Washington launches four different investigations into IRS scandal

Capitol Hill aides spent their Memorial Day weekend scanning hundreds of pages of documents related to the IRS scandal in order to prepare their bosses for what will inevitably be a frantic month of June involving multiple simultaneous investigations into government wrongdoing. By the time lawmakers return to session next week, at least four different investigations will be underway.

As The Daily Caller has reported, at least five different IRS offices including Cincinnati, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois and El Monte and Laguna Niguel, California improperly targeted conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny between 2010 and 2012.

The IRS’ shenanigans, chronicled in a damning report by Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George, started when a “team of [IRS] specialists” came together in April 2010 to process the tax-exempt nonprofit status of conservative groups that might be “potential political operations” (page 13 of the IG report). The IRS added “additional specialists” to this effort in December 2011. Read more >>

U.S. poverty at levels not seen since 60s

The U.S. Census Bureau puts the number of Americans in poverty at levels not seen since the mid-1960s when President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the federal government's so-called War on Poverty. As President Barack Obama began his second term in January, nearly 50 million Americans — one in six — were living below the income line that defines poverty, according to the bureau.

A family of four that earns less than $23,021 a year is listed as living in poverty. The bureau said 20 percent of the country's children are poor.
Although it is far from the country's poorest city, Baltimore's poverty rate far outstrips the national average of one in six.

Catholic Charities of Baltimore is a conduit for state and federal money for programs designed to help the poor. The charity plays a major role in administering Head Start, a federal program that provides educational services for low-income pre-school children and frees single mothers to find work without the huge expense of childcare.

The spending cuts, known as the sequester, are going to hit Head Start especially hard.
"Before the sequester only half of the need was being met. Now, after the cuts fully take effect, there will be 900 children already in the program who won't be able to take part," said William McCarthy, executive director of Catholic Charities. Read more >>

Public Buses Across Country Quietly Adding Microphones to Record Passenger Conversations

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

The use of the equipment raises serious questions about eavesdropping without a warrant, particularly since recordings of passengers could be obtained and used by law enforcement agencies.

It also raises questions about security, since the IP audio-video systems can be accessed remotely via a built-in web server (.pdf), and can be combined with GPS data to track the movement of buses and passengers throughout the city. Read more >>

Abandoned Homes Plague US Cities

Some local governments hardest hit by population losses are struggling with what has been left behind: large numbers of abandoned housing units. Census figures released Thursday underscore the problem: In places racked by foreclosure, job loss and a weak economy, housing units haven't fallen as fast as population.

A handful of cities such as Detroit have demolished thousands of housing units over the past few years. Many others — such as Baltimore, where city officials said as many as 10,000 empty buildings need to come down — have seen levels remain flat. Although an eighth of the nation's 800 largest counties have lost population since 2005, fewer than half those have seen declines in housing stock.

"The principal impediment is the cost," said Michael Braverman, deputy commissioner of code enforcement for Baltimore Housing, which tears down 200 to 300 buildings a year.  Read more >>

Massive Fish Die-off in Baltimore Waters

Timothy B. Wheeler
The Baltimore Sun
Something's rotten on the Baltimore area waterfront. Fish are washing ashore by the thousands in a mass die-off that officials say appears to be caused by a weather-driven worsening of the pollution that chronically plagues the Chesapeake Bay.

State investigators expanded their probe Wednesday into what they believe are algae-related fish kills in Marley, Furnace and Curtis creeks in Glen Burnie, raising the estimated death toll there tenfold, while finding a new batch of finny carcasses in a Dundalk creek.

Workplace Suicides Skyrocket

Workplace suicides rose 28 percent in 2008 from the year before according to the U.S. Labor Department reports. And according to a December 2008 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, white people age 40 to 64 have "recently emerged as a new high-risk group for suicide."

Susan Baker, M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, told CNN the reason for the increase is unknown. But if economic conditions continue to decline, suicides could go up. "This is a concern, especially when one looks at the high rates during the Great Depression," says Baker.

Seetal Dodd, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has found that suicide rates tend to fluctuate with the economic trends -- at least in men. The study is cause for concern, Dodd says, because it identifies middle-aged white men as the new high-risk group for suicide -- the same section of the population at risk for suicide during an economic downturn.

"There is a considerable risk that the current economic situation may result in a further spike in the suicide rate for men of working age, especially if we start to see an increase in unemployment and a decrease in housing affordability and consumer sentiment," Dodd says.

"We ordinarily experience much, much higher rates of suicide during times of recession," says M. Harvey Brenner, professor of public health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Brenner adds that what makes this recession different is that the very wealthy -- who are generally insulated from financial worries -- have taken a huge hit, and they have further to fall.

"You would think these people have such wonderful lives," says Brenner, full of private jets, luxury homes and the best of anything that money can buy. "Yet they are capable of losing much more, because they have so much more."

According to Alpha Galileo, a research news publication, investigators at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Oxford University estimated that soaring stress brought on by job losses could prompt a rise in suicide rates in people under-64 years of age, a rise in heart attack deaths in men between 30 and 44 years, and a rise in homicides rates, corresponding to thousands of deaths in European Union countries, such as the UK.

Professor Martin McKee, one of the report's authors noted that "Suicides are just the tip of the iceberg - rising suicide rates are a sign of many failed suicide attempts and high levels of mental distress among workers and families."