The committee is holding its third meeting on Monday. The panel is expected to hear from representatives of the state banking and agriculture departments as well as the New England political director for the Marijuana Policy Project.

The flawed paneling on the Denny Sanford Premier Center was the subject of a city settlement with five construction companies in 2015. An earlier forensic report concluded the flawed paneling wasn't worth replacing. But the report was never made public or disclosed to the City Council.

Fearing legal problems, lawmakers quickly passed legislation allowing towns that postponed their elections to ratify the results. In hopes of avoiding future problems, they also created a committee to study who should have the authority to reschedule elections and under what circumstances. That group meets Tuesday and has a deadline of Nov. 1 to make recommendations.

On 7 December, Uppsala University in Sweden released a long-awaited report by its Board for Investigation of Misconduct in Research, which investigated a high-profile paper about the effects of microplastics on fish, published in Science in June 2016. The panel found that the paper's first author, Oona Lönnstedt, committed misconduct by fabricating data in the paper; her lone co-author and supervisor, Peter Eklöv, bears responsibility for the fabrication as well, the board said, but was not guilty of misconduct under the regulations in effect when the paper was published. The investigation, the third and most damning one into case, also found both researchers guilty of misconduct for not obtaining a permit from an ethics review panel for their studies.

A study group at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications held its first meeting Wednesday, where it discussed ways to spur industry competition with the aim of lowering mobile phone fees in the nation.