for spotlighting the last remaining artifact from the Sept. 11 attacks among thousands preserved and distributed for memorials. http://apne.ws/2cqWmx1
for two engaging pieces on the 9/11 anniversary. The first, built around video interviews with regular Americans, examined how the sense of national unity that existed after the attacks has disappeared; the other, in vignette style, focused on children who lost parents during the attacks. http://bit.ly/2cavGzY http://bit.ly/2cqA8YE http://apne.ws/2cmLRKi
Who hasn’t glanced out the car window and seen another driver, head down, texting furiously? That was the genesis of a story by Boston-based reporter Denise Lavoie, who took an authoritative nationwide look at the texting-while-driving scourge and law enforcement’s losing battle to stop it.
Lavoie did spot checks with a handful of states around the country, as well as interviews with federal transportation officials and others. Her reporting – AP’s first major attempt to grasp the scope of the problem – found that police are fighting a losing battle despite adopting some pretty creative methods to catch serial texters in the act.
for documenting the high number of mass graves that the Islamic State group is responsible for, through interviews with witnesses, mass grave officials, NGOs and activists, and satellite photos. http://bit.ly/2clBkkZ http://trib.in/2cojfDv http://bit.ly/2cFTY6H
for striking images and stories of migrants from a two-week embed on a rescue ship operated by a Spanish volunteer group. http://nyti.ms/2c0ZZIF
for being first to report the death of legendary comic actor Gene Wilder. http://bit.ly/2c1KqUB
for filing a FOIA to force the town of Latta to disclose why the state’s first female and openly gay sheriff had been suspended for five days. http://bit.ly/2bVpxEm
for getting the raw FBI crime data to prove wrong the Maine governor’s allegation that blacks and Hispanics account for "90-plus percent" of heroin trafficking arrests in his state. http://nyti.ms/2cnuBG2
for getting documents about a group of Jewish “avengers” who poisoned more than 2,000 Nazis after World War II but did not succeed in killing any. http://apne.ws/2c11Nlx
for securing exclusive, all-formats access for AP of popular sportscaster Craig Sager undergoing a rare third bone-marrow transplant ... http://apne.ws/2c9WhuD
for being first to report that Sept. 10 was the day would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley would leave Washington psychiatric hospital ... http://bit.ly/2cDyRTp
for the first major effort by AP to grasp the scope of the texting-while-driving scourge ...
http://abcn.ws/2cIGMin
for an exclusive, multi-format profile about a family that fled Syria and arrived in San Diego ...
http://apne.ws/2cnuzhe
or reporting that the head of the Indiana Department of Education's office circumvented the rules ...
http://bit.ly/2cEXVFF
for exposing how government officials are being accused of diverting food aid from camps for people who fled Boko Haram extremists, leading to a high number of starving children.
http://bit.ly/2ccmvfH
http://apne.ws/2bzjfit
for one of the first published interviews that Warren Beatty has given in years on the occasion of his new Howard Hughes biopic, "The Rules Don't Apply."
http://bayareane.ws/2cFXsWA
The scene, presented in the most vivid close-up, shows a paramedic frantically pushing an IV full of an opioid blocker into the vein of a woman turning blue and barely breathing. Then the radio squawks: Two more overdoses just reported. Where will Claire Galofaro’s riveting narrative go from here?
“The woman’s eyes blinked open” she writes next. Then: “Red lights on the phone at the 911 dispatch center flashed faster and faster until all 16 lines were screaming. They called from the dining room of a rickety house, the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, the bathroom of a gas station. `People are dying everywhere,’ one caller said.”
When WikiLeaks announced the release of hundreds of Saudi diplomatic documents last year, AP’s Raphael Satter in Paris and Maggie Michael in Cairo provided some of the most aggressive coverage of the leak. They broke news about everything from the secretive kingdom’s checkbook diplomacy to unpaid limousine bills and cheating students.
But as they plowed through the documents, they also noticed medical and identity documents -- potentially serious privacy violations. Satter flagged the issue but never got a formal response from WikiLeaks; with other stories on the horizon and only a handful of questionable documents in hand, Satter and Michael shelved the subject.
As nurse practitioners, Sister Margaret Held and Sister Paula Merrill played a pivotal role in the lives of many people in rural Holmes County, Mississippi, which with 44 percent of its residents living in poverty ranks as the seventh-poorest county in America, according to the Census Bureau.
So when the two Roman Catholic nuns were found stabbed to death in the home they shared, the news devastated friends and families, as well as the many people who came to rely on the pair for critical, life-saving medical care.
in all formats, for scoring a two-hour beat over the competition with first photos and video from the scene of Italy’s devastating earthquake, and following it with exclusive aerial images of flattened villages from a rented helicopter. They also found and interviewed the nun who became the icon of the devastation.
