Government Contracts and Procurement
Baby Formula Shortage Has an Aggravating Factor: Few Producers
In the early 1990s, the nation’s biggest makers of baby formula were under fire. The three largest manufacturers, which controlled 90 percent of the U.S. market at the time, were hit with waves of state, federal and corporate lawsuits, accusing them of attempting to limit competition and using their control of the industry to fix […]
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Russian Shipping Traffic Remains Strong as Sanctions Take Time to Bite
Data from MarineTraffic, for example, a platform that shows the live location of ships around the world using those on-ship tracking systems, indicates that traffic from Russia’s major ports declined after the invasion but did not plummet. The number of container ships, tankers and bulkers — the three main types of vessels that move energy […]
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When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained
Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network. The tool was used to track supporters of […]
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Biden Adopts Recommendations for Promoting Union Membership
The White House on Monday released a report outlining several dozen steps it intends to take to promote union membership and collective bargaining among both public and private sector employees. The report is the product of a task force that President Biden created through an executive order in April. A White House statement said the […]
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Air Force Taps Clearview AI to Research Face-Identifying A.R. Glasses
The U.S. Air Force is looking into keeping its airfields safer with help from the facial recognition start-up Clearview AI. The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Clearview $49,847 to research augmented reality glasses that could scan faces to help with security on bases. Bryan Ripple, a spokesman for the lab, described the work as a […]
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The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon
The Mexico example revealed both the promise and the perils of working with NSO. In 2017, researchers at Citizen Lab, a watchdog group based at the University of Toronto, reported that authorities in Mexico had used Pegasus to hack the accounts of advocates for a soda tax, as part of a broader campaign aimed at […]
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Beneath a Covid Vaccine Debacle, 30 Years of Government Culpability
At first, it appeared that the agency had attracted two large pharmaceutical firms — Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline — but their involvement proved temporary. The companies already had contracts with the agency to work on vaccines for influenza pandemics. It was a distinct corner of biodefense that attracted major manufacturers because they could use much of […]
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As Workers Gain Pay Leverage, Nonprofits Can’t Keep Up
At Maryhurst, which provides help to children suffering neglect and abuse, the staffing shortage was so severe that the board recently agreed to raise wages for frontline workers, in some cases by as much as 28 percent. But the organization didn’t receive any permanent increase in state funding to pay for those raises, meaning it […]
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$15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30.
Employees of federal contractors will make at least $15 per hour under a final rule that the Labor Department announced Monday, providing a likely wage increase for over 300,000 workers, according to administration estimates. The wage floor will affect contracts that are executed or extended beginning on Jan. 30, 2022. The current minimum wage for […]
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