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County Crews Busy Cleaning Up After Storm
Monday, March 5, 2007--City roads around Iowa are improving each day, now the focus has shifted to reconnecting hundreds of rural routes back to civilization. Clearing roads sounds simple enough, but dozens of Iowa's county workers are tackling drifts as high as their trucks. In Greene County, Kevin Bauer has been busy for four days, sun up to sun down. "I've worked at the county now for twenty years, and this is the worst one I've seen," Bauer said. He's cleared twenty snow mountains inside his giant Greene County blower by mid-afternoon, and doesn't expect to finish for a few more days. "We've got some of them that are 14, 15 feet tall," he said. Besides the blower, twelve massive v-plows are also widening roads that look more like narrow snow canyons. Jefferson-Scranton schools remained closed on Monday because officials didn't want students to navigate the now-single lane roads.
Haringey hits back at child protection whistle-blower
Haringey Council has launched a counter-offensive against a senior social worker who won an employment tribunal against it by default last week. Nevres Kemal, who still works for the council successfully sued Haringey for racial discrimination and being disadvantaged as a result of whistle-blowing, because it failed to respond to her claims. .
New measure encourages telling IRS of tax cheats
The Internal Revenue Service estimates that the difference between what Americans owe in federal taxes and what they actually pay every year is about $345 billion annually. To close this huge "tax gap," Congress and President Bush enacted a measure in December designed to give people more motivation to tattle on dishonest employers, employees, co-workers, acquaintances and former spouses. But the enhanced incentives -- higher cash rewards to those who blow the whistle on tax cheats -- will go only to those informants who provide specific, useful information. "Evidence and analysis is what we are looking for rather than hearsay and speculation," said Stephen Whitlock, director of the IRS' new Whistleblower Office. "People who come in with hearsay, speculation and a motive tend to be less reliable.
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