The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Extra Extra
Attendance discrepancies skew economic impact figures
Josh Robbins of the Orlando Sentinel reports that inaccurate attendance reports could be skewing the economic impact that sports venues have in the community seeing as though turnstile counts are often lower than the published “official attendance” numbers. As the County Commission in Orange County, Fla. prepare to consider a $1.1 billion plan for a…
Read MoreFresno suffers more power outages than neighboring communities
California and other states require investor-owned utilities to publish reliability statistics, including the number of minutes the average customer goes without power each year. Brad Branan of the Fresno Bee looked at those numbers to find that “customers in the Fresno division of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. go without power longer than those in…
Read MoreAbuses at Texas state schools go unpunished
A Dallas Morning News investigation into disciplinary records of employees at state schools for the mentally retarded “ found hundreds of cases of abuse at the hands of those charged with caring for the mentally retarded
Read MoreOvertime tops $500 million in California state prisons
Inmate overcrowding and the increasing number of staff vacancies in California’s prisons are spiking overtime costs for the state’s corrections department, which spent more than half a billion dollars last year on overtime pay, according to analysis of payroll records by the San Francisco Chronicle. Tom Chorneau and Todd Wallack report that the surge —…
Read MoreShriners investigation
Over a year ago, online investigative reporter Sandy Frost began digging into whistleblower
Read MoreWithout limitations, campaing cash spent freely in Oregon
The Oregonian‘s Ryan Kost reports that Oregon lawmakers chose not to place limitations on how campaign money could be spent despite promised campaign finance ethics reforms. Two proposed laws limiting how campaign contributions could be spent were never passed, thus it remains legal to spend campaign monies on other things – from candy to airfare.…
Read MoreCities liability records expose wide disparities
A quick-hit investigation by Marc Davis of The Virginian-Pilot looked at city liablitiy records and found “Virginia Beach paid 84 homeowners and businesses a total of $457,000 to fix damages or repay plumbing fees for sewer backups in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Among the other four cities – Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Suffolk – none…
Read MorePentagon dismissed requests for mine-resistant vehicles
The Pentagon failed in its efforts to protect troops in Iraq, according to an investigation by Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison and Tom Vanden Brook of USA TODAY. The Pentagon has known for years that Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles could save lives for soldiers on patrol and in combat, but ignored appeals for such…
Read MoreWARN Act riddled with loopholes
In a four-part series, James Drew and Steve Eder of The (Toledo, Ohio) Blade report that a 19-year-old federal law that requires companies to give notice to workers losing their jobs is so full of loopholes and flaws that employers repeatedly skirt it with little or no penalty. A Blade analysis of 226 lawsuits filed…
Read MoreComputer security issues plague Boeing financial records
Andrea James and Daniel Lathrop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigated security problems with Boeing’s computer system which leaves it vulnerable to manipulation, theft and fraud. The issues relate to Boeing’s failure to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, “a wide-ranging law aimed at preventing stockholder rip-offs such as the Enron scandal from happening again.” For the…
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