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Legislation Languishes in Congress as Miners Fight for their Benefits
By Anupama Narayanswamy May 14, 2008 4:28 p.m.Glen Charles, who had been a miner in West Virginia for 42 years, was diagnosed as having black lung, for which he received benefits under the Black Lung Act up to the time of his death in August 2005. Under federal law, surviving spouses of miners who die from the disease are eligible to continue receiving those benefits. But soon after Charles died, his checks stopped arriving, leaving Emma Charles, his 75-year-old widow, financially unstable.
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Congressional Oversight of Blackwater Hampered by Lack of Documents
By Anupama Narayanswamy Oct 16, 2007 6:56 p.m.Nine months before Blackwater USA employees took part in a shootout in which eight Iraqi civilians were killed, a few members of Congress raised concerns about the performance of the private military company that provides security services for the Departments of State and Defense in Iraq. In 2007, five members of Congress sent at least six letters to the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom raising questions about the company, raising questions about the controversial firm.
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Office of Administration not subject to FOIA
By Anupama Narayanswamy Aug 22, 2007 4:18 p.m.According to this AP article, the Justice Department is maintaining that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
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Letters from Defense
By Anupama Narayanswamy Aug 16, 2007 6:51 p.m.We just received few of the letters we had requested from the Department of Defense from the January batch of correspondences. We received only a partial response to the FOIA where we had selected specific letters from the correspondence logs.
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Congressional-DoD correspondence visualization
By Bill Allison Jul 27, 2007 6:12 p.m.Why should the Sunlight Labs guys get all the fun? I loaded the subject lines of the correspondence logs referenced immediately below into Many Eyes, which our co-conspirator Josh Ruihley used to create our Earmarks Visualizations. So what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about to the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Al Qaeda? Military contracts? National Guard? Body Armor? See for yourself.
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DoD correspondence log converted from pix to spreadsheets
By Bill Allison Jul 27, 2007 4:18 p.m.I'm posting, in an Excel spread sheet, the congressional correspondence logs covering the first three months of 2007 that we got a while back in a less than user friendly format from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Here's a sample of what we got in response to our FOIA -- a .tif or tagged image file format -- I picked one at random, but we have a CD-Rom with 189 files just like it.
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Great use of correspondence logs
By Anupama Narayanswamy Jul 10, 2007 3:46 p.m.The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Times used some of our correspondence logs to track down letters members of Congress were writing to federal agencies requesting funding for certain projects. Here's a link to the LA Times story.
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Defense correspondence logs
By Anupama Narayanswamy Jun 21, 2007 9:46 p.m.Here's the correspondence logs we received from the Department of Defense recently. We received about 100 pages of documents in PDF format that we converted to text.
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Whistleblower Complaints to DoD
By Anupama Narayanswamy Jun 4, 2007 6:17 p.m.Two letters members of Congress wrote to the Defense Contract Audit Agency reveal two cases of employees of government contractors who alleged wrongdoing by their companies.
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National Endowment Letters Unsolicited
By Bill Allison Jun 1, 2007 3:21 p.m.While I wait for word from Fraiola & Associates on the Penguin PAC (see below), I thought I'd go through a five-inch tall stack of papers Anu got in response to a FOIA request for congressional correspondence logs from the National Endowment of for the Humanities. So far, what I've seen aren't letters from members of Congress, but rather, a March 16, 2007, letter NEH sent to the entire congressional delegations of states lucky enough to be blessed with NEH funding. The letters include "a complete list of grants recently made in your state by the National Endowment for the Humanities," lists that have not yet been made public. "We are pleased to be able to notify Members of the House and Senate of these awards in advance of their public release," the letter, from Bruce Cole, the chairman of NEH, states. Those lists are online now--and have been since April 19.
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FCC Correspondence Logs
By Anupama Narayanswamy May 30, 2007 3:08 p.m.Here are the two Federal Communications Commission spreadsheets, converted from PDF to excel. The first one is for January and February and the second for March.
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FOIA on a Floppy
By Anupama Narayanswamy May 23, 2007 8:46 p.m.Here's a picture of the most recent addition to the stack of FOIA clutter on my desk.
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OALJ correspondence log now online
By Bill Allison May 23, 2007 8:16 p.m.It took a little longer than I thought it would (in part because I was also doing other things, in part because I kept letting the full content of the documents disctract me) to create the it, but here, attached, is a log of correspondence from members of Congress to the Office of Administrative Law Judges of the U.S. Department of Labor covering the months of January and February: OALJ Log.
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Air Force Logs of Correspondence
By Anupama Narayanswamy May 3, 2007 10:11 p.m.We received
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