Wednesday, May 22, 2013
 

When former Marine Maureen Gard goes running, the flashbacks come: riding in the platoon leader’s car, the jokes about her bra size, the fondling, and the pinning her down.

She was 18 at the time and considered her platoon leader a friend when she went for a ride with him to a mall near their base in Virginia. They were classmates training to be Marine musicians.  He drove fast, her cell phone fell between her legs, he reached down to get it, she said.  He fondled her knees, legs and stomach, drove to a wooded area behind an abandoned building, and climbed on top of her and pinned her down.  He kissed her and kept asking if she liked the encounter.  She resisted his advances and was able to get out of the car, she said.

Former House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan, D-Meriden, asserted his innocence Tuesday in a surprise appearance outside federal court as jurors began deliberating whether a top campaign aide was guilty in the corruption case that derailed his 2012 congressional campaign.

The state's largest teachers' union has filed a complaint against Bridgeport, the state's largest school district, claiming the superintendent is shutting out teachers and parents from important decisions.

"The Board of Education of Bridgeport, through its superintent Paul Vallas, is not interested in following statutory mandates," says the complaint filed Tuesday by the Connecticut Education Association with the State Board of Education.

Testimony about the state Department of Social Services’ handling of Medicaid applications resembled something of a math problem Monday.

At issue in the trial in U.S. District Court in Hartford is whether the department has enough employees to process Medicaid applications in time frames required by the federal government. And on Monday, each side offered its take on what is needed to meet the record-setting demand for the medical assistance program.

Does Scott Walker’s record as a conservative Republican governor of progressive Wisconsin make him a role model for GOP candidates in Connecticut? Walker thinks so. So does Jerry Labriola, the state GOP chairman who invited him to deliver a pep talk to a struggling party and headline its major annual fundraiser, the Prescott Bush Dinner.

First the good news, and then the good news: Not only was the Monday commute in lower Fairfield County reasonable, but the president of Metro-North said full train service will return Wednesday morning.

 

The head of the legislature's Children's Committee, flanked by mental health experts and parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, unveiled a proposal aimed at improving the mental health system for young children.

Supporters call it a first step, a framework. It doesn't include any state spending, an advantage for its chances of passage in a tight budget year but a drawback to advocates who say the system needs more resources.

New Haven -- The defense rested Monday without offering testimony in the conspiracy trial of Robert E. Braddock Jr., the campaign aide whose arrest a year ago opened a scandal that mortally wounded the congressional candidacy of Christopher G. Donovan.

 

The two biggest fundraisers for then-House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan’s 2012 congressional campaign were Harry Raymond Soucy and Mark Masselli, men with significant financial interests before the General Assembly, a campaign official testified Friday.

Soucy delivered $27,500 from donors trying to ensure that their roll-your-own cigarette business remained free of Connecticut’s steep tax. Masselli, who raised at least $15,000, obtained a $15 million bonding authorization for his community health centers

Reacting to a week of shockingly bad news about sexual assault in the military, Sen. Richard Blumenthal announced Friday that he is pushing to reform the military judicial process and provide more support for victims.

“This crime is underreported and under-prosecuted in the military and I am going to be proposing reforms along with colleagues that will … encourage more women to come forward and allow enable perpetrators to be prosecuted successfully,” Blumenthal said during a press conference at the state Capitol.

Connecticut can reduce the cost of municipal government dramatically over time, but it won’t happen unless state leaders pave the way, a top economist with the Federal Reserve Bank said Friday.

Yolanda Kodrzycki, vice president and director of the reserve’s New England Public Policy Center in Boston, also said other states particularly have cut costs in health care services, technology, capital programs and administration of retirement benefits.

Washington -– As the U.S. Census Bureau collects information about housing from Connecticut residents in the next few months, the agency faces trouble in Washington.

The sequester, or across-the-board federal spending cuts, are digging deep into the agency's budget and conservative Republicans want to gut or eliminate many of its programs.

That’s making a broad coalition of academics, business leader, advertisers and others dependent on census data very nervous. 

It started with a report to the state's Office of the Child Advocate that a child had been expelled from preschool.

Jamey Bell, the child advocate, saw no reason why a child that young should be suspended, and wanted to know how widespread the problem was.

She would soon find out that there were 1,967 incidents of students age 6 and under that were suspended last school year -- almost all of them black or Hispanic.

New Haven – In a secretly videotaped encounter in 2012, then-House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan, D-Meriden, seemed to cheerfully take credit for killing a tobacco tax bill, then recoiled from the idea seconds later.

“I took care of ya, didn’t I?” a smiling Donovan told Harry Raymond Soucy, a union friend acting on behalf of smoke-shop owners trying to keep their roll-your-own cigarette business free of state tobacco taxes.

Donovan and Soucy then embraced, a scene played Thursday in U.S. District on the fourth day of the trial of Robert Braddock Jr., who was the chief fundraiser of Donovan’s 2012 congressional campaign.