By Brian Joseph
FairWarning.org
Big rig crashes kill nearly 4,000 Americans each year and injure more than 85,000. Fatalities involving large trucks are up 17 percent since 2009; injuries up 28 percent. Given these numbers, you might expect Congress to be agitating for tighter controls on big rigs. In fact, many members are pushing for the opposite – looser restrictions on the trucking industry and its drivers.
By Stuart Silverstein and Brian Joseph
FairWarning
As both a veteran railroad worker and union official responsible for safety, Mike Elliott became alarmed when he learned of trouble-plagued train signals in his home state of Washington.
Signals, he said, at times would inexplicably switch from red to yellow to green – potentially creating confusion that could lead to a crash.
By Paul Kiel and Annie Waldman
ProPublica
On a recent afternoon, the new African-American mayor of the St. Louis suburb of Jennings, population 15,000, looked at a computer list of every debt collection lawsuit against a resident of her city – at least 4,500 in just five years. She saw the names of many of her neighbors. Then she saw her own name.
By Fred Schulte
Center for Public Integrity
White House budget director Shaun Donovan called for a “more aggressive strategy” to thwart improper government payments to doctors, hospitals and insurance companies in a previously undisclosed letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell earlier this year.
By Nicholas Kusnetz
Center for Public Integrity
The offices in a former Kohl’s department store here look inconsequential enough — linoleum floors, fluorescent lights and cookie-cutter furniture. But what happens in this strip mall, and other equally nondescript settings nationwide, could in fact be crucial to the struggle over America’s voting laws and apparatus — a struggle that may go a long way toward determining the outcome of next November’s presidential election.
By Patrick Malone and Douglas Birch
Center for Public Integrity
A team of experts has confirmed what the Energy Department has been saying for two years — that burying 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium would be far cheaper and more practical than completing a multibillion-dollar plant that would turn the radioactive material into commercial reactor fuel.
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