Agencies

A Hunt Valley environmental service company has signed agreements with two Chinese environmental agencies that could lead to nationwide projects in China.Officials of EA Engineering, Science and Technology Inc., who are part of a Maryland delegation in China this week, signed an agreement on Tuesday with the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, a division of the National Environmental Protection Agency.Today, EA is scheduled to sign an agreement with Anhui Institute of Environmental Science, a research and regulatory agency in Anhui Province.

ANNAPOLIS -- Maryland agency heads have a new set of marching orders: Get wired.Gov. Parris N. Glendening told department heads at a July 13 Cabinet meeting that they have until December to create "home pages" -- chock-full of useful information -- on the Internet's World Wide Web.Those home pages, on-screen directories that guide computer users to other information, would in turn be posted on the state's new home page, which went on line about two weeks...

Agencies that offer the bare necessities of food and warm shelter -- or help people keep them -- can get federal money allocated to Carroll County.But the agencies must apply for it by Dec. 31.Only Carroll County Food Sunday, a food bank, has applied for part of the $22,372 in Federal Emergency Management Agency grant for Carroll County.The federal government has provided the grant to the county for the past four years, and this year's grant came with a 9 percent increase, said Kelly Parrish, assistant director for Human Services Programs of Carroll County Inc."

One on One is a weekly feature offering excerpts of interviews conducted by The Evening Sun with newsworthy business leaders. John Hardwicke is chief administrative law judge of the new Office of Administrative Hearings, which was formed last year to try to resolve disputes between state agencies and citizens and businesses.Q.What are the most common disputes that businesses would have with government agencies?A. Probably in the area of the environment and natural resources. Those would almost always involve businesses, whether it's a gasoline station with a buried tank that's leaking gasoline or oil into the subterranean strata of Maryland or whether it's an environmental pollution matter involving a little business or a big business.

Cutting 3 to 5 percent from multimillion-dollar budgets may seem like a simple task to people trying to stretch a paycheck to the end of the month.But, for the state departments that provide most of Maryland's human services, the reality of federal regulations and the threat of lawsuits gave agency heads little room to maneuver in cutting their budgets.The decisions made over the past two months within the Departments of Human Resources and Juvenile Services would have confounded Solomon.

FEWER THAN two-thirds of federal agencies are complying with new diversity guidelines that require them to file annual reports on barriers to minority hiring and promotions, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Thursday. EEOC spokesman David B. Grinberg said about 60 percent of federal agencies have filed the first report, which was due in January. He declined to provide a list of the agencies that failed to do so. Grinberg said the EEOC plans to publish the list in its annual report, scheduled for release by the end of May. "These are new rules, and it may take longer for some agencies to meet our deadlines," he said.

WASHINGTON -- The long list of federal government failings in the face of Hurricane Katrina is well-documented. Now the nation's top auditor is praising a few agencies that he says were up to the challenge. In addition to the Coast Guard, which has been widely lauded for its daring helicopter rescues of more than 12,000 flood victims in New Orleans, Comptroller General David Walker commended other federal agencies whose efforts weren't the stuff of Hollywood action films, but filled critical needs nonetheless.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration expanded an inquiry yesterday into the propriety and safety of human radiation experimentation conducted by the government in the decades after World War II.Following the lead of the Department of Energy, which began three weeks ago to comb its archives for records on the experiments, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said yesterday they...

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department, advising federal agencies on the fate of scores of federal affirmative actionprograms, raised the prospect yesterday that many of those plans could not now survive a constitutional challenge.A 37-page memo was sent to the top legal officers of all government departments and commissions. It is the first "preliminary" attempt by the government to assess the effects of the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 ruling that national programs based on race must satisfy the toughest constitutional test, or cease to exist.