The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
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Personnel law in North Carolina shrouds records in secrecy
Keeping Secrets, a three-part series by The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) for Sunshine Week, found North Carolina’s 35-year-old personnel law is among the most secretive in the nation, barring access to disciplinary actions, hiring decisions and employment histories. The series had plenty of examples showing how this secrecy is preventing the public from learning…
Read MoreSpecial probabtion protects dangerous drivers
Joe Mahr and Gerry Smith of the Chicago Tribune did a computer analysis of state police speeding tickets and driving records. They found that nearly two-thirds of the time, people caught going 100 mph or faster were given a special kind of probation that kept the tickets off their driving records. That included those triple-digit…
Read MoreNanomaterials may pose serious health risk
Once confined to cutting-edge labs, nanotechnology has an increasingly pervasive place in everyday life. Its ultra-tiny engineered particles are now in as many as 10,000 products. A series by Andrew Schneider of AOL News shows a growing body of research suggests these nanomaterials pose significant and potentially fatal health risks including lung, heart and brain…
Read MoreSeismic safety repairs slow at public universities
Nearly 180 public university buildings in California used by tens of thousands of people have been judged dangerous to occupy during a major earthquake — including libraries, classroom buildings, student apartments, gyms, a hospital and even a child care center, a California Watch investigation has found.
Read MoreSome Massachusetts companies abused job creation tax breaks
Todd Wallack of The Boston Globe reports on the misuse of the Massachusetts’ Economic Development Incentive Program which provides tax incentives to companies that invest and create jobs in the state. A review of records shows that hundreds of projects created fewer jobs than promised while others actually reduce employment while still collecting the tax…
Read MoreNominee’s links to TSA contractors raise ethics concerns
Last week, President Obama nominated Army Maj. Gen. Robert Harding to head the Transportation Security Administration, but Harding’s ties to several TSA contractors via Harding Security, a firm he founded in 2003, have raised ethics concerns. “A review of Harding Security’s business activities by CongressDaily showed that of 21 companies listed on the firm’s…
Read MoreStimulus funds for special-education diverted for other uses
An investigation by Shannon Mullen of the Asbury (N.J.) Park Press shows that special-education stimulus funds have been diverted to other costs in Monmouth and Ocean counties, including legal fees and teacher benefits. “The redirection of funds was possible thanks to a previously little-used provision in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal statute…
Read MoreLoophole in Hawaii’s pay-to-play law exploited by donors
An investigation by the Honolulu Advertiser found that donors linked to city and state contractors are giving money to candidates for Hawaii’s gubernatorial races. Experts say the donors are exploiting a loophole in Hawaii’s five year-old pay-to-play law. The study is based on a computer-assisted survey of more than 2,300 campaign contributions made to three…
Read MoreNew York State road work account raided, little left for repairs
Michelle Breidenbach of The Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) mined state financial documents to show the abuse of New York State’s Dedicated Highway and Bridge Trust Fund. It’s not “dedicated” at all. Years of raiding and borrowing have left just 22 percent of the fund to fix the state roads.
Read MoreU.S. government funded companies doing business in Iran
An investigation by The New York Times reveals that “the federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington’s efforts to discourage investment there.”
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