The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Blog
Clark Kauffman of The Des Moines Register reports that in the past five years, 38,000 Americans, including 267 Iowans, have complained of medical-privacy violations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. More than half of those complaints nationally have been disposed of with no investigation. Until last year, no one nationally ever was prosecuted…
Read MoreIRE is partnering on two upcoming training sessions next month that focus on two key areas of beat coverage: business and health. We’ll be in New York City on Sept. 20-21 co-hosting an Investigative Reporting on Business and Finance Conference. A stellar line-up of journalists will cover a wide range of topics from the foreclosure…
Read MoreA recent study shows that the number of “dead zones” in bodies of water across the globe has doubled every decade since the 1960s, reports Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post. Fertilizer in agriculture run-off and air pollution are two factors that are causing hypoxia in coastal waters. “A few hypoxic ecosystems have improved in…
Read MoreA Mother Jones investigation by James Ridgeway, Daniel Schulman and David Corn reveals that an NRA spy had infiltrated anti-gun groups for the past several years. The investigation shows that Mary Lou Sapone, a freelance spy for the NRA, spent years posing as gun control activist Mary McFate. McFate had penetrated the highest ranks of…
Read MoreReporter Mike McAndrew of The Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) used interviews, emails, contracts and other documents to show that the operators of New York’s State Fair contrived the justification to award a lucrative no-bid contract to a national concert producer. The reporting pokes holes in the reasons cited by public officials when they circumvented state law…
Read MoreRobert McClendon of Columbus, Ohio was freed from prison by a Franklin County judge after serving 18 years for a child rape that new DNA tests showed he did not commit, report Geoff Dutton and Mike Wagner of The Columbus Dispatch. McClendon was one of 30 prisoners identified by The Columbus Dispatch and the Ohio…
Read MoreA report by Dina ElBoghdady of The Washington Post reveals that renters are becoming unwitting victims of the mortgage crisis as property owners lose houses to foreclosure. “Several localities around the country, as well as some members of Congress, are pushing to give renters more time before the new owners, usually banks, can evict them.…
Read MoreIn China in Africa and China in Peru, parallel investigations for Bloomberg Markets, Simon Clark, Michael Smith and Franz Wild report on the exploitation of indigenous peoples by Chinese-owned mining companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The authors report that “hundreds of workers have been injured or killed since 2005 working for Chinese companies.”…
Read MoreA report by Jim Getz of The Dallas Morning News looks at the impact of population growth on dam safety. The investigation “found that suburban sprawl has encroached on hundreds of dams in Texas that were once in remote locations – including dozens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.” Development upstream from a dam increases runoff…
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