Underreported from WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show

On this week’s Underreported, Human Rights Watch researcher Nisha Varia describes abuses of migrant domestic workers in Asia and the Middle East, and why Cambodian women are particularly vulnerable to mistreatment in Malaysia. Plus, a look at efforts to implement international labor standards for domestic workers.

The crisis at the Fukushima reactor in Japan has been out of the headlines, but that doesn’t mean the crisis has been solved. We’ll speak with Dr. Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist in the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists

Full body X-ray scanners are now commonplace in airports across America. ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell tells us about a new report that has found that the U.S. government glossed over a number of safety concerns about the the devices—even ignoring concerns about a potential increased risk of cancer.

Recently Kenyan forces invaded Somalia in a bid to fight the militant group Al-Shaabab. The United States has also been heavily involved in the country in recent years— allegedly establishing CIA bases, carrying out drone strikes, and providing funding for militants. The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill looks at the political situation in Somalia and the history of recent interventions in the war-torn and famine wracked country.

Earlier this month President Obama deployed 100 U.S. troops to Uganda in an advisory role to aid the fight against the Lords Resistance Army. Nate Haken, who works on conflict assessment issues in Uganda, and Patricia Taft, who served an adviser to the government of Uganda on war crimes prosecution and its case against the LRA, look at why this action was taken and the controversy surrounding it. Haken and Taft both work for The Fund for Peace.

In the current economic downturn, governments around the world are looking to crack down on tax loopholes—corporations have been able to take advantage of tax breaks and loopholes that add up to billions of dollars in lost tax revenue. On today’s Underreported, ProPublica senior reporter Jeff Gerth and Megan Murphy, Investment Banking Correspondent for the Financial Times, describe how corporations are saving billions and how governments are now trying to close some of these loopholes.

When we’re in the supermarket, trying to figure out what to cook for dinner, the issues of immigration and migrant laborers usually aren’t on our minds. Yet migrant workers pick much of the produce that ends up on our tables. On today’s Underreported segment, GQ correspondent Jeanne Marie Laskas describes the season she spent with the migrant workers who pick the fruits and vegetables we find in our supermarkets, and why our food system depends on them. Her article "Hecho en América" appears in the October issue of GQ.

This week major clashes erupted in South Africa over the future of the African National Congress, the country’s ruling party since the end of apartheid. New York Times reporter Alan Cowell and Franz Krüger, Director of the Wits Radio Academy in Johannesburg, join us to explain South Africa's political scene.

Journalist Michela Wrong looks at Eritrea and its president Isaias Afewerki. She has spent 13 years reporting in Africa and is the author of In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, about the Congolese dictator Mobutu, and I Didn't Do It for You, about Eritrea.

More than 50 years have passed since the United States sponsored a covert invasion of Cuba that came to be known as the Bay of Pigs. Now, one of the most coveted documents surrounding the disaster been released to the public: the top secret multi-volume CIA history of the operation. Peter Kornbluh of George Washington University’s National Security Archive led the effort to obtain the documents.

The Horn of Africa is facing its worst drought in 60 years. Already, 10 million people are in urgent need of food in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya and yesterday the United Nations declared its first famine in 27 years for parts of Somalia. On today’s first Underreported, Nora Love, the International Rescue Committee’s deputy director of programs, discusses the situation across the region.

More than 2.5 million Somalis are now in desperate need of food, but it wasn’t until late Wednesday that the State Department announced that it would send food aid to the country. The reason? Concerns that sending food aid would be aiding al-Shabab, which controls parts of southern Somalia and which the United States views as a terrorist organization. On today’s Underreported, Eliza Griswold, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Tenth Parallel, describes why the State Department was concerned that al-Shabab would use the food as a weapon and the challenges of providing food aid to areas where aid workers were banned until quite recently.

This week, a team of Japanese scientists announced that vast deposits of rare earth minerals—considered essential for the production of certain electronics—have been found under the Pacific Ocean. Cindy Lee Van Dover, Director of Duke University Marine Laboratory and Peter B. Kelemen, an Earth & Environmental Studies Professor at Columbia University, tell us about the deposits and how deep sea mining works.

A number of scientists believe that the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima reactors in Japan is much worse than what governments are revealing. Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail discusses what some in the scientific community are saying about the effects of the meltdown.

On this week’s Underreported, Dan Coughlin, reporter for The Nation magazine, Kim Ives, editor for Haiti Liberté, discuss what the WikiLeaks cables reveal about American diplomatic attitudes toward Haiti – both before and after the devasting earthquake there in 2010. A new series of reports about the 1,918 cables that relate to Haiti is being published in a partnership between The Nation and the Haiti Liberté newspaper.