Kirwan education reforms are at high risk of repeating historical disappointments
From the cover of the preliminary report.
Accountability was certainly a feature of the massive 235-page bill, HB1300, that implements the 10-year, multi-billion-dollar plan for strengthening and rebuilding K-12 education in Maryland. Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed that bill not just because it would require higher taxes but also because he found it lacking in accountability.
Next week, the legislature will attempt to override Hogan’s veto. In this article, Maryland Reporter contributor Charlie Hayward, a life-long government auditor, takes a deep-dive into the accountability features in the legislation and finds numerous problems.
GAO Report Promotes New Way To Advance LSL Remediation
In a report released just four days before the U.S. EPA issued its final revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) on December 22, 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided insights that water utilities can use to achieve better protections for water customers in neighborhoods at higher risk of lead exposure. Here are links to the complete GAO risk-of-lead-exposure report and an overview of its four recommendations, which the GAO anticipated updating in response to the EPA’s LCR final revisions. Water utilities can use the experience outlined in the report to focus attention on high-risk areas in their systems and accelerate their own efforts to identify and replace problematic lead service lines (LSLs).
Can the U.S. End Supply Chain Links to Forced Uighur Labor?
A Chinese cargo ship. (Kees Torn, https://tinyurl.com/iiwcrl7a; CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en)
Recent reporting on the human rights crisis in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region has revealed the United States to be a major consumer in the global marketplace for forced Uighur labor. It is a near certainty that some goods currently being sold in the United States though it is difficult to say which ones were made, wholly or in part, by Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in furtherance of their forced “reeducation” in China.
Feb 02 2021 Read 492 Times
In the United States, the legacy infrastructure traditionally used to measure and manage air quality is timeworn and costly to maintain. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), for example, released a report in December 2020 highlighting that US air quality monitoring networks have fallen into disrepair due to aging equipment and budgetary constraints.
The U.S. is not the only country challenged to maintain funding for air quality monitoring infrastructure - government-funded air pollution initiatives are chronically underfunded globally. Grants from multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, remain critical to building air quality monitoring efforts in the many countries where no funding exists. As government agencies across the world face budget cuts due to the economic impacts of COVID-19 in the coming years, air quality leaders will need to find ways to stretch their monitoring budgets.
Black market starting to emerge amid coronavirus vaccine shortages [The Orange County Register]
Jan. 31 In Miami, priority access to COVID vaccines was dangled as a lure to big hospital donors.
In New York, hospital workers laboring from home cut in front of their frontline colleagues on the COVID-19 vaccine line.
In California, teachers at the wealthy Los Gatos Union School District were urged by their superintendent to masquerade as health care workers to get vaccines ahead of schedule.
Scarcity of vaccines amid a deadly global pandemic is fueling fears of a black market that could inflict great harm on public health and confidence, where potentially stolen, spoiled or fake vaccine is sold to those who can afford to pay while the real thing is in short supply in communities most heavily impacted by COVID, experts said.