The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
$40-billion missile defense system proves unreliable | Los Angeles Times 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…
Read MoreThis was originally published on the ProPublica Nerd Blog. By Ryann Grochowski Jones, ProPublica I think I’m a decent arbiter of people’s appreciation of data. I worked at IRE’s data library as a grad student and I’ve attended four consecutive NICAR conferences. At ProPublica, I work with complex data sets every day. I help run…
Read MoreWashington 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…
Read MoreExecutives 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…
Read MoreMuckRock is suing the CIA over a handful of specific FOIA requests that would shed light on how the agency determines what is and isn’t releasable, among other things. The CIA “has a track record of holding itself apart from, and largely above, the Freedom of Information Act, consistently ignoring deadlines, refusing to work with…
Read MoreMore 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…
Read MoreSlaves 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…
Read MoreEver wanted to scrape data from the web but didn’t know how? Here’s your chance to learn. We’re offering two sessions on web scraping at the IRE Conference in San Francisco, June 26-29. In addition to that, Helium Scraper has given us some coupon codes for a limited number of IRE members to receive 50…
Read MoreEver wanted to scrape data from the web but didn’t know how? Here’s your chance to learn. We’re offering two sessions on web scraping at the IRE Conference in San Francisco, June 26-29. In addition to that, Helium Scraper has given us some coupon codes for a limited number of IRE members to receive 50…
Read MoreOne in four of the more than 3,700 commercial motorcoach and passenger van companies regulated by the federal government has never received a full safety evaluation, according to an investigation by The Boston Globe. Nearly half have not been reviewed in more than two years. Buses carry nearly as many people as airlines, but receive…
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