Investigative Journalism Education Consortium (https://ijec.org/prominence/footer-featured/)
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A single gram of meth is often enough to keep an addict satisfied for a day, according to agents from the Illinois State Police’s Zone 5 Meth Response Team. Beginning in June 2012, drug task force agents tracked 78 occasions when people who had recently purchased pseudoephedrine arrived at Tena Logan’s residence in Loxa, Ill., according to a written statement by FBI task force officer Scott Standerfer, in the case against Logan.
Once thought to be on a downward spiral, recent criminal reports indicate that meth use is climbing again. In fact, Illinois registered the fifth-most meth lab seizures and arrests in the country last year, behind Missouri, Tennessee, Indiana and Kentucky.
Residents of Tipton County continue to fight the construction of Wildcat Wind Farm, and Jon Thompson, a farmer with 28 turbines on his property, isn’t quite sure why.
“I don’t understand why people would be against it,” Thompson said. “It’s not just generated income for us but also for our community.”
Less than 10 years ago, Lafayette, Ind. was just another stretch of flat farmland used to grow corn and soybeans. But since 2008, boosted by federal and local tax incentives, wind turbines like these have become an increasingly prominent part of the northern Indiana landscape.
Only three of the University of Wisconsin System’s 13 four-year campuses — Platteville, Stevens Point and Parkside — have more than half of students, faculty and staff signed up to receive text alerts, according to a review by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – where the Northern Illinois shooter, Steven Kazmierczak, lived and attended graduate school at the time of the shooting – has not changed its emergency alert system to reach more students via text messages. With its current opt-in system, however, less than one-third of Illinois’s roughly 42,000 students are signed up for text alerts, Illinois campus security officials say.
The percentages of students who receive emergency notifications via text message reflect the inconsistent and patchwork emergency notification systems that U.S. universities and colleges use. In addition, universities vary on how they keep track of who and how many receive these alerts.
A spot check of universities across the Midwest and around the nation has revealed that four-year institutions are inconsistent in their approach to sending out emergency alerts to students and staff. Although universities automatically send out emergency notifications via school email addresses, they vary on their policies and success for text alerts.
The Investigative Journalism Education Consortium was named a finalist this week in a national award honoring outstanding student investigative journalism projects in 2012.
The transition for mentally ill inmates from the Champaign County jail to community services is seriously hampered by a lack of coordination and communication between the jail officials and local mental health providers, according to a top county mental health official and a jail consultant hired by the county.