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Connor Sheets on Muck Rack

Connor Sheets

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As seen in: Los Angeles Times, Apple Podcasts, Medium, MSN, Yahoo Life, Scribd, The Guardian, Yahoo Canada, Yahoo News, Yahoo News Australia, Yahoo News Malaysia and
Investigative & enterprise reporter @latimes | Writing a book about the Palisades fire @BloomsburyPub
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Transgender in Alabama: Combat veteran, teens voice their struggles

Transgender in Alabama: Combat veteran, teens voice their struggles

The Birmingham News — The more than 15 transgender individuals AL.com spoke with across the state over the past three weeks attend private high schools and public colleges, are retired and hold down jobs at big-box retailers and Starbucks locations. They are single and in committed relationships, are grappling with whether to come out as transgender and have long openly identified as such. They identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, pansexual and somewhere in between. They attend support groups, one-on-one therapy sessions, LGBTQ centers and advocacy events. They have been ridiculed and embraced by their peers and rejected and accepted by their families.
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Fighting heroin on Alabama streets: Inside covert world of police raids, undercovers, informants

Fighting heroin on Alabama streets: Inside covert world of police raids, undercovers, informants

The Birmingham News — The eerie early-morning still of a row of small clapboard homes on the east side of Gadsden was interrupted shortly before 6 a.m. one Tuesday last month by the percussive thud of an exploding flashbang grenade. Moments earlier, a column of about a dozen camo-wearing law enforcement officers bearing submachine guns and other tactical weapons hopped out of unmarked SWAT vans, ran around the side of a gray-and-white house and knocked down the back door with a heavy steel ram. They threw the flashbang into the living room then quickly filed into the home, guns drawn, and within a minute one of them yelled "clear."
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The deadly pills-to-heroin pipeline: Inside the growing scourge devastating Alabama communities

The deadly pills-to-heroin pipeline: Inside the growing scourge devastating Alabama communities

The Birmingham News — When Brent Bonham finally hit rock bottom, he was living under a highway, panhandling outside Brookwood Village mall to feed his $300 daily heroin habit. His loved ones had cut him off after they got fed up with him stealing from them, and he says he had succumbed fully to his addiction, regularly fist-fighting other homeless addicts for the best begging spots and going without bathing for days on end. On July 23, 2012, Bonham was arrested on his third loitering charge in a month and was taken once again to the Jefferson County Jail, where he was squeezed into a two-man cell with three other inmates.
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Hometown friends say Harper Lee was manipulated into publishing second book

Hometown friends say Harper Lee was manipulated into publishing second book

The Birmingham News — Multiple residents of Monroeville who have known Harper Lee for years said Wednesday that they believe the 88-year-old author does not possess sufficient mental faculties to make informed decisions about her literary career. Suspicion has emerged about the timing of publisher HarperCollins' announcement Tuesday that her second novel, "Go Set a Watchman" is slated to be released this summer. Four people who knew Lee to varying degrees and live in or just outside the town where Lee has lived most of her life and on which she based Maycomb -- the fictional setting of her seminal 1960 novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- told AL.com Wednesday they believe Lee's wishes for her career are not being respected.
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Harper Lee appears to be fully lucid: She just told me to 'go away' via snail mail

Harper Lee appears to be fully lucid: She just told me to 'go away' via snail mail

The Birmingham News — On Feb. 5 I wrote a two-page letter to Harper Lee, following up on my repeated attempts to reach the beloved novelist via her lawyer, publisher and even by visiting her nursing home on the outskirts of Monroeville, Alabama. I didn't get around to mailing it until a little over a week ago, mostly due to laziness and my seeming inability to buy stamps. Though I never really expected a response, some small part of me hoped that she would send a letter back.
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University of Alabama quietly testing fraternity brothers for drugs

University of Alabama quietly testing fraternity brothers for drugs

The Birmingham News — Every week, several members of the University of Alabama's Sigma Nu fraternity chapter are randomly chosen to report to a cluster of dingy offices on the bottom floor of the school's Russell Hall and urinate in a cup. Though the compulsory exercise sounds like a rush-season hazing ritual, it is in fact a central component of a strict new anti-drug effort launched at the start of the fall semester. Beginning this academic year, UA has been quietly drug-testing active members of multiple Greek organizations, including the Alabama chapters of the prominent Sigma Nu and Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternities, in the first run of a mandatory screening regime that some experts say is the boldest and most extensive in the nation.
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Lagos Slum's Legal Victory Presents Path To Future For Nigeria's Least Fortunate

Lagos Slum's Legal Victory Presents Path To Future For Nigeria's Least Fortunate

International Business Times — LAGOS, Nigeria -- Along the eastern outskirts of the Lagos mainland neighborhood of Ebute-Metta, an unassuming road hidden between two rows of warehouses winds past dilapidated red-and-yellow buildings darkened by years of soot before suddenly giving way to a stark portrait of urban despair. Just a short walk down the unmarked gravel street separates the relative prosperity of the city proper from Oto-Ilogbo Extension, a literal and figurative wasteland littered with the castaway people, trash and brutal downside of unrestrained oligarchic capitalism.
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EXCLUSIVE: New Boston Police Anti-Terror Shortfalls Before Marathon Bombings Exposed

EXCLUSIVE: New Boston Police Anti-Terror Shortfalls Before Marathon Bombings Exposed

International Business Times — Three years before the Boston Marathon bombings in April, the city's police department complained to federal authorities about flaws in a key intelligence-sharing system, which appears to have overwhelmed local investigators with a torrent of information they were unable to effectively sift through or act upon, according to a U.S. law-enforcement report obtained by International Business Times. The concerns raised by Boston police in a 2010 federal analysis of the collection and interagency sharing of information about suspicious individuals and activities point directly to possible weaknesses in the city's ability to thwart potential terror attacks both then and now.
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Occupy Wall Street Latest Target of Controversial NYPD Surveillance Units

Occupy Wall Street Latest Target of Controversial NYPD Surveillance Units

International Business Times — Anyone who has visited Zuccotti Park since its occupation by Occupy Wall Street began will likely recall the constant, silent sentinels that have watched over the grounds 24 hours a day for the past month. Tall, white-metal behemoths, they look like space-age cherry-pickers, but they're some of the most visible high-tech crime-fighting machines the NYPD has at its disposal. Dubbed SkyWatch, the controversial surveillance program began in 2006, and has kept an eye on the populace from high in the sky ever since.
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China's Corporate Ghost Towns

China's Corporate Ghost Towns

Newsweek — SUZHOU, China — A few minutes after our tour boat glided past the neon lights of Suzhou’s spanking new business district, the city abruptly fell dark. The modern LED display that had illuminated the night sky over Jinji Lake was little more than a show to entice investors to do business in what had been touted for the past hour as a booming tech and industry hub. A city of 6.5 million in China’s southeast Jiangsu Province, Suzhou is described by Chinese government officials as a shining beacon of the country's modernizing economy, with 28,000 projects funded by more than $100 billion in foreign investment from 116 countries.
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The Paris Street Artist 'Invading' New York As Banksy Leaves

The Paris Street Artist 'Invading' New York As Banksy Leaves

Newsweek — Invader, the Paris-based urban artist behind thousands of hand-made mosaics, is in New York for a residency -- or "invasion" -- of his own.
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