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Mark Benjamin of Salon.com reports of continuing problems at Arlington National Cemetery. Burial mix-ups include cremated remains being dumped in a landfill before being recovered and buried as an unknown soldier. Careless record keeping has contributed to others being buried as unknown soldiers. “In some cases cemetery officials lost track of the identity of remains during burial…
Read MorePatricia Decker and Robert Porterfield have found the construction project on the east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be the most expensive project ever done in the state of California. While overall costs have been presented to the public, Decker and Porterfield report that the interest on the money borrowed to pay…
Read MoreKen Dilanian, Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker of USA Today report that the Army circumvented its own ethics code to hire two former generals as contractors before the mandated yearlong “cooling off” period. The Army wanted to hire former generals John Vines and Dan McNeill as “senior mentors,” but the mentorship program is run…
Read MoreA three-day series by students from Columbia College Chicago, in collaboration with Illinois Statehouse News, examines Illinois’ century-old legislative scholarship program. The program doled out $12.5 million during the 2007-2008 academic year. The investigation found there is “virtually no regulation of the scholarship program.” The only requirement is that applicants must live in the awarding…
Read MorePam Louwagie and Glenn Howatt of the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune have finished their three-part investigation into falling deaths in Minnesota nursing homes. According to the newspaper’s analysis, more than 1,000 Minnesota deaths were related to falls in nursing homes from 2002 through 2008, but few were fully investigated. In fact, less than 10 percent of…
Read MoreAlison Young of USA Today reports that vaccine distribution data from three states shows that thousands of doses of the H1N1 vaccine went to corporate clinics when the supply was scarce. Walt Disney World, Toyota and Norwegian Cruise lines were three such recipients. “Of the 2.42 million doses in Texas and 2 million in Florida…
Read MoreBy Daniel Gilbert Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier On Sunday, our newspaper launched an eight-day investigative series on mineral rights that draws extensively on techniques I learned at IRE’s August boot camp on computer-assisted reporting. The stories focus on landowners forced by the state of Virginia to lease their mineral rights to private companies. The companies…
Read MoreA series by the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier exposed problems with Virginia’s mineral rights leasing program. Landowners have been forced to lease their mineral rights to private companies with the promise of royalties in return. “But instead of reaching the pockets of mineral owners, the money is funneled into an opaque state-run escrow fund, where…
Read MoreA nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity looks at sexual assaults on college campuses. “According to a report funded by the Department of Justice, roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But official data from the…
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