President Bush has called Iran part of an "axis of evil" and accused it of helping terrorists, meddling in Iraq and trying to develop nuclear weapons. I decided to see whether Bush's tough rhetoric was reflected in the United States’ exports to Iran. Bush has been pressing the United Nations and European Union to impose tougher sanctions on Iran, but he hasn’t pursued stronger U.S.-only limits on trade. I analyzed U.S. trade data from Bush’s first seven years in office and found that exports to Iran grew more than tenfold. In addition to the ...

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Every day, on average, a city vehicle or two hits something in this corner of Virginia. Sometimes it’s a mailbox. Sometimes it's another car. Sometimes it's a person. Often the offending vehicle is a school bus. But sometimes it’s a garbage truck, or a police car, or a fire truck. Those accidents cost localities millions of dollars a year, and sometimes they injure or kill people. Throughout the 1990s, I covered civil courts in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area, a region with about 1.6 million people. Often I would find lawsuits against cities and schools. Usually ... Read more ...

When The New York Times decided to examine the qualifications of town and village justices, the CAR conundrum was more organizational than analytical. The state Office of Court Administration provided roughly 2,500 scanned PDF questionnaires that the justices had filled out, revealing their names, addresses, telephone numbers, courts, whether they served as a full- or part-time justice, any other occupation, justice salary, level of education and, in some instances, the number and type of cases handled in a year. The PDF forms spanned 40 years, the format had changed over time, many had been filled out by hand, some ... Read more ...