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.
Washington –- Saying children should not have to walk down the halls where their classmates were slaughtered, Connecticut lawmakers introduced bills in Congress Thursday that would secure federal funds to build a new Sandy Hook Elementary School
Last week, town leaders in Newtown voted to tear down the existing facility and build a new one in its place. The cost, they said, could reach $60 million.
Gregory Gray is familiar with crisis management.
Ten minutes on the job of leading a three-campus community college system just outside Los Angeles, his phone rang with an emergency message from the vice chancellor.
“We have to cut $16.5 million from our budget this week,” Gray recalled of the conversation. He was told he would need to shrink his budget by 8 percent.
“And I have been involved in that type of budget problem almost every day since that time.”
Gray is about to step into another storm in Connecticut come July 1 when he becomes the president of the state’s largest college system.
State officials trying to close a last-minute hole in the next budget got some good news Wednesday in the form of major savings in health care costs for retired state employees.
Budget analysts now expect the cost of providing health care to the retirees to drop by $307 million in the next two fiscal years.
With shrinking revenues complicating state budget talks, anti-smoking advocates pitched a nearly 30 percent hike in the cigarette tax Wednesday as an increase most voters would welcome.
Key state officials responded warily to the 95-cents-per-pack hike proposal, and Connecticut’s grocery stores argued it would harm retail sales in a vulnerable economy.
The dentists who run the annual Connecticut Mission of Mercy try to give each part of the state a chance to host the massive free dental clinic. There’s need, after all, in every town.
But logistical problems have kept them from having a clinic in Southeastern Connecticut. So as they plan for a 120-chair clinic in Bridgeport next month, organizers are also planning to branch out to smaller clinics in New London and other parts of the state where a major clinic isn't feasible.
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'Connecticut's budget deficit, and why you should be worried' by Mirror budget reporter Keith Phaneuf
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Mass shootings in the U.S.
Since 1949, there have been 67. The Mirror's interactive map provides historical detail to the violence and is regularly updated to reflect the most recent mass shootings.