First Amendment & FOIA
Iowa hospital sends $180,000 in food waste to landfill
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics threw away 355,000 servings of food worth $181,600 last year, according to The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The hospital prepared roughly 3 million total servings of food in 2012, not counting patient meals. The Gazette found that the hospital’s dining room serving doctors and nurses from operating rooms threw away…
Read MoreExtra Extra Monday: Teacher absences, prescription painkillers, complaints at for-profit care centers
Welcome to IRE’s roundup of the weekend’s many enterprise stories — the last one of 2012 — from around the country. We’ll highlight the document digging, field work and data analysis that made their way into centerpieces in print, broadcast and online from coast to coast. Did we miss something? Email tips to web@ire.org. The…
Read MoreInvestigation into court loophole leads to conviction
“Investigative reporter A.J. Lagoe, with WRIC TV8 in Richmond, Va, uncovers widespread fraud in Virginia’s court-appointed attorney system. Criminal defendants are lying about their assets in order to qualify for a free lawyer and all too often getting away with it thanks to a loophole in Virginia law.” “Now a man profiled in the 8News…
Read MoreInvestigation leads to EPA re-examining lead factories
“The Environmental Protection Agency is re-examining more than 460 former lead factory sites across the USA for health hazards left by toxic fallout onto soil in nearby neighborhoods.” “The massive effort, a result of a USA TODAY investigation, involves locations in dozens of states and has already identified several sites needing further investigation and some…
Read MoreHundreds of reports from students trapped in elevators at UT-Arlington
“According to open records obtained by The Shorthorn’s Krista Torralva the University of Texas-Arlington has spent more than one million dollars on elevator upgrades yet students are still getting trapped.” “It has also been found that the campus is in violation of Texas law, which requires certificates of compliance to be posted either inside each…
Read MoreExtra Extra Monday: War veterans, inmate risks, betrayals of trust and more
Welcome to IRE’s roundup of the weekend’s many enterprise stories from around the country. We’ll highlight the document digging, field work and data analysis that made their way into centerpieces in print, broadcast and online from coast to coast. Did we miss some? Let us know. Send us an email at web@ire.org or tweet to @IRE_NICAR. We’ll add…
Read MoreObama cabinet failing at FOI requests
“In June, more than 30 Bloomberg reporters filed Freedom of Information Act requests with 57 agencies for the travel records of top administrators and cabinet secretaries. Three months later, only about 30 percent of the cabinet-level agencies had gotten back to the reporters with documents, and only one cabinet-level agency responded within the legal 20-day…
Read MoreOSU president expenses in the millions
Daily News reporter Laura A. Bischoff fought a year-long FOIA battle to get hold of Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee’s expense reports, which ultimately revealed that the unviersity spends $7.7 million on Gee’s expenses — almost has much as his $8.6 million salary. The expenses include travel, parties and $64,000 on the president’s signature…
Read MoreNavy officials may have suppressed bad test results
“U.S. Navy emails and other documents, obtained by Aviation Week, suggest that officials muzzled bad test results for the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-1) variant, the USS Freedom, at a crucial time in the program’s development, when the service was considering which seaframe to pick for the $30 billion-plus fleet.”
Read MoreWill other states follow CA and suspend sunshine laws to save money?
OMB Watch reports that “the California legislature, as part of its Budget Act of 2012 (passed in June), suspended the state’s open meetings law for the next three years in an effort to cut state expenditures.“
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