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Following the news of fugitive Norman Hsu fundraising for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a Center for Investigative Reporting investigation for Politico finds new examples of presidential candidates relying on fundraisers with questionable backgrounds. A fundraiser for Mitt Romney was recently suspended from practicing law. A backer of Barack Obama defaulted on loans. A bundler for Rudy…
Read MoreA six-part series by Kevin Craver of the Northwest Herald (Crystal Lake, Ill.) looks into lawsuits facing two chemical companies after a cluster of brain cancer patients were discovered in a small town. Craver studied documents going back 30 years to investigate the site’s regulatory history, inspections, claims and counterclaims about pollutants and human exposure.…
Read MoreAlan Wirzbicki and Kevin Baron of The Boston Globe exposed a lucrative black market that exists for professional certification exams. The Globe found that “pirated answers to hundreds of professional qualifying exams, in fields ranging from school-bus driving to medical technicians, are openly available, sometimes for as little as $4 each, from a thriving network…
Read MoreRobert Gehrke of The Salt Lake Tribune reported that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt discussed incorporating Mormon doctrines and beliefs into state government when he was governor of Utah. When The Tribune started inquiring, Leavitt requested the state remove transcripts of his discussions from public display. PDFs of the minutes from the…
Read MoreA three-part investigative series by The Baltimore Sun looks at the drug buprenorphine which is now being commonly prescribed to addicts to help them kick their addictions. It has shown great promise with opiate addictions by curbing withdrawal symptoms. But in plentiful supply, it is now showing up on the streets where abusers are using…
Read MoreBryan Bender and Kevin Baron of The Boston Globe spent five-months investigating the Army’s testing program “which verifies that soldiers have learned certain military skills and helps them amass promotion points.” Cheating had been suspected since 1999, but the Army did not acknowledge the problem until June 2007. The Globe‘s investigation learned that the Army…
Read MoreBen Poston, Derrick Nunnally and Bill Glauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel built a database of every player named in the Mitchell Report. The reporters analyzed statistical performance before and after the players allegedly began taking drugs and found that more than half the 90 players named in the report showed an improvement in performance…
Read MoreBrent Schrotenboer of The San Diego Union-Tribune dissected the college football bowl system to reveal the lucrative financial structure that helps explain the system’s staying power. The investigation checked IRS records for 19 current bowl games to find that net assets grew by 85 percent from 2001-2005, up from $3.4 million to $6.3 million The…
Read MoreGilbert Gaul continued with The Washington Post‘s investigation of the USDA’s farm subsidy loan program and found many shortcomings. Small companies that go out of business often default on their loans; since the 1970s, the loan program has seen nearly $1.5 billion in losses. Gaul used individual examples of USDA loans to illustrate broader problems…
Read MoreGary Craig from the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat and Chronicle investigated the growing use of mood-altering prescription drugs among youth in foster care and uncovered cases of children as young as one year old being prescribed psychotropic drugs. The investigation revealed many trends in the prescribing of these drugs, and disturbing statistics about their prevalence in…
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