She set dinner on the table before sharing the bad news with her 10-year-old son Wyatt.
On and off throughout Wyatt’s life, his father has been incarcerated at the Kennebec County Correctional Facility in Augusta. Most weeks his mom, Courtney Allen, scraped together $50 to pay for a few 15-minute phone calls from the jail. That week she didn’t have the money.
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor.
The Maine Monitor, formerly known as Pine Tree Watch, is a local journalism product published by The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, a nonprofit civic news organization based in Augusta.
May 20, 2021
In December 2020, CSIS laid out why the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the most important UN agency you have never heard of. On March 31, Secretary Blinken announced U.S. support for an American candidate, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, to lead that important agency. She would be the first woman and the second American to lead the agency. While her candidacy is deeply meaningful, having her at the helm of the ITU would be even more so .
Yet, running a successful campaign to head a UN specialized agency is not an easy task. There are many examples where a lack of strategic organization by the United States has resulted in our competitors taking on important positions, such as the 2019 Food and Agriculture Organization ’s director-general elections. In the case of the ITU, the current secretary-general is a Chinese national, well known for practices preferential to Chinese firms. Recent international organization elections, including the World Intelle
May 25th, 2021
POOL New / reuters
Although the government has pledged to help expand high-speed broadband access in communities that need it, officials need to expand the eligibility criteria, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). President Joe Biden
signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law in March. It directs the Treasury Department to distribute billions of dollars in stimulus funding to local and state governments.
Those funds can be used to improve broadband access, but the bill severely limits the eligibility criteria for such projects. The bill says that only unserved or underserved communities can use the federal funding to improve broadband access, as