Below is the grand jury report from the First Judicial District of Philadelphia on the practices of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in his West Philadelphia abortion clinic. Gosnell was put on trial following the release of the report and convicted of first-degree murder in the death of three viable babies born at the clinic as well as manslaughter for the death of a clinic patient.
For more on the conviction, click here.

Gosnell Grand Jury Report by Tim McGhee

The federal government released a report Wednesday, May 8, showing that costs for the same treatments varied widely between different hospitals in the same state and even the same city.
Below is the cost data collected on hospitals in Pennsylvania, among them Pottstown Memorial Medical Center, Phoenixville Hospital and Reading Hospital and Medical Center. You can search for hospitals by facility name or search the type of treatment. Not all operations or treatments available at area hospitals were looked at and will not be on the list.

Exelon Nuclear's Limerick Generating Station

Perhaps few things are more regulated by the federal government than nuclear power plants.

And one thing you can sure about government regulations is that they tend to generate an awful lot of documents.

Sorting through the documents generated by a nuclear generation station can be confusing at best, even to reporters familiar with the agencies, web sites and contents.

With the presence of Exelon Nuclear's Limerick Generating Station in our community, actions and documents generated by and for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that may related to the Limerick nuclear plant are of particular interest to Mercury readers.

To help keep track of the documents relevant to Mercury news stories, and to provide links for readers who want more information, we began posting those documents on a service called "Document Cloud."

It occurred to us that the community might like access to those collected documents and not just to those to which we provide links in stories.

So we created a folder called "Limerick Watch" where all those documents are collected and available for public viewing.

Some have been re-named by the reporter using them and the folder is anything but complete, but we figured, why wait?

We intend to add older documents as time permits, and to update it with new documents as they become available and relevant.

In the meantime, we have embedded them here in this blog for easy access.

We have also embedded a timeline of Mercury stories about the Limerick plant, particularly as they relate to earthquakes, begun in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and which readers can use to search previous stories.

Earthquakes and Nuclear Plants on Dipity.

Wondering what the average salary is for a teacher in your school district? Wondering how much your child's teacher gets paid? You can find out using the search option below.
Enter information in any of the fields to carry out a search. You do not have to fill out all the fields in order to search.

Online Database by Caspio

Click here to load this Caspio Online Database.

Eight people were charged by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office with participating in a Pay-to-Play scheme for Turnpike contracts. The charges stem from a grand jury investigation into contract bidding at the Turnpike Commission.

To read the grand jury report, click here.
To read the criminal complaints against each of the individuals charged, click here.
To read Attorney General Kathleen Kane's comments on the charges, click here.
To read the attorney general's office press release and see photos of those charged, click here.

Wondering about the shifting ground beneath your feet? If you are wondering if sinkholes could be an issue at your home or business, you can find out exactly which areas in Pennsylvania are considered to be "karst" or a region with limestone. Sinkholes occur when limestone and or dolostone in bedrock dissolve due to acidic water formed when water and carbon dioxide mix. Sinkholes can also occur when deposits within natural rock fractures are washed away, causing the hole to open up.

The map below, courtesy the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, shows areas of Pennsylvania where sinkholes have opened up or where depressions in the earth, which could indicate a future sinkhole, have been recorded.

For more on sinkholes, click here.