The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
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Black students leaving Birmingham (Ala.) schools
Jeff Hansen and Marie Leech of The Birmingham News report on black flight from Birmingham’s public schools and its impact on suburban school districts. In the past five years, Birmingham schools have lost 20 percent of their students. Nine of every 10 of those 7,300 children who left the city were black.
Read MoreWar Crimes in Vietnam went unpunished
A report by Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson for the Los Angeles Times shows recently declassified documents regarding war crimes committed during the Vietnam War establish that hundreds of soldiers went unpunished for crimes against Vietnamese civilians. “The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese
Read MoreCity officials in Iowa generously compensated
“City managers and administrators in the Des Moines area and other large Iowa cities tend to be paid well above the national average – some by more than nearly double the national average,” reported Jason Clayworth and Melissa Walker of the Des Moines Register. By looking at the compensation packages given to city government officials,…
Read MoreValero seeks millions from TX counties
L.A. Lorek of the San Antonio Express-News reports that counties in Texas may end up paying Valero – the nation’s largest independent refiner – millions of dollars due to inflated property assessments. Valero contends that “most of its Bexar properties
Read MoreFlorida plans for potential Cuban exodus
Kevin Begos, of the Tampa Tribune, reports that Florida has a plan in place to handle the potential influx of Cuban immigrants into the state. The Tribune obtained the state’s Mass Migration Response plan through a public records request. Plans include “setting up long-term detention sites across the country” to help defray the logistical stress…
Read MoreBehind the mask of the Mo. execution doctor
Jeremy Kohler, of the St. Lousi Post-Dispatch, uncovered the identity of the doctor responsible supervising Missouri’s lethal injection procedure. Banned from practicing in two hospitals in the state, charged with malpractice over 20 times and having received a public reprimand in 2003 by the state Board of Healing Arts, Alan R. Doerhoff has overseen lethal…
Read More“Conduct Unbecoming” Continues
Eric Nalder and Lewis Kamb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer uncover more police abuses in a continuation of the “Conduct Unbecoming” series. In their latest installment — focusing on a specialized King County Sheriff’s unit assigned to police the Metro regional transit system — Nalder and Kamb, with assists from P-I beat reporters, turned out a…
Read More“Teflon Don”
The Times Herald-Record’s Michael Levensohn conducted an exhaustive investigation painstakingly detailing how a local businessman, Donald Boehm, looted an estate of millions of dollars and has become the focus of a police investigation in the most notorious unsolved killing in the region. The reporting for this story began in April 2004 with the bankruptcy filings…
Read MoreHouse of Lies
An extensive four-part series by Debbie Cenziper, Susannah Nesmith and Tim Henderson of The Miami Herald has uncovered extensive corruption in the Miami-Dade Housing Agency. Their investigation uncovered a system which has operated like “an unchecked cash machine for developers and consultants and its own leaders and failed the families it was meant to serve.”…
Read MoreIndianapolis library expansion mired in mess of mismanagement
The Indianapolis Star’s Kevin Corcoran looks into the construction project to expand Indianapolis’s Central Library which is now two years behind schedule and more than $50 million over budget. An extensive review of documents and interviews with involved parties suggest that the Library Board’s decision not to employ a general contractor led to this debacle.…
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