Atlanta Unfiltered

Imagine you’re a Fleet Street reporter at a British tabloid with a pocketful of cash. You meet a trusted source at a pub, a police officer who tells you about the royal family’s confidential schedule in exchange for a small gratuity. You hand over a few quid and rush off with a photographer to stake out a health club where Camilla Parker-Bowles is toning her abs. Guess what: If you work for Rupert Murdoch, you may have violated U.S. law.

Formaldehyde is now classified as a carcinogen. But, despite the growing scientific consensus about how formaldehyde can affect human health, it remains to be seen if the studies will lead to tighter U.S. formaldehyde regulations.

At Project Share, started by Atlanta philanthropist Bernie Marcus, brain-injured troops get cognitive therapy rehabilitation to relearn basic tasks of life — care the Pentagon’s Tricare health plan won’t pay for.

For-profit universities collected about $640 million from the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill in its first year, according to a new U.S. Senate committee report. The boost to for-profits came at a time when the sector was subject to criticism for poor results and for leaving many students with unmanageable debts.

Just over a week ago, when Kenneth Feinberg took over handling of damage claims from the Gulf oil spill, he promised to cut through the delays and confusion common under the much-maligned BP system. But Feinberg’s goals – particularly his pledge to respond to personal claims for emergency payments within 48 hours – may be overly ambitious. Applicants say that they have not received responses within two days of filing claims and have encountered an array of service problems.

The federal government has lost eight of 15 cases in which Guantánamo inmates have said they or witnesses against them were forcibly interrogated. That’s according to a review of 31 published decisions that resolve lawsuits filed by 52 captives who said they’ve been wrongfully detained. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly and others rejected government evidence because of interrogation tactics ranging from verbal threats to physical abuse they called torture. More than 50 such lawsuits are still pending, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court gave Guantánamo inmates the green light to challenge their detention in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Lowe’s Companies Inc., the nation’s No. 2 home improvement chain, has set off a legal firestorm by agreeing to a $6.5 million national settlement over tainted drywall in a class-action suit being decided by Muscogee County Superior Court Judge Bobby Peters. The $6.5 million settlement would pay relatively small amounts — Lowe’s gift cards in amounts ranging from $50 to $2,000 — to most victims who had the tainted drywall in their homes. But the handful of attorneys who quietly negotiated the deal will receive a separate payment of $2.1 million.

By SHARONA COUNTS/ProPublica After being laid off from her job as a high school teacher in Dayton, Ohio, Nicole Massey decided to go back to college. For months, she scoured the Web for ways to fund her tuition, while supporting her 10-year-old son, Tyler. So when ads turned up in Massey’s inbox claiming that President […]

Last December, a $500 donation could buy a ticket to a fundraiser featuring “Bojangles’ Fried Chicken, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, And Mel Watt, of course!” Two days later, Congressman Watt (D-N.C.) withdrew a provision from the House’s financial reform bill that would have regulated loans from car dealers. Fund-raisers by Watt, Georgia’s  Tom Price and several other congressmen are the subject of ethics investigations, The New York Times reports today.

NEW ORLEANS — For more than a year, the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity has insisted there were no defects in the Chinese drywall it used to build nearly 200 houses for victims of Hurricane Katrina, including many in its heavily publicized “Musicians’ Village’’ development in the Upper Ninth Ward. But a house-by-house canvas of Musicians’ Village by reporters from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and ProPublica found several homeowners who reported serious problems and one who said she had complained to Habitat for more than a year about corrosion and electronics failures believed to be related to her drywall.

The military medical system is failing to diagnose brain injuries in troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom receive little or no treatment for lingering health problems, an investigation by ProPublica and NPR has found. Tens of thousands of troops with mild traumatic brain injuries have gone uncounted, according to unpublished military research obtained by ProPublica and NPR. “When someone’s missing a limb, you can see that,” said Sgt. William Fraas, a Bronze Star recipient. “When someone has a brain injury, you can’t see it, but it’s still serious.”