And Those Who Don't Comply Will Be Fined

Scott: What is up? It is Thursday, April 2. I am Scott Evans and Channel One News starts right now.

Time to take a look at what's making headlines, and first up we head to California where for the first time residents are being ordered to slash their water use.

California Governor Jerry brown issued the unprecedented mandatory water restrictions for the entire state yesterday. And it comes as California is facing a horrible drought that is now in its fourth year.
Adding to the problem was a California winter with record low snow record levels.
The executive order, which comes from the governor’s office, directs the State Water Resources Control Board to reduce water use by 25 percent. And it would impose cutbacks across the board, including homeowners, farmers, cemeteries and golf courses.

And those who don't comply will be fined.

Next up, we head to Atlanta, Georgia where educators were found guilty in one of the biggest cheating scandals involving standardized testing in U.S. history.

Eleven educators, including teachers and a principal, were found guilty yesterday of charges ranging from racketeering to theft and making false statements. Others involved in the scandal already made a plea deal with the courts.
The scandal was so big that nearly 180 educators were involved. They were accused of erasing wrong student answers on standardized tests and then filling in the right ones.
Police say some teachers said they were pressured to show fake progress at troubled schoolsso they could get more federal funding.But prosecutors say some educators also did it for personal gain, earning bonuses.

Alright coming up, you may have heard the phrase Fair Trade, but what does it have to do with college sweatshirts. We will explain.

We are continuing our celebration of 25 years of Channel One News, and today we take a look back at what’s called Fair Trade. Now, that's a movement that has a goal of helping poorer countries better pay the employees that make what we buyhere in the U.S.

Now, former reporter Adriana Diaz found one company and one university who are making it work.
Adriana: Duke University's school store has all the basics, hoodies, tees, and lots of school pride.
But there's one thing they have in stock that might surprise you- messages from the factory workers who made the gear on the shelves.
Girl: “These clothes have changed my family's life. I hope you enjoy wearing them,” she says. Wow that's pretty cool.
Adriana: The workers are from the Alta Gracia clothing factory in the Dominican Republic, a Spanish-speaking country that shares an island with Haiti.
All these clothes have the Alta Gracia label that tells shoppers about the people they are supporting by buying these clothes.
Brittany Moss:I personally would go for cheaper clothes, or “oh I have the best deal.” But then to look at this and go, well it’s only a few extra dollars to me and it's a whole change of life for them. That's a big deal.

Adriana: So why are these clothes life-changing? Well, I went to the Dominican Republic to find out.
I met Maritza Vargas at the Alta Gracia factory, which makes clothes for more than 350 U.S. colleges. She makes a living making college t-shirts that eventually get taggedwith her picture.

Adriana: How does it make you feel that your picture is on all the t-shirts and clothes that get sold?

Vargas: I feellike I was Jennifer Lopez, totally famous.
Adriana: How has your life changed since you started working here at Alta Gracia?

Vargas: Well my life has changed very drastically. I’m better able to feed my children. My son can go to university. He had to stop studying until I was able to work to send him to college.
Adriana: That's because the Alta Gracia factory is trying something new; paying workers what's called a living wage. So what workers earn is based on the amount of money they actually needs to support a family.
Vargas: Now I can buy cheese, butter, condiments, ketchup, mayonnaise which my kids like but we didn't have.
Adriana: So before you didn't have ketchup in your house?

Vargas: No we didn't have ketchup in my house. Having ketchup was like reaching for the stars.
Adriana: Maritza's living wage is based on a calculation made by the Worker Rights Consortium, a non-profit group that helps workers around the world.
Sarah Adler-Milstein: We go through all of the basic categories. So food and nutrition for their family, housing- so beds and sheets and towels, education, health care; whatever you can imagine that you need in order to make ends meet in a normal month, that's included in the living wage.
Adriana: That amount is $2.83 an hour in the Dominican Republic, more than three times the minimum wage or the amount required by law which is 85 cents.
It is that low minimum wage that attracts companies from other countries because it is cheap to make their products here. But it can also attract sweatshop operations,where people work long hours in poor conditions and where companies don't pay minimum wage or obey labor laws.
Something Alta Gracia's trying to change.
Milstein: This is the first time in the apparel industry where workers are being compensatedwith salaries that are enough for them really to get by.

Adriana: It has helped Maritza,who made minimum wage at her old factory job. And she says it just wasn't enough to pay the bills.
Vargas: I was thinking of separating the family, stop renting our house, to be able to paylittle by little what I owned.
Adriana: This is the two bedroom house Maritza almost lost, a tight squeeze for her family of five.
Vargas: This is where my kids sleep. This is where we bathe. There's no water at the moment because the waters cut, sometimes it gets cut and then it comes back.
Adriana: But now that Maritza's salary has tripled at Alta Gracia, she says everything has changed. Her son is back in school, and after class he can be seen on the family's new computer, something they could never afford before.
Do you have Facebook?
Boy: Yes. Yes. I like to chat on Facebook.
Adriana: And her son will soon be updating his Facebook status from somewhere else because the family's moving into the house of their dreams.
Vargas: We are going up to my new house! I am going to live like a rich person!
This is going to be my sons' room. Here they're going to have privacy.This is their own bathroom that's in perfect condition.And here I'm going to have a terrace.

This is all amazing. In the other place right now there isn't water to bathe, but here we have water. Now that problem is solved.
Adriana: Maritza says this is all possible because of the people who buy Alta Gracia's products on U.S. campuses.

Vargas: It’s in their hands that we are able to continue to send our kids to school, so they can be professionals and make it out of the poverty that we're all in.

Scott: Great story.

Alright coming up, we take a look at a mystery that’s washing up on the shores ofthe West Coast.

Over the past few months, starving sea lions have mysteriously been washing up along the shores of California. Arielle Hixson gives us a closer look at the big rescue effort underway.

Arielle: Beaches on the Channel Islands off Southern California are crowded with female sea lions and their pups. But in the ocean where the mothers hunt for food, fish are hard to find. So now, mothers are travelling further to find food and leaving their pups behind.
Theyare showing up thin and hungry, stranded on beaches all along the coast at a rate some 20 times greater than in a normal year.
At the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito about 200 pups are being nursed back to health.
Dr. Claire Simeone is a veterinarian.
Claire Simeone: They come into us about 20 pounds, some of them a little bit less, some of them more. They should be closer to 60 or 70 pounds
Arielle: They arrive suffering from pneumonia, parasites and infections. And they are so weak they have to be fed through tubes.
Simeone: We're feeding them as quickly as we can, but some animals don't make it. We've seen about a 60 percent success rate so far.
Arielle: Scientists believe the unusually warm weathers in the Pacific drive away the sardines and anchovies that sea lions usually eat. This is because the fish move out to deeper waters in the ocean where the water isn’t so warm.
Shawn Johnson: We have some of the highest water temperatures ever recorded off the California coast here.

Arielle: At the Marine Mammal Center they're going through about a thousand pounds of fish a day. Once the young sea lions are well enough to eat normally they are on their way to be returned to the wild.

Eventually they will be released into colder waters in Northern California, where fish should be easier to find.
Arielle Hixson, Channel One News.

Scott: And for more on the sea lion crisis and how you can help, head on over to Channelone.com.
Well, that’s going to do it for us. Have an awesome weekend, and we will see you on Monday.

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