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Deborah 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…
Read MoreAn investigation by Thomas Hargrove and Gavin Off of Scripps News Service found that “taxpayers pay millions of dollars every month to educate tens of thousands of high school students who rarely or never show up for class, part of a growing trend of high absenteeism at privately operated schools.” Most charter schools are funded…
Read MoreAn investigation by David Andreatta of the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, N.Y.) revealed that “more than $1.6 million in taxpayer money was paid last year to municipal employees in Monroe County for work they performed strictly for their unions, including dozens of labor leaders who have not toiled in their government jobs in years.” Many…
Read MoreChris Halse of KIRO-Seattle recently used federal transportation data to uncover design flaws in high-end recreational vehicles. Learn how Halsne obtained and analyzed the data in this article from Uplink, IRE and NICAR’s online computer-assisted reporting newsletter. This story is available as free site content. Uplink subscribers get full access to the articles and blog…
Read MoreThe 2008 Election Day is upon us! IRE and NICAR have compiled a list of resources to aid in your coverage of stories as they unfold on this historic election day. Included you will find relevant tipsheets and stories, databases, articles on election coverage from Uplink and The IRE Journal, and other helpful websites. Please…
Read MoreThe Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind. published the first section of a 12-part investigation into how federal dollars are spent the northeast region of the state. The Journal Gazette, using numbers from the Census Bureau and the Federal Procurement Data System, tracked the $5,618,386,731.89 the government spent on goods and services in 11 counties…
Read MoreAlison Young of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that the airline regulation language protecting animal safety excludes the thousands of animals transported by breeders, farms, laboratories and pet stores. The U.S. Department of Transportation defines the word “animal” to mean one “that is being kept as a pet in a family household in the United States,”…
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