A reporter’s tool

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No investigation | Will the reasons for the Iraq war ever be known?

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Tersely, Gil Cranberg links the voluminous findings in the Penn State probe into the Sandusky sex scandal to the failure – and circumscription – of a government inquiry into the possibly illegal invasion of Iraq, and the very costly war there.

National security

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When Roberts rules | A reporter's checklist for the impending Obamacare ruling

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Health care expert Judith Stein, director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, offers reporters and editors a checklist for stories when the Roberts Court's ruling is released.

Out of step

ASK THIS| June 07, 2012

A whistleblower wonders

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Big numbers

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As charitable giving grows

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Unintended consequences

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An inside job

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NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity has put out a tip sheet for reporters to get to the bottom of assertions that government regulations, such as ones by EPA, are killing jobs. And also to check on claims to the opposite – that regulations are creating jobs. In the last two weeks, the Obama administration announced lie-detector tests on leaking, and House members introduced a state secrets bill that Obama has notably failed to endorse. National security reporters should be asking lots of questions, and here are some of them. They're the only three countries in the world that haven't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. The authors of a new report, 'Cruel and Unusual: U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Global Context', find that overlong sentences and prosecution of children are two ways the U.S. is out of step with most of the rest of the world. Army Lt. Col. Danny Davis, who broke ranks to debunk official reports of progress, cites multiple journalistic and analytical reports that back his perspective, and wonders: Isn't Congress the least bit curious about whether it's been badly deceived? The Pentagon base budget of $530 billion is only about half of it, write two researchers for the National Priorities Project. Add in war funding, nuclear weapons spending, the homeland security budget, international security assistance, retirement costs and 'defense-related activities' and you're talking about an easily trimmable $1 trillion a year. These days, Web-based charities may serve as pass-throughs for donations to nonprofit groups, sometimes without the knowledge of the nonprofits themselves. There are mountains of money involved, occasional confusion and added expense and an obvious potential for abuse as well. Expert William Bagley raises serious questions about key aspects of this system. How does supporting warlords help create a stable government? Why are we counting the money spent instead of the good achieved? A scholar who has done extensive field research in Afghanistan on the intended and unintended effects of foreign aid writes that reporters are missing some of the key dynamics at play there. Memo to ALEC members on how to dodge pointed inquiries into the group's mechanisms exposes its vulnerability to accusations that it is a lobbying arm for corporate interests.