Susan Carroll Fellowship
Reporter Mike McAndrew of The Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) used interviews, emails, contracts and other documents to show that the operators of New York’s State Fair contrived the justification to award a lucrative no-bid contract to a national concert producer. The reporting pokes holes in the reasons cited by public officials when they circumvented state law…
Read MoreRobert McClendon of Columbus, Ohio was freed from prison by a Franklin County judge after serving 18 years for a child rape that new DNA tests showed he did not commit, report Geoff Dutton and Mike Wagner of The Columbus Dispatch. McClendon was one of 30 prisoners identified by The Columbus Dispatch and the Ohio…
Read MoreA report by Dina ElBoghdady of The Washington Post reveals that renters are becoming unwitting victims of the mortgage crisis as property owners lose houses to foreclosure. “Several localities around the country, as well as some members of Congress, are pushing to give renters more time before the new owners, usually banks, can evict them.…
Read MoreIn China in Africa and China in Peru, parallel investigations for Bloomberg Markets, Simon Clark, Michael Smith and Franz Wild report on the exploitation of indigenous peoples by Chinese-owned mining companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The authors report that “hundreds of workers have been injured or killed since 2005 working for Chinese companies.”…
Read MoreA report by Jim Getz of The Dallas Morning News looks at the impact of population growth on dam safety. The investigation “found that suburban sprawl has encroached on hundreds of dams in Texas that were once in remote locations – including dozens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.” Development upstream from a dam increases runoff…
Read MoreRecords show that one-third of Barack Obama’s campaign donors have made donations over $1,000, reports Michael Luo and Christopher Drew of The New York Times. While Obama claimed to forgo public financing due to his lucrative grassroots fundraising from small donors, he has a robust stable of “bundlers” — more than 500 — who have…
Read MoreA series by The Cincinnati Enquirer analyzed a daily price database of gas prices at 716 stations in the Greater Cincinnati region, including northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana, to better understand the many aspects of retail gas pricing. Rising gas prices and stiff competition are causing many major oil companies, like BP and Shell, to…
Read More“Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance,” reports Deborah Sontag of The New York Times. Hospitals are deporting these patients without any government assistance or oversight. While immigration rights advocates see this as international patient…
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