How was your NICAR26?
Michelle Nicolosi of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Washington state’s dental board has been slow to act and has cut generous deals with some of the state’s most complained-about dentists. The P-I investigation found that dentists were allowed to continue working in Washington with little restriction long after they lost licenses in other states, or…
Read MoreAdam Liptak of The New York Times , examined information about prisoners serving life sentences in all 50 states, finding “that about 132,000 of the nation’s prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison…
Read MoreJon W. Glass and David Gulliver of The Virginian-Pilot used city property records to show that " hundreds of homes in the highest-risk areas around Oceana Naval Air Station were built before it became an air base and before Navy flight patterns exposed some neighborhoods to potential jet crashes." A base-closing commission has recommended that…
Read MoreRussell Carollo and Larry Kaplow of the Dayton Daily News and Cox News Service used a Pentagon database to show that "dozens of soldiers have been accused of crimes against Iraqis since the first troops deployed for Iraq. But despite strong evidence and convictions in some cases, only a small percentage resulted in punishments nearing…
Read MoreWith the Virginia governor’s race just weeks away, the Virginia Public Access Project used mapping technology to create online dynamic maps of campaign contributions received by Virginia’s statewide candidates. The map shades contributions by county and city, and links to detailed data on individual donors in those localities.
Read MoreJim Galloway and Alan Judd of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution report that Ralph Reed, who has vocally condemned gambling as a "cancer on the American body politic," quietly worked five years ago to kill a proposed ban on Internet wagering on behalf of eLottery Inc., a Connecticut-based company in the online gambling industry. The defeated legislation…
Read MoreLee Davidson at Salt Lake City's The Deseret Morning News reported that Orrin Hatch, despite being a former Mormon bishop teetotaler, has received more from alcohol interests than any other U.S. Senator this year — and he’s among the top five in money from tobacco interests. The Deseret Morning News also searched Federal Election Commission…
Read MorePhillip Reese and Nancy Weaver Teichert of The Sacramento Bee used state inspection reports to show that “ Sacramento nursing homes failed to meet minimum federal and state standards more often than facilities in the rest of the top 10 largest cities in California during the last two years“. The leading complaints were quality-of-care, and…
Read MoreGreg Bruno of the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., looked into disaster plans for communities of the Catskills and Hudson Valley, finding that three-quarters of them would be unprepared. “Of the 75 communities that provided their plans for review, only 25 percent are updated or specific enough to be useful in a catastrophe, according to…
Read MoreEric Lipton and Ron Nixon of The New York Times used federal contract data covering hurricane response to show that “more than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding or with limited competition … provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about…
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