An investigation by the Honolulu Advertiser found that donors linked to city and state contractors are giving money to candidates for Hawaii’s gubernatorial races. Experts say the donors are exploiting a loophole in Hawaii’s five year-old pay-to-play law. The study is based on a computer-assisted survey of more than 2,300 campaign contributions made to three top gubernatorial candidates during the second half of 2009.

An investigation by The Salt Lake Tribune found clustering of probationers and parolees “in specific neighborhoods and even apartment buildings, despite rules prohibiting people on supervision from associating with one another. Law enforcement and scholars say offenders are more likely to succeed if they are dispersed, but a lack of halfway houses and city ordinances passed in recent years have limited where many offenders can live.”

The Tennessean’s three-part series on gangs reveals a growing problem across the state, particularly in suburbia and small towns. Law enforcement is overwhelmed and schools are ripe recruiting grounds in what’s part of a national trend of gangs expanding their influence to areas outside the urban core to sell drugs. The newspaper gained access to gangs, taking readers inside their world, while providing the most complete public accounting to date of gang activity across the state. Included in the online presentation is an interactive map of known gangs that operate in each of Tennessee’s 95 counties. Relying on a confidential report, interviews, police records and court records, the newspaper’s series found there’s no consistent system to track gang activity. The lack of information leaves the public, and sometimes even law enforcement, in the dark about the scope of the problem. The paper also found some homicides with links to gangs never get reported as such by police.

The dangerous problem of cars accelerating without a driver’s input has put Toyota in the headlines – and brought the car maker’s executives to congressional hearings. But an NPR News Investigation by Robert Benincasa found that unintended acceleration is not limited to Toyota. It is actually a problem found throughout the auto industry. The NPR Vehicle Acceleration Database can be viewed online.

An investigation by the Houston Chronicle found dozens of police officers across the country have died in car crashes while unbuckled — at least 64 between 2004 and 2008 alone. It also discovered a widespread culture in police agencies of officers refusing to wear seat belts. “Some officers worry that their belts could hinder them if they have to exit quickly to confront a suspect — a seat belt can easily get tangled on a holster. Others fret they’ll be unable to control violent prisoners while buckled up.”

In an analysis of prescription drug deaths in the Milwaukee area, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Tom Kertscher found of the 1,200 overdose deaths in an eight-year period, some 70% involved prescription drugs. Kertscher created the database himself by reviewing the medical examiner reports for each of the counties in question. Additionally, Kertscher reviewed hundreds of pages of documents tied to a high-profile death of a 15-year-old girl to find that she died despite numerous warning signs to authorities, including 15 calls to police about drug activity and suspected dealing by the man who has pleaded guilty to her death.

Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein of ProPublica reported on big gaps in a federal database that is supposed to alert hospitals to disciplinary actions against health care providers across the country.  Over two decades ago, Congress “ordered up a national database allowing hospitals to check for disciplinary actions taken anywhere in the country against nurses, pharmacists, psychologists and other licensed health professionals.”  That database becomes available on March 1, but this investigation shows that it is missing thousands of serious disciplinary actions.  The story ran in The Los Angeles Times.

Hundreds of Georgia schools are under investigation for cheating on state standardized tests. This week’s release of a state probe of erasure marks followed more than a year of stories by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Heather Vogell and data analyst John Perry about suspect test scores.

Race Matters, a series by The Toronto Star, investigated why blacks are three times more likely than white to be stopped and questioned by police. “In each of the city’s 74 police patrol zones, the Star analysis shows that blacks were documented at significantly higher rates than their overall census population by zone, and that in many zones, the same holds true for “brown” people — mainly people of South Asian, Arab and West Asian backgrounds.” The Star was involved in a seven-year battle with the Toronto police to obtain the data used in this series.

As many as 80% of children in some states who received a first dose of H1N1 vaccine haven’t received a booster dose that’s necessary to fully protect them from swine flu, according to a USA Today review of immunization registry data from 10 states. State health officials are worried growing public complacency could put these children at risk if a third wave of disease hits this winter. Because there are there are no national data on the second doses. USA Today sought data from the 14 states that the CDC says require all H1N1 doses be recorded in immunization registries; four didn’t provide data.