Posts by Alena Rehberger
Portsmouth schools stash away year-end surplus dollars
In a highly unusual move a little more than a year ago, a special grand jury declared that Portsmouth school officials had violated state law by holding on to tens of millions in year-end surplus dollars that should have been returned to the city. Yet six times since the financial maneuvers were first challenged by…
Read MoreExperts raise numerous concerns about Lakeland Behavioral Health System
The News-Leader raised questions then about Lakeland Behavioral Health System and posed more questions when more runaways were reported. The paper found a report that says Lakeland failed to follow Medicaid rules by repeatedly using antipsychotic drugs to restrain children.
Read MoreConcerns over Google’s scans of student emails
Every day, thousands of Orange County students log in to their school-assigned Google accounts to work on lessons and send emails to teachers and classmates. What many parents and teachers don’t know is that Google is scanning and indexing every email that those students send and receive. The company recently disclosed how it processes the…
Read MoreFifteen felons voted in 2010 Maryland gubernatorial election
Though felons are prohibited from voting in Maryland, 15 of them cast ballots in the 2010 gubernatorial election, according to a recently released audit. The finding in an Office of Legislative Audits’ report criticized the State Board of Elections, saying the agency “did not have an effective process to ensure that individuals serving a sentence…
Read MoreWhen does web-scraping become unethical or illegal?
[View the story “Hacks or Hackers? ” on Storify]
Read MoreCatch up with some of IRE’s international members
While many of our members work in the United States, hundreds of international journalists contribute to the IRE community. IRE membership stretches from Australia to Argentina. It includes journalists in more than 50 countries, including Pakistan, Kenya, India, Finland and Switzerland. We asked a few of our international members to tell us what they’ve been…
Read MoreVA pays out $200 million for nearly 1,000 veterans’ wrongful deaths
In the decade after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid $200 million to nearly 1,000 families in wrongful death cases, according to VA data obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting. In that time, CIR found the agency made wrongful death payments to nearly 1,000 grieving families, ranging from decorated Iraq War veterans…
Read MoreLearn how to use genealogy records with IRE’s new webinar
Paul Parker of the Providence Journal walks through how to use online genealogy records and ancestry databases to profile subjects and verify stories in this 20-minute webinar. Learn how to use popular genealogy websites like Ancestry.com as well as lesser-known sites such as cyndislist.com. So how do you use this stuff? Parker explains how he…
Read MoreAnnouncing the 2013 IRE Awards
The winners of the 2013 IRE Awards provided unprecedented insight into the ways in which the government deploys technology in surveillance programs with a shockingly wide net. They used deep sourcing to overcome government roadblocks and uncover atrocities and corruption. They fought and won precedent-setting victories in open records battles to shine light on increasingly…
Read MoreUS secretly built ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest
The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Agency for International Development was behind the creation of a “Cuban Twitter,” a social network designed to undermine the communist government and push Cubans toward dissent. The project – called ZunZuneo – drew tens of thousands of subscribers in the more than two years in operated. American contractors…
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