Susan Carroll Fellowship
A four-part series by Binyamin Appelbaum, Lisa Hammersly Munn and Ted Mellnik of The Charlotte (N.C) Observer profiles Beazer Homes USA and the failure of starter-home neighborhoods in the Charlotte area. As it sold homes and arranged mortgages, the company crossed the line between selling to people who could barely afford homes and selling to…
Read MoreA special report by Andrew McIntosh of The Sacramento Bee reveals problems with paramedics and EMTs in the state of California. Substance abuse is on the rise among paramedics, including theft of morphine on hand to treat patients in the field. Additionally, lax oversight of the paramedic and EMT licensing systems have led to fired…
Read MoreIn a two-part series, Clark Kauffman of The Des Moines Register examined the Iowa Foundation for Medical Care, the largest of 53 federally funded Quality Improvement Organizations. The newspaper found that the tax-exempt Iowa foundation, which investigates complaints of poor patient care received by Iowa’s 500,000 Medicare beneficiaries, reviewed only 12 complaints in 2005. That…
Read MoreIn an investigative series by the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune staffers Matt Doig, Tiffany Lankes and editor Chris Davis expose an epidemic of misconduct in Florida schools. In the past ten years, more than 750 Florida teachers have been punished for misconduct toward students, and at least 150 are still teaching today. It’s possible that the…
Read MoreAaron Lee of the Lynchburg (Va.) News & Advance used FOIA to obtain complaints to the state department of motor vehicles about vanity license plates that had been issued to Virginia drivers, as well as subsequent correspondence between the DMV and the plate holders. The story reveals a host of complaints against many of the…
Read MoreBrooks Egerton of The Dallas Morning News covered the release of Tyrone Brown “17 years after a single positive marijuana test while he was on probation led a Dallas judge to sentence him to life in prison.” Brown’s story drew national attention last year after The News ran a story on the inequity of justice…
Read MoreJeff Schweers and Sarah Okeson of Florida Today looked at motorcycle fatalities in Brevard County and found that more than twice as many people were killed in 2006 as in 2000, and the county could top that this year. There are now twice as many bikers on Florida highways as there were five years ago.…
Read MoreHenry Goldman and Jonathan D. Salant of Bloomberg report that Rudolph Giuliani’s law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, “lobbies for Citgo Petroleum Corp., a unit of the state-owned oil company controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the U.S.’s chief antagonist in the Western Hemisphere.” The law firm first registered to lobby for Citgo in April…
Read MoreJeffery Brainard of The Chronicle of Higher Education discovered an increase in accidents on campuses as proper inspections have declined. “Serious accidents in which workers were killed or hospitalized have became more common on college campuses, according to a Chronicle analysis of federal safety-inspection records…nearly 200 significant campus incidents were cited by government officials between…
Read MoreTim Darragh and Christopher Schnaars of The Morning Call investigated the inspection of Pennsylvania dog kennels. Analyzing a database of 20,000 inspections since 2003, they found that kennel owners almost always got a satisfactory grade, even when they had violations. This kennel inspection data was made availabe on The Morning Call‘s site and is searchable…
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