Tag: California

In case you missed it: The terrifying evaporating mud puddle that was once Lake Mead outside of Las Vegas is a flashing warning sign...

Here maybe, in the climate change era, at the end of 2014, we are seeing news of the beginnings of a different kind of...

“I believe that people who are either transsexuals or transvestites — I don’t know what the proper term is — traditionally are more liberal-minded thinking people, tend to associate more with the defendants because, obviously, they have been either ridiculed before or are feeling in a position of being in a microscope all the time and are outcasts which lends themselves to associating more with the defendant.”

Struggling with an ongoing recession-era budget crisis that has seen hundreds of millions of dollars slashed from public education alone, Colorado lawmakers tried and failed to get mega-online retailer Amazon to pay state sales taxes last year. Amazon successfully dodged similar efforts in other states, but the tax man came calling in cash-strapped California last spring and, after dumping $5 million on a ballot initiative to oppose the new online tax law, Amazon announced on Wednesday it had made a deal with state lawmakers. It will charge sales tax in the Golden State next year. That gives Amazon and other online retailers just months to press federal lawmakers to pass a national law that thins their obligations in the states.

Colorado lawmakers staring down an historic recession budget deficit last year passed legislation requiring Amazon.com to finally begin collecting sales taxes in the state. It didn't go so well. Amazon is still doing business here tax free. A similar battle is waging now in California, only on a greater scale, drawing the eyes of politics and business watchers in Colorado and around the nation. The California case likely won't go as well for Amazon as the Colorado case did. Amazon does huge online business in California and it also has a physical presence in the state, for example in the Silicon Valley warehouse where it develops its Kindle readers. Indeed, the tide seems generally to be turning against the online retailer, which has grown massive over the past two decades, spreading its roots in the fertile ground of a tax-free internet fairyland.

The California Supreme Court Monday unanimously upheld a state law granting in-state tuition rates to undocumented residents who attended high school for at least...

The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal society founded in New Haven in 1881, does a lot of good work detailed in a lengthy report on its charitable giving in 2009. Add to that list a donation of a whopping $1.4 million in 2009 to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a nonprofit group dedicated to fighting same-sex marriage.

Gay marriage advocates may have lost a number of battles at the ballot box this past year, but it appears they’re winning the war....

For tens of thousands of the nation's teachers, it is the start of an endless summer. In the past month, the Los Angeles Unified School District has sent pink slips to 693 employees. The Detroit school system has laid off 1,983 teachers, including Michigan’s 2007 teacher of the year. And Greensboro, N.C., has received national attention for firing or reassigning more than 500 teachers in a district serving just 71,000 students.

Dave Weigel, who tracked the tea party and fringe right intensely for the last year-plus at the Washington Independent, writes at the Washington Post...