Syrian Churches are vandalized and looted

Dozens of people were killed when Islamist rebels besieged the Christian towns of Saddad and Haffar in Syria. As churches, homes and schools were looted and destroyed, 2,500 families fled, while 3,000 people, including children, were held as a human shield for a week.

Militants from the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front stormed Saddad and Haffar on Monday 21 October shouting “Allahu Akhbar” [“Allah is great”]. They set up sniper posts and launched a campaign of shelling, killing anyone they found in the streets. Children were crying in fear as the militants took over the towns.
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Today, U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Mike Enzi (R-WY), commented on a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report they requested that warns the Obama Administration is failing to provide Congress and the public with timely, meaningful analysis of likely future shortages of health care providers.  The report, HRSA Action Needed to Publish Timely National Supply and Demand Projections, warns that the national supply and demand projections for the health care workforce are currently based on information that is more than a decade old.
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Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) Thursday highlighted a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) entitled, “Security Clearances: Additional Mechanisms May Aid Federal Tax-Debt Detection.”  In the report, GAO found that 8,400 individuals adjudicated as eligible for a clearance were found to owe $85 million in unpaid federal taxes as of June 2012.

“Giving security clearances to individuals that fail to follow the law is unwise and unnecessarily puts our nation’s classified information at risk,” Dr. Coburn said.

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(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a report entitled, “PARKED! How Congress’ Misplaced Priorities are Trashing Our National Treasures.”  The report documents how members of Congress have used the Park Service to advance parochial interests while ignoring billions in maintenance backlog at our nation’s most prized national parks, and outlines areas of low-priority and wasteful spending by the Park Service.
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Rep. James Lankford, Oklahoma

Washington, D.C. – Representative James Lankford (R-OK) announced the introduction of H.R. 3316, the Grant Reform and New Transparency (GRANT) Act of 2013. The bill would direct federal agencies to establish uniform standards for how they notice, award and disclose discretionary competitive grants, which would increase transparency and accountability to American taxpayers during the award process.

“Federal agencies annually award billions in discretionary and competitive grants but have few standards for disclosing the process of awarding the taxpayer-funded projects,” said Lankford. “In some agencies the current process lacks transparency and places an undue burden on grant applicants trying to navigate the system. The nebulous system also makes it difficult for lawmakers to hold agencies accountable for the stewardship and distribution of taxpayer dollars,” concluded Lankford.
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