Posts Tagged ‘original-reporting’
Reporting: Gulf Coast could be poised for comeback
After five years, there are still so, so many questions: Can the Gulf Coast make it all the way back — not just from Hurricane Katrina, and not just from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and not just from the recession, but from the toxic multiplier effect of all three?
The answer to all of those questions, Gulf Coast leaders, environmental scholars and economists say, is yes.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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Exclusive: Last U.S. combat brigade leaves Iraq
Live reporting of this was an NBC News/msnbc.com exclusive:
NEAR THE IRAQ-KUWAIT BORDER, Aug. 18, 2010 — The last U.S. combat troops were crossing the border into Kuwait on Thursday morning, bringing to a close the active combat phase of a 7½-year war that overthrew the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, forever defined the presidency of George W. Bush and left more than 4,400 American service members and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com and Richard Engel and Charlene Gubash/NBC News)
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Reporting: Hundreds of millions in Katrina funds remain unspent
Five years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 200,000 Louisiana homes, the state program established to help families rebuild still hasn’t paid out more than three-quarters of a billion dollars and has come under fire from a federal judge for discriminating against black homeowners.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com and Kiran Chawla/WDSU)
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Portrait of stabbing suspect emerges
My profile of serial stabbing suspect Elias Abuelazam: Quiet and friendly — until he would explode:
“Abuelazam grew up in a well-to-do Christian Arab family in the city of Ramle, Israel, where former neighbors and acquaintances described him as a shy, quiet geek who fell in with the wrong crowd. They said he eventually fell prey to drugs and ‘criminal elements,’ which led his single mother — his father is reported to have died when Elias was very young — to send him to the United States, where many relatives now live. He arrived sometime around 1995.”
Full post (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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Florida college students’, staff members’ personal data exposed
The central library system for Florida’s public colleges is sending out e-mail notices this week to as many as 126,000 summer school students, faculty and staff at six colleges disclosing that it exposed their personal information online from May 29 to June 2.
Investigators with the Leon County Sheriff’s Office discovered that “some personal information had been accessed by unauthorized persons and that some was available through Google until the search engine was notified,” the College Center for Library Automation said.
“The records of these institutions were contained in temporary work files that were being processed by CCLA at the time of exposure” during a software upgrade, it said.
While “CCLA has found no indication that the data has actually been obtained or misused,” it urged students, faculty and staff at the six institutions — Broward College, Florida State College-Jacksonville, Northwest Florida State College, Pensacola State College, South Florida Community College and Tallahassee Community College — to immediately place fraud alerts on their credit files.
Reporting: Branded! Public schools court corporate sponsors
Schools across the country are dropping their resistance to advertising, selling the rights to name their facilities to local businesses as education budgets fall further behind in the stagnant economy.
That’s why field hockey and lacrosse players at Hempfield High School in Landisville, Pa., practice and compete on Heart of Lancaster Hospital Turf Quad. At Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., the baseball team plays at SmileMaker Dental Field. At Wilson High School in West Lawn, Pa., the basketball teams compete at Discovery Federal Credit Union Gym.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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Reporting: Arizona immigration law has echoes across U.S.
Arizona officers on Thursday began enforcing the state’s new immigration law — what’s left of it, anyway. In the small town of Fremont, Neb., they’re not even bothering.
Arizona and Fremont are at the forefront of the movement by state and local governments to get tough with illegal immigrants, rather than rely on the federal government’s efforts to address the problem. But they are learning that simply passing a law is far from enough.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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Reporting: Utah close to determining whether state resources used in immigrant list
Utah officials said they were close to identifying the possible source of a mysterious list purporting to identify 1,300 illegal immigrants, acknowledging that a state employment database compiles all the information cited in the document — a database available to more than a thousand state employees.
UPDATE 8 p.m. ET: Utah officials now say they have found evidence the state Workforce Services Department database was breached and will turn the evidence over to the attorney general’s office.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com with KSL-TV)
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Original reporting: He did the right thing; now he faces deportation
It’s called Section 287(g), and it means local police can enforce federal immigration laws. That’s why an illegal immigrant from Mexico faces deportation after he did the right thing and called 911 to report a dirty cop.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Reporting: U.S. split over Arizona immigration law
Arizona’s tough new immigration law has brought calls for boycotts of the state, but similar measures are in the works in at least 12 other states.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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