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Mike Sherry of the Kansas City Star used federal data to determine that the Lake of the Ozarks is the “third-most accident-prone waterway in the country.” The Lake of the Ozarks trails only the Atlantic Coast and the Colorado River in number of of serious mishaps according to his analysis of over decade’s worth of…
Read MoreDan Morgan, Sarah Cohen and Gilbert M. Gaul of The Washington Post analyzed payment records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in an investigative series. People who don’t farm at all have received $1.3 billion in government handouts since 2000, the investigation found. They also found that growers reaped benefits even in good years from…
Read MoreMichael Cabbage of the Orlando Sentinel studied e-mails sent from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General to an agency administrator and the chairman of an advisory panel that monitors NASA safety and found that “key officials responsible for overseeing NASA expressed serious concerns about launching space shuttle Discovery without additional work to prevent foam insulation…
Read MoreSharon Coolidge of The Cincinnati Enquirer won a two-year battle with the Cinncinnati Health Department to obtain records of properties cited for lead contamination violations. Coolidge analyzed the city health records and found that “Cincinnati’s Health Department is failng to force property owners to fix their buildings, leaving hundreds of children at risk for lead…
Read MoreAlison Young of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution analyzed the flight log of the jet leased by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and found that “a luxury private jet leased by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for use in emergencies has been used instead primarily to shuttle Health and Human Services Secretary Mike…
Read MoreRuth Teichroeb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer studied university job records and found that Terry Tafoya, known across North America as a pre-eminent American Indian psychologist and a sought-after speaker for continuing education at schools such as Harvard University, “has scripted his own life, embellishing his academic credentials and past.” The tribe he claims to be…
Read MoreBill Dedman and Michael Brindley of The (Nashua, N.H.) Telegraph studied Nashua’s city credit card records and found that “school Superintendent Julia Earl has spent public money to travel out of state at least seven times in her first nine months on the job, including five trips to her home state of Texas.” The total…
Read MoreMelvin Claxton of The Tennessean has a three-part series on the price of murder in Tennessee, finding that “homicides cost state and local governments more than $110 million each year. The bill for Nashville alone, which has accounted for 17 percent of the state’s homicides over the past two decades, exceeds $18.7 million annually.” The…
Read MoreThe CBC’s investigative unit obtained data from workplace safety insurance boards across Canada to track top national trends in the workplace of today. “Canada’s record for reducing workplace fatalities over the previous 20 years was the worst. The project looks at health-care workers, mines, fatalities by province, and more. Audio reports are included in the…
Read MoreMaurice Possley and Steve Mills of the Chicago Tribune reviewed thousands of pages of court records and found that Texas may have executed an innocent man in 1989. “<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/broadband/chi-tx-htmlstory,1,781241.htmlstory?coll=chi-news-hed 16 years after Carlos De Luna died by lethal injection, "the Tribune has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that the acquaintance he named, Carlos Hernandez, was…
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