Newscast for Friday, January, 2010

Geithner in the hot seat
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is back in the hot seat - this time over allegations that he helped broker secret deals while he was the head of the New York Federal Reserve. During the collapse of insurance giant AIG, Geithner’s former staff helped negotiate sweetheart deals for banks...and tried to keep it all secret. Tanya Snyder reports.

Federal report finds high rates of sexual victimization at juvenile detention facilities
A federal study released on Thursday has documented - for the first time - direct complaints of sexual victimization of youths held in juvenile detention. The report is the result of a survey mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Shannon Young spoke with Allen Beck, senior statistical adviser of the Bureau of Justice Statics at the Department of Justice. He's also the lead author of the report.

Listen to the extended interview here

Read the report here

Labor Department releases data for December
The officials US unemployment rate is holding steady at 10%, according to December employment numbers released today by the Labor Department. The country lost 85,000 jobs, despite some expectations that the New Year would bring better news for the economy. Lauren Applebaum, a labor researcher at UCLA, says the unemployment rate that includes people who are working part time but want full time jobs and those who have given up looking for employment remained unchanged at 17.3%.

“However, many people have left the labor force – 661,000 people altogher have left the labor force and it is possible that some of those people are not being accounted for. Even that number, the 17.3% only includes people who have looked for a job in the past 12 months. So it is possible there are people who gave up looking for work more than 12 months ago and aren’t being included.”

Applebaum says the only job growth came in unskilled sectors – where pay is low and benefits are scarce.

Some Texas Death Row inmates may be ineligible for execution under law
Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned execution of persons diagnosed with mental retardation, Texas continues to hold men with severe mental disabilities on Death Row. FSRN reporter Renee Feltz looks at a Texas psychologist who determines eligibility for execution based on estimates of prisoners' IQ scores.

Support for the story was provided by the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund. Read the Texas Observer version of the story, which includes an interactive graphic of the 29 Atkins cases Dr. Denkowski worked on in Texas.

Farmers in Gaza link problems in their field to white phosphorus contamination
One year after the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, farmers in the region complain of strange symptoms that have recently appeared among their crops. Some are linking the problems to Israel's use of white phosphorus during the military siege. FSRN's Rami Almeghari has the story.