WASHINGTON–The congressional firefight over a stop-gap funding bill for fiscal year 2012 has immediate implications for Connecticut’s ability to respond to Tropical Storm Irene. But it also puts in jeopardy a small victory that Democrats won in the debt-ceiling deal that Congress passed last month. And if that debt-deal win comes unraveled, it could have […]

An ‘unverified’ license Connecticut launched a campaign today to publicize how to obtain a driver’s license that meets the stricter verification standards of a federal “Real ID” law passed in 2005, but never implemented in face of objections from two dozen states. Beginning Oct. 3, drivers in Connecticut will have two choices when renewing their […]

Social service advocates are urging legislators to commit state money to make up for a potential shortfall in federal funding to help low-income residents to heat their homes this winter, an alternative to a plan by the Malloy administration that would leave to more than 80,000 poor households without the assistance. But Gov. Dannel P. […]

Though just a fraction of the state budget, the $80 million winter heating assistance funding shortfall might not be the last small-ticket item to toss a big wrench in Connecticut’s fiscal machine. With virtually no cushion below the constitutional spending cap, more than $830 million in savings targets that must be hit, the potential for […]

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will be in Hartford on Saturday to tour Coltsville, the industrial neighborhood that the city and congressional delegation have been trying to get designated as a national historic park. He will be joined by U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-1st District, who announced the visit today, and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, Sen. […]

Last night’s execution of Troy Davis, a Georgia man convicted of murdering an off-duty police officer largely on the strength of eyewitness testimony, has renewed a national debate over the accuracy of such witnesses’ identification of suspects, Maggie Clark reports at Stateline.org. The first study questioning the reliability of eyewitness accounts was published more than […]

WASHINGTON–At a Senate hearing on wartime contracting Wednesday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman and ex-Rep. Chris Shays mostly stuck to the dry subject at hand–squandered taxpayer dollars, poor government oversight, and sweeping abuses in military contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But beneath the staid policy discourse, they were unspooling a juicier political thread. As ex-GOP congressman Shays […]

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has signed two executive orders providing a path for child care workers and home care attendants who work in state-funded programs to organize and gain collective bargaining rights. The orders enact scaled-back versions of legislative proposals that did not pass this year and, in the case of home care workers, generated […]

MILFORD–One of the lessons from her failed 2010 U.S. Senate campaign was put into practice on day two of the new 2012 campaign: Linda McMahon mingled Wednesday with real people on real shop floors, trailed by a six-man film crew. A day after announcing her candidacy for U.S. Senate in a factory in Southington, McMahon […]

Despite new legislation aimed at helping the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities streamline its operations, key officials say further action may be necessarily if the agency is to deal with a massive backlog of cases reported this month by auditors. The report from state Auditors John C. Geragosian and Robert M. Ward found […]

WASHINGTON–Dr. Courtland Lewis has been fielding a lot of anxiety-filled queries lately–not from his patients, but from other doctors. The Hartford-based orthopedic surgeon is suddenly one of the state’s go-to experts on federal efforts to revamp how doctors and hospitals are paid for the care they provide. That’s because Lewis and the knee-and-hip replacement surgeons […]