Solving a health gap

After a report was released by Spokane’s regional health district, the newspaper mapped life expectancy for each neighborhood in Spokane – showing the differences in well-being among its many neighborhoods: People in the county’s wealthy neighborhoods can expect to live longer than those in the poorer ones, by years and years.

A Bay Citizen investigation has found that "veterans waiting for decisions on their disability claims wait longer than the Department of Veterans Affairs has acknowledged, especially if they come from larger urban areas. Solutions tried in four locations have not helped so far, as the backlog continues to grow."

In a report filed The Boston Globe, it has been revealed that "federal agents working out of Boston, are heading an investigation into child pornography that so far has resulted in at least 40 arrests around the world and the discovery of 140 children who were sexually exploited. And it all began with a single photo sent by a Milford, Mass man."

Staff at The Globe have put together a map of how the cases are all linked.

"A Houston Chronicle/Hearst series on disabled veterans ripoffs nationwide found convicted thieves, inveterate gamblers, the bankrupt and the mentally ill were repeatedly handed control of disabled veterans’ assets and estates by the VA – and then stole from them."

"The findings of this investigation of more than 100 prosecutions and decades of audits of this program already has generated strong reaction from Congress, including calls for legislative action and reforms from U.S. Senators and key House committee members."

"USA Today’s investigative team found the EPA failed to tell people about or take action on hundreds of former lead smelting sites they’d known about for years. Alison Young and Pete Eisler tested the soil around former plants in 13 states and found potentially dangerous levels of lead remain in people’s yards and in parks."

This multi-part look into long-forgotten lead factories includes nearly 370 site-related documents, using DocumentCloud; video interviews with parents whose children play in their lead contaminated back yards; an interactive map telling you where smelters once were in your area; tips on how to make your home and yard safer and much more.

"A review by The Salt Lake Tribune has found that perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars of Utah's beer tax money have been diverted to other causes or rolled into everyday city or county activities in.

In some cases, the recipients seemingly stretched the interpretation of the statute to justify how they spent the money. Other municipalities didn’t even try to explain how their purchases comply with the law."

Matt Haag from The Dallas Morning News reports that several schools (most in southern Dallas) in the Independent School District (ISD) have halted their construction projects.

One school, Pearl C. Anderson, already paid $400,000 for renovations before the construction was called off, said  District spokesman Jon Dahlander.  But he said some of the money went toward buying supplies, which can be used at other schools under construction.

Haag used Google Fusion Tables to examine Dallas’ planned school closings and which schools are underused. You can check out the data he used here:http://cl.ly/8g0P And you can play with an interactive map of all DISD schools here.

In a two-part story on North Caroina's satellite-based monitoring of sex offenders program, the Winston-Salem Journal newspaper found that technological limitations create a system that some say does nothing more than create a false feeling of security. Additionally, legal challenges may reduce the number of offenders who will have to enroll. The Journal built an in-house spreadsheet to track more than a year's worth of decisions out of the state Court of Appeals, which showed that GPS monitoring was overturned in more than half the cases the court considered. The Journal also used a database of statistics provided by the program's administrators to determine that 41 percent of enrollees were being tracked despite the fact that there were no restrictions on where they could go. The data were also used to create an interactive map that showed the distribution of GPS-monitored sex offenders across the state using the Geocommons map builder.

The Hidden Life of Guns, a year-long investigation by The Washington Post, traced guns recovered in crimes in the region. The Post's analysis found a small number of gun stores in the region were linked to a vast majority of the guns recovered in crimes. "Since 1992, more than 2,500 guns recovered by police and tied to crimes in the Washington area have been traced back to their original sale at Realco Guns in Forestville, Md. The total is four times that of the dealer with the next highest number of gun traces." In Virginia, 60 percent of the 6,800 guns seized since 1998 can be linked to just 40 dealers — one percent of the licensed firearms dealers in the state.