The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Government (federal/state/local)
Cities and county failed to inspect fire hydrants
An investigation by Matt Dixon of The Villages Daily Sun (The Villages, Fla.) revealed that fire hydrants in Sumter County have not been regularly inspected. A request for maintenance records by the paper revealed that none existed. Municipalities county-wide had been under the impression that the county was responsible for the maintenance of fire hydrants. …
Read MoreTracking pharmaceuticals in waterways inadequate
Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard of The Associated Press report that, “U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked.” The scant tracking by the federal government of pharmaceuticals released into waterways…
Read MoreFDA wants states to monitor their own inspectors
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration wants states to assess their own inspection programs, even after Georgia’s failed to prevent a salmonella outbreak traced to a Blakely peanut plant, exposing broad gaps in the nation’s food safety system,” according to an article by Alan Judd of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Food safety experts question the efficacy…
Read MoreStreetlight outages plague Detroit
The Detroit Free Press looked into the on-going problem of streetlight outages in the city. “The Free Press spent three nights in March driving more than 200 miles of city streets examining the state of some of Detroit’s 88,000 lights, at least 9,000 of which are out.” Response to reports of outages are met with…
Read MoreOfficials withhold ticket contract information
Elise Young of northjersey.com reports that state officials refuse to provide complete public contracts with Ticketmaster. According to the article, the “arrangements give the state millions of dollars from seat sales and the non-refundable ‘convenience’ fees and other charges to fans.” In contracts obtained by The Record, the state’s take in transaction fees was removed.
Read MoreHousing program fails to aid low-income families
A story by William Heisel of the Los Angeles Times focuses on the failures of the federal government’s efforts to revitalize the housing market and to increase affordable housing. For a decade, the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) has been giving local governments homes to refurbish and resell to low-income buyers. The story…
Read MoreBuffett benefits from bailout
Charles Piller of The Sacramento Bee reports that billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway “owns more than $13 billion of stock in the top recipients of TARP funds – including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., US Bancorp, American Express Co. and Bank of America Corp., all considered by analysts to be in deep trouble before the federal…
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 MoreBankTracker crunches numbers from FDIC reports
An analysis of bank financial statements by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University and msnbc.com, sheds new light on just how dangerous conditions have become in many banks across the nation. Information is available on the BankTracker site and a related msnbc.com story by Bill Dedman.
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