When 19-year-old Taylor Kennedy woke up to find his friend dead, he called the police.

Just the day before, he had gone with Shannon Gaddis, 17, to buy heroin in St. Louis, police said.

Though officials determined that Taylor was sleeping when Shannon snorted heroin, Taylor was charged with drug-induced homicide for buying the heroin that led to her death.

If convicted, the Troy, Ill., teen faces up to 30 years in state prison.

The Illinois state and federal prosecutors in the Metro-East area, adjacent to St. Louis, announced they would investigate overdoses more thoroughly.

And they would go after ...

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Located just south of Chicago, Indiana's Lake County has long been a hot-bed of political corruption, bloated government and patronage jobs. County government spending became so rampant that the largest corporate taxpayers in 2005 commissioned a study that recommended cutting government spending or consolidating services to save taxpayers millions. Few of the recommendations were adopted, and about two years later, the Indiana General Assembly forced a frozen tax levy specifically targeting the county's wasteful ways.

Times of Northwest Indiana reporter Bill Dolan and I spent four years collecting a decade's worth of electronic spending records for all ...

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I am constantly getting data from all kinds of public agencies that provide the most important field – the date of birth – in different formats. An example is city employee data. I request the name, DOB, salary and job title from San Antonio and other nearby cities to use in determining whether any of those workers have a criminal record.

Most of the time, the agencies provide the birth date like this in text format: mm/dd/yyyy. I prefer to work with the date like this in text format: yyyymmdd. When I want to find out how many employees were ...

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California's Board of Registered Nursing oversees more licensees, some 350,000, than any state nursing agency in the country. It is responsible for ensuring that nurses at patients' bedsides are not only competent, but sober, sane and law-abiding. So when we became suspicious that the board was fumbling its duties, leaving members of the public at risk, we wanted to ground our reporting in more than anecdotes, although those were rich and plentiful. Figuring out how to do this proved both time-consuming and hugely rewarding.

We first became interested in the board after we spent much of 2003 and ...

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Last month, I provided some tips for making the switch to Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet. Here are some things you need to know about Access 2007, the updated version of Microsoft’s desktop database manager. Just like Excel 2007, Access uses Microsoft’s new Tab, Ribbon and Button setup to organize functions that had been stored under menus. (Click images to enlarge for a better detail view.) 1. Access 2007 uses a new file format and extension (.accdb) that’s incompatible with earlier versions of the program. However, the 2007 version is able to open database (.mdb) files created by ... Read more ...

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates the nation's aging and overburdened sanitary sewer systems overflow at least 23,000 times a year and discharge between three billion and 10 billion gallons of raw sewage into streams, rivers and lakes. The problem is even bigger – 850 billion gallons bigger - when older sewer systems that discharge both storm water and sewage from the same pipe are included in the tally. But there is no national database to chronicle when, where and how much. The best the EPA has to offer is its Enforcement and Compliance History Online, a database known by its ...

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