In the latest installment of its series about North Carolina's dysfunctional medical examiner system, The Charlotte Observer published stories showing how faulty investigations into infant deaths routinely leave key questions unanswered. Medical examiners almost never go to infant death scenes and sometimes flout a state requirement to look at the baby’s body – two steps that national experts say are crucial to competent death investigations. Experts say infant deaths deserve special attention because children are vulnerable to abuse and neglect. But by some measures, N.C. medical examiners investigate infant deaths even less rigorously than those of adults.

Veterinarians are taking a crucial new role in public health in 2016 -- gatekeepers to tons of farm animal antibiotics now freely dispensed without prescription and contributing to a surge of antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" that infect people.

What will the companies selling antibiotics do about that? A Reuters investigation found broad, pervasive and mostly undisclosed financial ties between drugmakers and veterinarians:

Pharma companies gave $3.3 million to the main U.S. veterinary association over the past four years. Zoetis, the world's largest animal drug maker, named a prominent veterinary dean to its board at $240,000 a year, almost doubling ...

Alex Richards is joining IRE as a member of our training team.

Richards comes to IRE from the Chicago Tribune, where he had been a reporter specializing in investigative data journalism. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2011 and was awarded the Goldsmith and the Scripps Howard Farfel investigative reporting awards, among others, for the Las Vegas Sun series “Do No Harm,” with ProPublica’s Marshall Allen.

More recently, he shared IRE's FOI medal for a series on Chicago's truancy epidemic. In addition to reporting from Nevada for the Sun, he previously helped manage data ...

In celebration of the coming holidays, the IRE and NICAR offices will close Tuesday afternoon, Dec. 23 through Friday, Jan. 2 . While staff will be checking in periodically, coverage will be sporadic.

We appreciate your patience and will see you in the new year.

New Jersey taxpayers have paid significant fees to a firm that employs Mary Pat Christie, the wife of Gov. Chris Christie, according to the International Business Times. The state pension system in 2011 supposedly ended a $150 million investment in Angelo, Gordon & Co., but records obtained by the Times show that hundreds of thousands of dollars continue to flow to the firm. Mary Pat Christie joined the company in 2012 as a managing director.