The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Extra Extra
New urgency in hunt for terrorist
Adam Goldman and Randy Herschaft tell the story behind the hunt for Abu Ibrahim, a bombmaker who has eluded authorities for decades. Long forgotten and even presumed dead by some, Ibrahim is very much alive, according to an Associated Press investigation.
Read MorePolicing schools in Tulsa
A two-part series by the Tulsa World analyzes crime on public school campuses. Since 2005, Tulsa schools have called city police more than 9,450 times. Reasons for the calls include assaults, drug use, weapons found and burglaries. Child abuse was the leading reason for the calls, as teachers and counselors are increasingly finding abused children.
Read MorePsych hospital mixes up patient meds
Medication errors raise questions about patient safety at a New Jersey psychiatric hospital, according to an Asbury Park Press report by Jean Mikle. A review of hundreds of pages of Ancora medication safety and error reports by the Press found troubling patterns of mistakes and omissions at the facility, which has about 600 patients. The…
Read MoreFlorida ‘Pill Mills’ thrive
A two-part series in The Miami Herald explains how Florida storefront clinics exploit the market for narcotic painkillers. Scott Hiassen reports, “Experts blame these clinics for a startling rise in prescription-drug overdose deaths in Florida, including a 107 percent jump in oxycodone deaths in two years….Yet, regulators and police can’t control the problem — handcuffed,…
Read MoreRed Bull seaplane’s safety questioned
An ABC News investigation by Asa Eslocker, Joseph Rhee and Eric Longabardi examined the safety of the 55-year-old seaplane used by Red Bull to promote its energy drink across the country. The plane was decommissioned by the Coast Guard in 1976, but “it flies over the heads of hundreds of thousands of people a year…
Read MoreNew York’s failing workers’ compensation system
Steven Greenhouse of The New York Times reports on an investigation into New York state’s workers’ compensation system uncovering delays, fraudulent claims, and questionable rulings. Employees feel the system is trying to avoid paying out on claims, while employers believe fraudulent claims are rampant. “A century ago, when the state created its workers’ compensation system,…
Read MoreAbsent officers lead to dismissed cases
In a five-month investigation, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., looked at court attendance among police officers. Reporters Jason Riley and R.G. Dunlop found, “More than 600 defendants facing such felony charges as drug dealing, robbery, burglary and assault were set free in 2007 because the Louisville Metro Police officers who arrested them failed to appear…
Read MoreLittle-used Wisconsin bridges get federal stimulus dollars
Ben Poston and Tom Held of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that a vast majority of the Wisconsin bridges awarded $15.8 million of construction money in the first wave of federal stimulus funding carry fewer than 1,000 vehicles a day. A dozen of those get less than 100 cars a day. For the story, Poston…
Read MoreImmigration courts have huge backlog of cases
A report by Brad Heath of USA Today reveals that the nation’s immigration courts “are now so clogged that nearly 90,000 people accused of being in the United States illegally waited at least two years for a judge to decide whether they must leave, one of the last bottlenecks in a push to more strictly…
Read MoreBlack market for smuggled cigarettes tops $1 billion in Canada
The latest installment of “Tobacco Underground,” an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists exposes how U.S. and Canadian Indian tribes and organized crime gangs are behind a $1 billion black market in smuggled cigarettes in Canada. “Over the last six years, as Ottawa and provincial governments began hiking tobacco…
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