Water tainted with mercury ignored by government

Abandoned mercury mines in California are contaminating many of the state's waterways,  reports Jason Dearen.  An investigation by the Associated Press found that "the federal government has tried to clean up fewer than a dozen of the hundreds of mines - and most cleanups have failed to stem the contamination."

The movie "The Informant!," which opens at theaters tonight, is based upon the IRE-honored book by Kurt Eichenwald. The book was a finalist in the book category in the 2000 IRE Awards.

For more than 70 years, the Washington Redskins have boasted that they have sold out every game. Seats are so scarce that the waiting list for general admission season tickets has 160,000 names on it. But James Grimaldi of The Washington Post reports that the reality is that the team has sold thousands of general admission tickets to brokers, who resold them on the secondary market, often at higher-than-retail prices. Part 2 of this series looks at the fans who have been sued by the team over their inability to pay for premium seat contracts.

Stars and Stripes (Washington, D.C.) reporter Kevin Baron reports that less than a week after the paper first revealed that the Pentagon was routinely profiling journalists, the Army decided to cancel the program.  "The U.S. military is canceling its contract with a controversial private firm that was producing background profiles of journalists seeking to cover the war that graded their past work as 'positive,' 'negative' or 'neutral.'"

A story by Heather Vogell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raises questions about whether Atlanta is doing enough to probe allegations of cheating on state tests at its schools. Vogell used the state's Open Records Law to obtain more than 2,400 pages of internal investigations into testing misconduct at six large metro school districts.

An investigation by Sheri Fink of ProPublica reveals "what really happened to some of the patients who died at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina." Among her findings, Fink reports that more patients than had been previously reported were given lethal injections, and some of those patients were near death when they were euthanized. She also looks at who was involved in the decisions made at the hospital, and why those choices were made.

Jeremy Finley of WSMV-Nashville, Tenn. tracked the former staff of the governor’s office and found many of them active in “indirect lobbying” for special interests. A state law says no members of the governor’s staff can lobby for a year after they leave office.

Clark Merrefield, along with fellow CUNY graduate students, analyzed New York state’s compensation program for those found to be wrongfully convicted. Their findings showed that it takes years for recipients to receive their compensation, and the payment rates are wildly uneven despite promises to the contrary.

Laura Frank, reporting for Exposé, explores the state of investigative reporting in a series entitled "The Withering Watchdog." In an era of shrinking newsrooms, "investigative reporting is often the first target. Investigative journalism takes more time and more experienced journalists to produce, and it often involves legal battles. It's generally the most expensive work the news media undertake. But an Exposé original investigation has found there's more to the story. The decline in investigative reporting — the in-depth stories that hold the powerful accountable in a democracy — began long before the current economic collapse. The crisis that has pundits worried about the survival of serious journalism in America began with what the journalism industry did to itself."

In its on-going watchdog series "Clout Goes To College," the Chicago Tribune reveals a "jobs-for-entry scheme" at the University of Illinois' law school. Internal emails "show for the first time efforts to seek favors -- in this case, jobs -- for admissions, the most troubling evidence yet of how Illinois' entrenched system of patronage crept into the state's most prestigious public university."