“Prime Healthcare Services bills Medicare for a variety of unusual ailments – among them a brain disease and a condition causing eyes to bleed – that can generate lucrative payments to the chain. A California Watch analysis of newly released data shows that the chain’s Medicare billing for these disorders is far more aggressive than…
Read MoreThe journalists who attend the Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference do many things for their newsrooms: They analyze data, build websites, write stories, scrape and acquire records. To honor this work, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting will sell a T-shirt celebrating the data geek in us all. Proceeds from the shirt will help raise funds for…
Read More“Nowhere are the challenges facing the Alexandria Fire Department more stark than at Station 206, the Seminary Road facility built in 1958. Standing on the front ramp looking west, Fire Chief Adam Thiel can see the massive Washington Headquarters Service — the new Department of Defense building where more than 6,000 people will work early…
Read More“Following the deadly Esperanza wildfire in Southern California in October 2006, in which five U.S. Forest Service firefighters were killed, a task force recommended tougher zoning and code enforcement to limit development in the mountain forests considered high fire hazard zones. Yet within a year of those recommendations, Riverside County supervisors gave the go-ahead to…
Read More“State officials are investigating construction and zoning permits Monroe officials granted to township Mayor Michael Gabbianelli and his son. A week after the Courier-Post reported apparent ethics violations, state Department of Community Affairs (DCA) officials said they’ll determine whether Monroe officials breached the state Uniform Construction Code (UCC) with various approvals for Michael Gabbianelli Jr.’s…
Read MoreThe killer, a 72-year-old prisoner named Edward Harold Bell, told the Houston Chronicle in interviews and letters this summer that he killed 11 girls here in the 1970s, naming four of them and describing the rest. Though Bell previously confessed to two of the same crimes in 1989 letters authorities kept secret, he’s never been…
Read More“In recent months Koch Industries Inc., the business conglomerate run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, has repeatedly told a U.S. Congressional committee and the news media that the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline has “nothing to do with any of our businesses.” But Inside Climate News reports that the company has told…
Read MoreIn his bid for the president, Governor Rick Perry has attacked the Troubled Asset Relief Program numerous times; calling it an “unprecedented assault on free markets.” However, The Dallas Morning News reports that the very bank Perry designated for his campaign finances received more than $87 million in TARP money. That same bank, PlainsCapital, is…
Read MoreInvestigating private companies can stymie even the most dogged reporter. They aren’t subject to Sunshine requests and they don’t file paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But chances are, you can still find out a lot about most of them. Ames Alexander, a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, detailed some of these strategies at…
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