Search results for:
Students misuse low-income housing
Lee Rood of The Des Moines Register found scores of students are paying little or nothing to live in low-income projects in college towns in every region. Loopholes enable students — including scholarship athletes who already receive housing money — easily qualify for apartments in the Section 8 program. "Last year, during a probe into…
Read MoreKy. economic incentives fall short
A series of Lexington Herald-Leader reports from John Stamper and Bill Estep, with contributions from Linda J. Johnson, computer-assisted reporting coordinator, reporter Linda Blackford and news researcher Lu-Ann Farrar, examines Kentucky’s expensive efforts to recruit industries and failures in the program. “Instead, at a cost of $1.8 billion, Kentucky’s main economic-incentive programs have overburdened taxpayers…
Read More‘Guest workers’ suffer from exploitation, neglect
A nine-month investigation by Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua of The Sacramento Bee “has found pineros [Latino forest workers in the United States] are victims of employer exploitation, government neglect and a contracting system that insulates landowners — including the U.S. government — from responsibility.” The report, “based on more than 150 interviews across Mexico,…
Read MoreInnocent man likely executed in Texas
Lise Olsen of the Houston Chronicle reports that a witness now says he was influenced by police to identify Ruben Cantu, then 17, as the killer in an alleged murder-robbery. Cantu, who claimed to have been framed in the capital murder case, was executed in August 1993. “A dozen years after his execution, a Houston…
Read MoreRegion unprepared for disaster
Joe Mahr and Phillip O’Connor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch find that “repeated recommendations from all levels of government in an eight-state region of the central United States have been largely ignored on how to best brace for an event that scientists expect to kill thousands and cause widespread chaos.” The Post-Dispatch reviewed studies, reports,…
Read MoreCalif. system’s additional pay offsets student fee hike
Tanya Schevitz and Todd Wallack of the San Francisco Chronicle examine how much the University of California system really pays its administrators. “In addition to salaries and overtime, payroll records obtained by The Chronicle show that employees received a total of $871 million in bonuses, administrative stipends, relocation packages and other forms of cash compensation…
Read MoreWash. program’s flaws exposes public, vulnerable adults
Ruth Teichroeb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigated state records to show the flaws in a state-funded program that pays for-profit companies to supervise dangerous developmentally disabled adults. The program has the state paying for-profit companies to look after developmentally disabled people placed its Community Protection program. "While the program does protect the public in many…
Read MoreMortgage fraud surges in Chicago
David Jackson, with contributions from Ray Gibson, Todd Lighty and John McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, reviewed thousands of pages of land and court records and interviewed more than 100 people to show that a white-collar crime wave is raking Chicago’s poorest communities, robbing vulnerable families of their homes and draining billions of dollars from…
Read MoreFOI audit shows S.C. officials suspicious, uncooperative
Jim Davenport of The Associated Press wrote a series of reports detailing the costs of public records and abuse of executive sessions, as part of a statewide Freedom of Information audit completed by The Associated Press and the South Carolina Press Association. The investigation found that a quarter of elected officials in a statewide survey…
Read MoreCalif. conservators profit from vulnerable seniors
Evelyn Larrubia, Jack Leonard and Robin Fields of the Los Angeles Times examined records of more than 2,400 cases handled by California’s professional conservators since 1997 to produce a detailed four-part series on the state’s failure to protect its senior citizens from those hired to handle their affairs. More than 500 seniors were entrusted to…
Read More