies, but ignored by government safety regulators.
Spread over most of the front page of today’s Seattle Times, [...]
A Cold Truth Special Report
SPOKANE, Wash. – It was a strange sight. Two people dressed head-to-toe in protective Tyvek and full-face respirators, carrying a stainless steel bowl and a dirt scoop as they weaved through tomato plants, ducked under heavy, cherry-laden branches and crawled around a collection of gigantic plastic yard toys.
Raymond Wu and Jennifer [...]
Charles Dickens was writing a tale of two cities. But his words – that “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’’ – perfectly describe the tale of one this week.
After nearly a decade of fighting for and failing to get emergency help for the people poisoned by asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in [...]
People in Libby, Mont. are through licking their wounds and are working to put the acquittal earlier this month of W.R. Grace and its executives behind them.
But many say they live in fear that the innocent verdict offered up by the jury will give the former owner of the asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mine the chutzpa to [...]
A juror wept as a clerk stood before Judge Donald Molloy’s bench and reported that W.R. Grace and Co. and three of its former executives were not guilty of charges brought by the government in the nation’s largest environmental crime trial in history.
I’d love to know why she was crying. She wasn’t alone.
The trial took [...]
It took an hour for Judge Donald Molloy to give the jury its instructions.
Most sounded like a straight lecture on the eight criminal charges in the indictment, and he asked both the defense and prosecution to object or accept each of the 50-plus instructions. Grace’s side objected to many of them to reserve a right [...]
Cutting two expert witnesses they had earlier said were vital to their case, the defense in the W.R. Grace criminal trial rested today at 3:10 p.m. and judge Donald Molloy quickly headed to chambers with the lead lawyers to discuss the upcoming public debate over the final instructions to the jury.
The last witness in the [...]
The last day of testimony in the W.R. Grace criminal trial began with the defense calling a former Libby city attorney and an ex-Grace accountant. Both were quickly questioned and dismissed.
But drama surfaced soon after Defense Attorney Thomas Frongillo began questioning Melvin Parker, the owner of the nursery he built on the site of the [...]
There is a slight lingering stench in the Missoula courtroom where the criminal trial of W.R. Grace is two days from going to the jury.
Many blame it on the odorous performance of Grace’s star lawyer David Bernick and his repeated assertions that a Robert Marsden, an EPA criminal investigator had a “special relationship” with discredited [...]
