by Carl Bloice
The editors at the Financial Times have taken to referring to it as “palace intrigue.” Which seems a little overblown to me, evoking images of damsels locked in drafty bell towers, eunuchs tiptoeing down dank halls in the middle of the night and courtiers slyly whispering into the monarch’s ear. I doubt anything [...]

by Alexandra Andrews, ProPublica
A nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has uncovered widespread flaws in the way colleges respond to and report students’ allegations of sexual assault.
Such accusations are generally handled by campus judiciary processes– which tend to be highly secretive, reports CPI. Victims are regularly excluded from the proceedings, for instance, or given strict gag [...]

by The Reverend Dr. Britt Minshall
When we take our three year-old Cocker Spaniel, Maggie, out for walks, she gets so excited her 2″ stub of a tail continually wags, sometimes her body just can’t anchor the moving tail and she begins to wag all over.
That’s what happens when fundamentalism becomes the ruler of any social [...]

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica
First, in the name of the holiday, the giving.
Food banks and soup kitchens are more stocked than usual this year, thanks to an extra $100 million in resources from the stimulus, on top of the $250 million originally budgeted by the federal government, reports The New York Times. It’s a good thing, too—a recent survey [...]

by Christina Jewett, ProPublica, and Sam Roe, Chicago Tribune
Inside Chicago’s Maxwell Manor nursing home, Dr. Michael Reinstein’s patients suffered from side effects so severe that they trembled, hallucinated or lost control of their bladders.
Staffers told state investigators that so many patients were clamoring to complain to Reinstein about their medications that a security guard was [...]

(These jokes were forwarded over the Internet to UK Progressive by a former US Congressman so they have to be both 100% true and fully and freely in the public domain. If not, don’t laugh, burn/toss out your computer monitor and promise never to view them again. This may or may not satisfy any future [...]

by The Rev. Dr. Britt Minshall
Sitting in my chair at the Baltimore City Courthouse Jury Room I can see out the open door to the central hall leading to the battery of Court Rooms.  From this vantage point I am able to watch everyone as they come and go.
There are a large number of confused [...]

Several there wish she hadn’t.  Cameron Sinclair tomorrow’s lunch keynote at the same conference, wrote for Huffington Post and  Tweetcast her ’speech’… quite scary actually.
Just read, shudder and keep saying to yourself, she would have been a heartbeat away from a 72-year old, anger challenged, former prisoner of war,  high stakes gambler POTUS had they [...]

by Marcus Stern, ProPublica
Arkansas Rep. Mike Ross — a Blue Dog Democrat playing a key role in the health care debate — sold a piece of commercial property in 2007 for substantially more than a county assessment (PDF) and an independent appraisal (PDF) say it was worth.
The buyer: an Arkansas-based pharmacy chain with a keen interest in how [...]

by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica and Aram Roston, Special to ProPublica
Last spring, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq got a makeover,replacing the scandal-plagued Blackwater private security company with a firm named Triple Canopy.
The new $1 billion contract cemented Triple Canopy’s status as the pre-eminent provider of private security services in Iraq, with its heavily armed employees [...]