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While banning lobbyists from a role in the transition, President-Elect Barack Obama is keeping many of his large fundraisers on his advisory board, according to a report by Bloomberg‘s Jonathan Salant. Five of the 12 members of the transition advisory board raised over $50,000 for Obama in his presidential campaign. “Transition co-Chairman John Podesta yesterday…
Read MoreToday in Ciudad Juarez, Armando Rodriguez, the crime reporter at the Diario de Juarez, was murdered in front of his own home this morning as he got in his car to drive his daughter to school. Rodriguez has covered nearly every murder in the unprecedented wave of violence in Ciudad Juarez — which is right…
Read MoreOn Sunday and Monday, The Charlotte Observer published a two-part series detailing the risks to young workers in dangerous jobs. The stories showed that federal child labor enforcement has waned despite new evidence that many employers are ignoring the rules. Observer reporters also spoke to more than 20 current and former workers at House of…
Read MoreAn investigation by Gavin Off of the Tulsa World revealed serious issues in the allocation of farm subsidy dollars. By cross-referencing the USDA’s farm subsidy data with the Federal Elections Committee database, Off found “more than 100 lawyers and dozens of doctors, teachers, car salesmen and insurance agents have received U.S. Department of Agriculture farm…
Read MoreAn environmental investigation by The Times (Shreveport, La.) culled through data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and identified “at least 83 permitted dischargers within Bossier, Bienville, Caddo, Claiborne, DeSoto, Natchitoches, Red River, Sabine and Webster parishes that put wastewater into Red River or a nearby tributary.” At least…
Read MoreDeborah Sontag of The New York Times continued the paper’s “Getting Tough” series with an examination of some hospitals’ practice of repatriating immigrant patients to their native countries without consent. The article offers several vignettes of the difficulties patients and hospitals face in such situations, including the story of Antonio Torres, a nineteen year-old legal…
Read MoreCameron McWhirter of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that DeKalb County’s traffic court has lost the hundreds of thousands of citations. While no one knows how much the misplaced records could cost the county, estimates range from $90 million to $135 million. In response to inquiries made by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the county has set up…
Read MoreAlison Young of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that some dietary supplements, which are not subject to government regulation, contain amounts of undisclosed prescription drugs, as well as food allergens, bacteria and human placenta. Journal-Constitution reporters were able to obtain one dietary supplement containing prescription drugs, despite the fact that it had been the subject of…
Read MoreIn October, Dutchess County went from having a Republican majority among registered voters to a Democratic one for the first time in the county’s history. On Nov. 2, the Poughkeepsie Journal published an analysis that not only showed which municipalities were responsible for that growth, but drilled down to see which individual districts had the…
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