$40-billion missile defense system proves unreliable

The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, was supposed to protect Americans against a chilling new threat from "rogue states" such as North Korea and Iran. But a decade after it was declared operational, and after $40 billion in spending, the missile shield cannot be relied on, even in carefully scripted tests that are much less challenging than an actual attack would be, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found.

The Missile Defense Agency has conducted 16 tests of the system's ability to intercept a mock enemy warhead. It has failed in eight of them, government records show.

Read the full story from the Los Angeles Times here.

"The examination of prison records revealed that Nebraska Department of Correctional Services officials had released or were set to release dozens of prisoners years before their sentences were supposed to end.

All told, state officials had carved at least 750 years off the collective sentences of more than 200 of the state’s worst criminals. The problem: The department was using a formula that doesn’t square with how sentences should be calculated.

After The World-Herald revealed its findings Friday to Corrections Director Michael Kenney, he immediately directed staff to recalculate the sentences. He said he had been unaware of the problem."

Read the full story from the Omaha World-Herald here.

"Branson residents are questioning why city police arrested a 77-year-old man with health problems on an Arkansas bad check warrant from 1996 and held him in jail for five days.

Shortly after his release from Taney County Jail, Evans E. Ray was found dead in his home. It's unclear how long he was deceased in the home before he was found."

Read the full story from the Springfield News-Leader here.

"The retreats drum up hundreds of millions of dollars for conservative political candidates and set policy for the Kochs’ network of political organizations, which all share the same goal — moving the country to the right.

Most of the cash is funneled through “dark money” groups that are not legally required to disclose their donors.

According to Forbes, the brothers are worth $41.3 billion.

These are the most elite and most conservative political events in the country, and for the past few years, reporters and political bloggers have attempted to gain access. Twoinewsource reporters booked rooms at the St. Regis, a five-star resort, to find out who would attend and what was on the agenda."

Read the full story from inewsource.org here.

"Some Ohio schools might as well have a target painted on the side of the building as far as public-health experts are concerned.

In some schools in the state, as many as 1 in 3 incoming kindergartners and newly enrolled older students have parents who oppose vaccines, according to a Dispatch analysis of schools’ immunization counts."

Read the full story from The Columbus Dispatch here.

Washington State Department of Corrections documents reveal that parole officers missed telling clues that were being transmitted by a sex offender’s GPS tracking bracelet in the days and weeks before he murdered a 13-year-old girl. Seattle's KING 5 examined records from the 5-year-old murder as part of its series of investigations into the failures of electronic monitoring programs that law enforcement and courts use to keep watch on criminals who would otherwise be in prison or jail.

Executives and employees of the troubled Veterans Affairs health system enjoyed over $100 million in bonuses, according to the Asbury Park Press.

The federal government warned the VA in the past about the growing issue of excessive patient wait times and its detrimental effect on the health care system. Still, VA executives and employees received $108.7 million in bonuses over the course of three years.

Since 2005 more than a dozen reports have been released showing the negative impact of patient wait times at both the national and local levels. The VA said more than 57,000 veterans waited 90 days before seeing a doctor.

​Lawmakers in the House of Representatives Tuesday unanimously passed a measure that will suspend VA bonuses until 2016. Decorated war veteran Eric Shinseki resigned as Secretary of Veterans Affairs after the outbreak of this information, and the agency put a hold on employee bonuses for 2014.

Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal.

A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand are integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco.

The investigation found that the world's largest prawn farmer, the Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, buys fishmeal, which it feeds to its farmed prawns, from some suppliers that own, operate or buy from fishing boats manned with slaves.

More than 2,300 providers – doctors, nurses, physician assistants – earned $500,000 or more from Medicare in 2012 from a single procedure or service, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the data. A few of those providers, including an internist in Los Angeles and a dermatologist in Port St. Lucie, Fla., collected more from the single procedures than anyone else who billed for them — by very large margins.

The data release was prompted by a Journal legal effort to make the information public. This story is the first of a series, Medicare Unmasked, examining how payments are made in the roughly $600 billion Medicare system.

Even with more than 150 sessions, we often hear from attendees who wish we'd had just one more session on a topic we missed; or that we'd been able to get this fantastic journalist who they met the night before to speak; or who lament the fact that an idea was brought up in one session that really should be given more time.

So this year, we saved some space in the program to try and rectify that. On Saturday afternoon, we've set aside five panel sessions and both hands-on rooms, and we're asking you to design the programming.

You'll be able to go online and propose a panel – topic and speakers. Your fellow attendees will vote for the sessions they want to see, and we'll hold the top vote-getters on Saturday afternoon.

Here's how it'll work:

Starting Thursday (June 26) at 9 a.m. and ending Friday night, pitch a panel (or two). Give enough detail so others will know what it'll be about, and let us know who'll speak (no more than 3 speakers and a moderator please; fewer is fine). If it's a hands-on session, it should be a skill that can be taught in an hour with software available on the computers or online. If you're including other speakers, make sure they're willing.

All Saturday morning, all attendees can vote for the sessions they like. You can vote for as many as you like.

We'll announce the top vote-getters at the awards luncheon and post them on the IRE website and at the registration desk.