Connecticut businesses will pay less for workers’ compensation insurance next year, with the state again reducing premiums paid by private employers, which regulators say reflects an ongoing decline in claims.
The Connecticut Insurance Department has approved an annual workers’ compensation rate filing for 2024 with a decrease of 9.8% in voluntary market loss costs and a decrease of 10.5% in assigned risk plan rates.
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Connecticut’s revenues are down about $460 million, according to a new report, which says the state’s financial outlook remains positive despite a drop in tax collections.
The consensus revenue forecast, released by the Office of Policy and Management and Office of Fiscal Analysis on Monday, shows the state is likely to close out the fiscal year more than $630 million above initial budget projections. That’s still a surplus but well below the $1.1 billion projections when the budget was approved in June.
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Two students said Yale University barred them from an “anti-Israel” event this week, prompting them to listen through the door to “two hours of denial, lies and incitement” against Jews like themselves.
Sahar Tartak, a sophomore, said in a post on X that she believes her school “has become a campus without care for its Jews.”
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A coalition of 19 attorneys general filed an amicus brief in support of a local Maryland board of education’s policy that does not allow parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ inclusive texts. The lawsuit was filed by three families against the Montgomery County Board of Education, with two of the three families suing on behalf of policies for their second grade children, while the third did not list the grade level of its elementary school children. The parents, who are Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox, filed their lawsuit on religious freedom grounds.
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Boston Children’s Hospital was reimbursed $1.4 million by the state of Massachusetts for its “gender transition services” from January 2015 to May 2023, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a public records request.
Boston Children’s Hospital, which claims to have created the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program in the country, was hit with heavy backlash in 2022 for performing gender transition surgeries on minors, including vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction and breast augmentation, according to a since-deleted website. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts told the DCNF on July 25 that it paid the hospital over $1.4 million for “Gender transition services (i.e., physician’s services, inpatient and outpatient, hospital services, surgical services, prescribed drugs, therapies, etc.)” from January 1, 2015, to May 1, 2023.
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Critics of a Connecticut law banning religious exemptions from school vaccination requirements have lost several rounds in federal court but are planning to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case.
A lawsuit, filed by We the Patriots USA Inc. on behalf of parents whose children attend a school at Milford Christian Church, argued that Connecticut violated their First Amendment rights by repealing the state’s long-held religious exemptions to childhood vaccines.
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A group of Democratic senators are calling on President Joe Biden to provide more funding for fuel assistance with winter approaching.
In a letter to Biden administration officials, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, led by nearly 30 other Democrats, urged the White House Office of Management and Budget and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to “take additional steps” to reduce energy costs for Americans through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
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Connecticut’s consumer advocates are pushing back against natural gas rate increases sought by one of the state’s largest utilities, which comes as the company fights state regulators’ rejection of an electric rate hike in court.
In filings to the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Southern Connecticut Natural Gas and Connecticut Natural Gas request approval to increase their average gas distribution rates by 5-9% during the winter season.
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A group of Yale doctors and other healthcare researchers recently published a small study that stated there is “anti-Asian racism” in medical school programs and concluded that Asian students are “invisible.”
However, the researchers who conducted the study rejected the idea that a small sample size and biased sampling methods made the study inapplicable.
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New York Judge Arthur Engoron, a registered Democrat, granted summary judgment against Donald Trump last week in a case alleging real estate fraud by the former president. Not waiting for the trial to begin, where evidence would be produced, experts would testify, and discovery would conclude, Engoron revoked the licenses for Trump’s key properties, including Trump Tower and the Trump International Hotel, and set up a fast timeline to dissolve the Trump Organization and its connected entities. Engoron said Trump and his associates inflated the values of his properties, but several legal experts disagreed.
Viva Frei, a lawyer who hosts a show with fellow lawyer Robert Barnes called Sidebar, broke down his assessment of the case with Barnes in an 18-minute video on Monday. “It would seem that the REAL fraud is coming from the Court and from the corrupt Attorney General,” he said. “A breakdown of the absurdity coming out of New York from last night’s stream.”
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Connecticut is one of the last states in the nation to hold a presidential primary, but that would change under a proposal awaiting action by Gov. Ned Lamont.
A proposal approved by the state Legislature last week during a special session would change the presidential primary date to the first Tuesday in April, which in the next nominating cycle would be April 2. Under the current law, the primary is held on the last Tuesday, which would be April 30. Lamont, who backs the move, is expected to sign the bill into law.
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Connecticut will spend $25 million to replace its aging voting machines ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Gov. Ned Lamont said the State Bond Commission will vote at its Oct. 6 meeting to approve the borrowing to purchase new ballot-counting tabulators for use in elections and primaries statewide. He said the current voting machines are over 17 years old and approaching the end of their useful life.
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Wednesday evening’s chaotic GOP presidential primary debate at times felt more like an episode of “Jersey Shore” than a showcase of the best and brightest minds in conservative politics.
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Connecticut lawmakers are calling for an investigation and changes in state election laws following allegations of absentee ballot fraud in a mayoral election.
Following the Sept. 12 primary, John Gomes, a Democrat who challenged incumbent Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, released video footage showing a woman depositing absentee ballots into a dropbox a week before the election. Gomes lost to Ganim by 251 mail-in or absentee votes despite beating him at the polls, according to the election results.
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If Wednesday’s second GOP presidential primary debate proves to be anything like the first, we’re in for a night of political punches and maybe a rhetorical gang fight or two as the candidates look to score points in another Trump-less bout.
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Wages will rise for hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers in Connecticut next year under a 2019 law that pegs the state’s minimum wage to the federal employment index.
Beginning Jan. 1, Connecticut’s wage floor will rise from $15.00 per hour to $15.69 per hour as a result of the state’s first-ever economic indicator adjustment.
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A former Yale student who was acquitted of rape in 2018, and later kicked out of the college, can sue his accuser for defamation over statements the accuser made during a school hearing, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in June, according to the New York Post.
Saifullah Khan sued Yale in 2019 for $110 million, and has been attempting to bring his accuser into the lawsuit, according to the Post. The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled ruled that he can sue the accuser, and that she shouldn’t received “qualified immunity,” which prevents people from being sued over statements in judicial cases, from her testimony that Khan raped her in 2015.
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Wages will rise for hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers in Connecticut next year under a 2019 law that pegs the state’s minimum wage to the federal employment index.
Beginning Jan. 1, Connecticut’s wage floor will rise from $15.00 per hour to $15.69 per hour as a result of the state’s first-ever economic indicator adjustment.
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The cost of health insurance plans offered through Connecticut’s Affordable Care Act Exchange will increase next year by nearly double digits, state insurance regulators said.
The Connecticut Insurance Department has approved a 9.4% proposed rate increase for health insurers for plans available on and off Access Health CT, the state’s health insurance exchange.
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The group responsible for the nationwide overturning of affirmative action has dropped its lawsuit challenging the race-based admissions policies of Yale University.
According to Politico, Students for Fair Admissions (SFA) came to an agreement with the Ivy League school in which they would voluntarily drop their lawsuit, in exchange for Yale making several changes to its admissions policies prior to the Fall 2023 undergraduate application season.
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Connecticut taxpayers will be covering some health care costs for thousands of paraeducators as the state seeks to fill workforce shortages in public schools.
A new program rolled out Wednesday by state Comptroller Sean Scanlon includes a one-time $5 million subsidy that will help pay paraeducators’ health insurance bills not covered by local school districts.
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Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is blasting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and “Monster PAC” following a report exposing the political action committee\’s campaign in “spreading dirt” and “misstatements” about the poll-rising Ramaswamy.
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Yale University is seeking a “Global Black and African Diaspora Studies“ tenured associate professor well-versed in topics such as ”African/diasporic queer and feminist activism” and “transnational feminist and queer studies” to begin July 1, 2024.
“The Program seeks candidates whose research and teaching focus on the formations and lived experiences of Blackness, with emphasis on global, comparative, indigenous, or transnational perspectives drawn from African, Indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern, European, or Latin American and Caribbean contexts,” the job posting by the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Department states.
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Connecticut’s top law enforcement office is being faulted for poor accounting practices that have cost the state millions of dollars in unretrievable debt and allowing unauthorized overtime that tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report by the state Auditors of Public Accounts, released Wednesday, found that an estimated $10 million owed to the AG’s office and other state agencies from court settlements and other receivables is “unrecoverable” and cited decades of lax accounting practices for the loss of revenue to state coffers.
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As expected, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took some big swings at GOP presidential front-runner and former president Donald Trump Wednesday night at the first debate of the 2024 primary season.
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For those who thought a Trump-less GOP presidential primary debate was doomed to be a snooze fest, the two-hour political bar brawl disabused them of that notion.
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LGBTQ activists are seeking to ensure Massachusetts public schools are celebrating their agenda’s events throughout the academic year, Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) warns parents.
“Sex on the school calendar has become commonplace all over the nation,” a downloadable document from MFI states.
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The union representing Connecticut state troopers has taken a vote of “no confidence” in the police agency’s leadership, citing their response to the controversy over a phony ticket scandal.
The union spells out its grievances in a scathing letter to State Police Commissioner James Rovella and Deputy Commissioner Colonel Stavros Mellekas, accusing them of fostering “an environment of mistrust” in the agency and that has “failed to protect their Troopers” and of making decisions “based on self-preservation.”
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Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has overtaken Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in another national Republican primary poll.
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What a wild weekend in Iowa.
The presidential candidates who turned out for the Iowa State Fair came close to outnumbering the selections of food on a stick at the Iowa State Fair.
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Connecticut has banned the harvesting of horseshoe crabs along its coastline amid concerns about the ecological health of the species, which is prized for its life-saving blue blood.
The ban, approved by the state Legislature, outlaws horseshoe crab hand harvesting beginning on October 1. Anyone caught violating the law faces a $25 fine for each crab harvested. There are exemptions for scientific and medical purposes if it is determined that doing so will not harm the overall horseshoe crab population.
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Connecticut is tapping into federal funding to provide hundreds of thousands of public school students with free breakfast and lunch.
The state Department of Education announced that $16 million of funding the state received from the American Rescue Plan Act will be diverted to Connecticut’s free school meals program for the 2023-2024 school year, allowing students to get free meals regardless of their family’s income.
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A federal appeals court has upheld a 2021 Connecticut law banning religious exemptions for immunization requirements for schools, colleges and early education, but critics of the restrictions are vowing to take their case to the Supreme Court.
In the 2-1 ruling issued on Friday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit challenging the repeal of the state’s long-held religious exemptions to childhood vaccines.
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Fourteen state attorneys general asked the Biden Administration to do more to “combat the plastic pollution crisis.”
An Aug. 3 media release, the group stated, “Plastic does not fully degrade, instead breaking down into smaller pieces called microplastics, which have been found in drinking water, food, air, and even human blood and living lung tissue.”
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Washington state’s attorney general is among 20 attorneys general to have filed legal arguments in a federal lawsuit challenging Idaho’s law that makes it illegal to either obtain abortion pills for a minor or to help them leave the state for an abortion without their parents’ knowledge and consent.
In a Tuesday news release, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said the collective states’ amicus brief is in support of a lawsuit filed last month in U.S. District Court against Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador. The plaintiffs allege that Labrador’s interpretation of the law threatens to punish medical providers and residents outside Idaho’s borders for giving information and assistance to minors about legal abortion access in their states.
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Connecticut will join a handful of states in banning the sale of new fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035, but critics say the dramatic shift to electric vehicles will be costly for consumers and could impact energy supplies.
On Wednesday, second-term Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont rolled out new regulations that will require car manufacturers to ramp up sales of electric vehicles in Connecticut leading to a ban on the sale of new fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035.
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Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has tapped a former federal prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation of allegations that state police may have issued hundreds of “fake” tickets.
Lamont said he has hired former U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly to investigate allegations outlined in a recent audit by a taxpayer-funded group that reviews police records to look for racial bias in law enforcement activities. Lamont said the inquiry seeks to determine “how and why the misconduct occurred” and why it went undetected for years.
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Federalist Society Co-Chairman Leonard Leo, who served as an advisor in the selection process of former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees, has been targeted in his home town in Maine by what a prominent Catholic leader calls “anti-Catholic bigots” in the wake of recent rulings by the High Court.
Activists have been protesting at Leo’s home in Northeast Harbor, tying him to Supreme Court rulings with which they disagree.
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Connecticut utility regulators have rejected a proposed rate increase by one of the state’s largest utilities, which was seeking another $130 million from energy consumers.
The state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority turned down a request from United Illuminating to increase electric rates by nearly $131 million over the next three years. Instead, the agency approved a rate increase of just over $2 million for next year, which is still subject to final approval by the PURA board.
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A radical Massachusetts bill that would end nearly all restrictions on abortion in the state would also allow girls of any age to “consent” to an abortion without informing parents or requiring their consent.
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After Democrats threatened to censor him during last week’s House committee hearing on censorship, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to hold a “Roundtable on Censorship” next month.
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Maine Governor Janet Mills (D) signed a bill into law Wednesday that expanded access to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, making the state one of the least restrictive in the nation when it comes to ending the lives of unborn babies.
LD 1619, dubbed “An Act to Improve Maine’s Reproductive Privacy Laws,” states an abortion may be performed “after viability,” i.e. when the unborn baby can survive independently outside his or her mother’s womb, “when the abortion is necessary in the professional judgment of a licensed physician.”
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Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont (D) signed into law a series of bills Wednesday that seeks to protect abortion rights and access to both contraception and college students’ transgender drugs and surgeries.
In an official statement, Lamont also noted the new Connecticut laws counter those in Republican-led states that have sought to protect unborn life from abortion, and teens from life-altering transgender drugs and surgeries.
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A federal judge has tossed a challenge to a Connecticut law banning firearms in state parks, saying the lawsuit lacks standing because the regulation isn’t enforced.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Janet Bond Arterton, issued on Wednesday, upholds a more than a century-old Connecticut law prohibiting lawfully licensed firearm owners from packing in state parks and wildlife preserves.
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Maine Governor Janet Mills (D) signed into law legislation this week that eliminates the requirement of parental consent for 16-17-year-old minors to be provided cross-sex hormones to change their physical appearance to correspond to their gender identity at a given point in time.
L.D. 535, titled an Act Regarding Consent for Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy for Certain Minors, states “a health care professional may provide gender-affirming hormone therapy and follow-up care to a minor without obtaining the consent of the parent or guardian of the minor,” with the requirements being that the minor is at least 16 years old; has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria; has been judged by a healthcare professional to be experiencing “harm” from not obtaining cross-sex hormones; and the minor’s parents do not support the hormone treatment.
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A former Yale University student who beat back rape accusations can sue his accuser for defamation, the State of Connecticut Supreme Court ruled recently.
Saifullah Khan’s lawsuit can proceed after the court ruled on June 27 that the former Yalie, who was expelled, can sue his accuser because the university’s sexual assault proceedings did not resemble actual judicial procedures.
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Former President Donald Trump continues to crush the competition, but political outsider Vivek Ramaswamy is swiftly rising in the crowded field of Republican presidential candidates, according to a new Morning Consult poll.
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Connecticut’s craft beer makers are getting a break on their excise tax bill as part of a broader measure aimed at fostering the brewing industry.
The state’s excise tax on beer dropped by 16.7% beginning on July 1, which lowered the tax on a 31-gallon barrel of beer to $6, from $7.20 previously, and the excise tax on wine from $0.24 to $0.20 per gallon.
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Connecticut is coming up short on revenue from a controversial highway tax on truckers, with the state bringing in less money than expected during the first few months of the new levy.
Figures from the state Department of Revenue Services show the Highway Use Tax generated only $18.6 million from January through April, roughly half of what state budget writers had anticipated.
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Connecticut has joined a handful of states banning utilities from passing on the costs of lobbying the state government to energy consumers.
A new law, tucked into a package of bills signed by Gov. Ned Lamont last week, will prevent large investor-owned utilities from recovering the costs associated with lobbying, as well as legal fees, memberships, dues or contributions to a business or industry trade associations or groups, among other changes.
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