Late last month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch came to the MD Correctional Institute in Jessup to announce that the Obama Administration plans to introduce a pilot program that would allow a limited number of incarcerated people to receive Pell Grants for the college courses they take in prison. Congress banned the use of government grants for prisoners in 1994. The Obama Administration hopes that the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program will be a way of working around that ban to make grants available to some inmates.
Then, Dr. Ruth Faden is the Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Co-Principal Investigator of the Global Food Ethics Project. This is an international team of researchers, ethicists, nutritionists and people who study a wide variety of areas related to food policy, and in particular, the ethical challenges of feeding an ever-growing human population. In 25 years, there may be more than 9.5 billion people inhabiting this planet, and keeping everyone fed with safe, nutritious food will give rise to many thorny ethical issues, as we attempt to produce enough good food to satisfy that incredible need. Dr. Faden’s team has just issued a report called the 7 by 5 Agenda for Ethics and Global Food Security, which suggests seven projects that can be undertaken in the next five years to address the complex issues around global food security.
Also, As a novelist, Laura Lippman keeps a pace like the tempo she set meeting deadlines as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun: Lippman has published 21 novels in 18 years. But there was a curious gap in her signature series, the mysteries built around reporter-turned-private investigator Tess Monaghan. Until last spring, we hadn’t gotten a peek at Tess since 2011, when she was solving a mystery while on bed rest for a difficult pregnancy.Roughly the same time Tess became a mother, Lippman did, too. Sheilah sat down with Lippman last February when she published her 12th Tess Monaghan mystery, called “Hush, Hush”.