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USA TODAY looked at the majors of more than 9,000 junior and senior athletes in football, baseball, softball, and men’s and women’s basketball and found high rates of concentrations of athletes in certain majors at 83% of schools. Some schools had several “clusters” and more than half of the clusters are what some analysts refer…
Read MoreSteve Eder of The Toledo Blade reports that the embattled U.S. auto industry is facing yet another threat — India. In a three-part series, The Blade shows how India’s automakers are ramping up plans to sell their cars globally. The project, which included interviews with auto executives, parts suppliers, engineers, politicians and peasants in India’s…
Read MoreAs IRE has grown and evolved, so have the services offered to our members. Just a few years ago, one of the most common requests of our Database Library was a conversion of electronic information from tape to disc. Nowadays, Database Library staffers are working with open-source database technology, Web scraping and dynamic mapping. Recently …
Read MoreOklahoma voters gave Republican Sen. John McCain one of his largest margins of victory over Democrat Barack Obama in the presidential election earlier this month. But an analysis of precinct results from across the state by The Oklahoman shows Obama claiming heavily populated urban areas and pockets of support in eastern Oklahoma. McCain outpolled Obama…
Read MoreClark Kauffman of the The Des Moines Register reports that a state-run home for profoundly disabled children and adults has employed nine unlicensed psychologists and two successive, unlicensed medical directors. State records show the medical directors — both of whom are gynecologists — were paid a total of $127,424 without either of them ever obtaining…
Read MoreA 16-year long federal program to build a fleet of alternative-fuel vehicles for the government has been riddled with problems, according to a report by Kimberly Kindy and Dan Keating of The Washington Post. “Under a mandate from Congress, federal agencies have gradually increased their fleets of alternative-fuel vehicles, a majority of them ‘flex-fuel,’ capable…
Read MoreAn Associated Press analysis of federal drug data shows the U.S. government has spent over $200 million since 2004 on drugs that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In some instances, these unapproved medications have been linked to deaths. While Medicaid is not supposed to cover unapproved drugs, the FDA does…
Read MoreBusinessWeek’s Keith Epstein and Ben Elgin disclose detailed evidence that hackers and foreign operatives have been penetrating NASA computers for years, robbing the nation’s military and scientific institutions — along with the defense industry that serves them — of secret information on satellites, rocket engines, launch systems, and even the Space Shuttle. As part of…
Read MoreFollowing up on a recent investigation of vaccination enforcement in schools, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that hundreds of local day care centers also routinely violate a state law that prohibits admitting children without required shots. The newspaper also found health officials and child care licensing regulators were confused about what the law actually says and…
Read MoreIn October, Mark Benjamin of Salon.com questioned the U.S. Army’s report attributing the deaths of Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Robert Suarez to enemy action after finding evidence suggesting that the men died from friendly fire. Now three soldiers say they were ordered to shred boxes of documents containing private information about Nelson and Suarez…
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