Archive
A hurricane hasn't hit Florida on Gov. Rick Scott's watch, but he finds himself trying to guide the state through a more insidious and nearly invisible public health threat.
As Chicago officials continue to try to repair the political damage and distrust sown by past police abuses, disturbing new video emerged Friday that illustrates how much has changed in recent months and how much has not.
Shaun Donovan, President Barack Obama’s budget director, wants to run for mayor of New York City—and one of Michael Bloomberg’s top political hands is putting together a preliminary effort to draft him into the 2017 primary race against incumbent Bill de Blasio.
It was elected officials day Sunday at the Schlitterbahn water park in Kansas City, Kan., and the place teemed with lawmakers and their families, who received free admission and lunch and a day of fun.
Scott Silverthorne built a reputation as a civic pillar of Fairfax City, Va., over three decades, helping bring a park to the affluent suburb’s downtown and championing other improvements during his stints as a City Council member and mayor.
Starting this fall, college students throughout Minnesota will be required to complete training on sexual-assault prevention within their first 10 days of school.
They added the most jobs last month in a year. But employment for the sector is still well below prior levels.
Lawmakers are pouring millions of dollars into making their states a destination for patients around the world. Will their investments pay off?
Washington, D.C., will be the first U.S. city to let a European company test its technology that replaces delivery drivers.
In one of the country's bluest states, a Republican may be the next governor.
New York health officials are on high alert following the Zika outbreak in Florida.
Prosecutors in Virginia won a rare conviction of a white former police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teen suspected of shoplifting.
A longtime Opa-locka manager who oversaw the city's troubled public works department was charged Thursday in the first federal corruption case brought by prosecutors after a three-year FBI investigation into alleged bribery schemes at the highest levels of government.
Backers of ColoradoCare — the state ballot initiative that would establish universal health care in Colorado — think they have the perfect job for former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Stockton Mayor Anthony Silva was booked into jail Thursday on charges stemming from a strip poker game prosecutors said he held with teen counselors at his Mayor's Youth Camp last summer.
Humana is the latest health insurer to significantly pull back its participation selling subsidized individual coverage under the Affordable Care Act, announcing plans to scale back next year to “no more than 156 counties” across 11 states.
A roundup of money (and other) news governments can use.
The state's rare approach is meant to increase child support payments. But some say it will do the opposite.
States are increasingly creating specialized ombudsman offices to cater to citizens' complaints.
Alabama’s lawsuit against the U.S. government concerning the possible relocation of Syrian refugees to Alabama was dismissed July 29 in federal court.
Fed up with what he says is the governor's failure to properly fund his overwhelmed office, the state's lead public defender ordered Gov. Jay Nixon this week to represent a poor person in Cole County this month.
In a 148-page decision, Delaware's Supreme Court has invalidated the state's death penalty law.
Texas struck a deal Wednesday that will soften its voter ID law for the November general election — a development that lawyers suing the state say will make it easier for minorities to cast their ballots.
The Supreme Court intervened for the first time Wednesday in the controversy over transgender rights and blocked a lower court ruling that would have allowed a transgender boy to use the high school restroom that fits his "gender identity."
For seven years, while Nicholas Young patrolled the Washington area’s Metro system as a transit police officer, other law enforcement agents were watching him.
The most important election news and political dynamics at the state and local levels.
According to a new report, some regions are adding high-skill, high-paying jobs, while others are seeing them decline.
Eric Greitens, the Maryland Heights native who turned his service with the elite Navy SEALs into a national brand and, then, into his debut political campaign, emerged from a bruising four-way primary Tuesday as Missouri's Republican nominee for governor.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee will face Republican Bill Bryant in the general election after the favored candidates of both major parties easily outdistanced other candidates in a crowded gubernatorial field.
Gov. David Ige's decision to defer indefinitely almost all major new projects to increase highway capacity and reduce traffic congestion on state roadways is a major policy shift, but Ige says he had little choice.
North Carolina's attorney general won't represent the state in appealing last week's court ruling that overturned a voter ID mandate and other voting restrictions.
Federal health officials, scrambling to fund efforts to combat the spread of the Zika virus in the United States, said on Tuesday they have provided more stopgap money to various locales while calls grew for Congress to cut short its recess and act.
In the priciest markets, some are spending nearly half their income on rent or mortgage. See how your area compares.
William J. Bratton, the city's 42nd police commissioner, said Tuesday he would step down from the department in mid-September to go into private industry, capping a 45-year career in policing which has been innovative and controversial at a time of constant challenges to law enforcement around the country.
Politics can make for strange allies sometimes. Curry Todd and Mark Lovell proved that Tuesday.
Under the direction of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, registered sex offenders in New York are no longer allowed to play the popular app Pokemon Go.
Portland Mayor Charlie Hales reversed course Tuesday on his controversial homeless policy that allowed tent camping and sidewalk sleeping.
Two more health cooperatives have filed lawsuits against the Obama administration over a program in which insurers compensate each other for taking on sicker customers under the Affordable Care Act.
Gov. Charlie Baker has signed into law a bill requiring men and women be paid equally for comparable work in Massachusetts.
In one week, federal courts struck down such laws in four states, marking a significant shift in the legal battle over voting rules.
A volatile stock market over the past year has taken a toll on public pension assets.
When accusations are flying or scandal erupts, it's crucial to get the initial response right.
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca withdrew his guilty plea Monday to a charge of lying during an FBI investigation into the county’s jails, opting instead to take his chances at a high-stakes trial.
With rising public concern about the threat posed by lead pipes connecting thousands of Chicago homes to the public water supply, city officials announced Monday they will begin testing tap water on streets that face greater risks of exposure to the brain-damaging metal.
Cursive education has been, understandably, declining, but advocates say it teaches broader skills and is needed for the reading of original documents.
At stake is a question to voters on the November ballot that would raise the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 75 -- a decision that could alter the partisan makeup of the Keystone State's highest court within the next year.
In 2002, Miami-Dade voters were promised nearly 90 miles of new rail in exchange for accepting a nearly 8 percent increase in the county sales tax. Fourteen years later, that half-percent transit tax has built less than three miles of extra track. Now Miami-Dade leaders may try to revive those 2002 ambitions with a new revenue source: property taxes.
Across the country, a critical shortage of state psychiatric beds is forcing mentally ill patients with severe symptoms to be held in emergency rooms, hospitals and jails while they wait for a bed, sometimes for weeks.
Unwilling to hit property owners for the third time in one year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to raise the city’s utility taxes to save the largest of Chicago’s four city employee pension funds, City Hall sources said Monday.
Federal health authorities on Monday urged pregnant women not to visit a South Florida neighborhood where new cases of the Zika virus have emerged, the first time officials have warned against travel to part of the continental United States due to the outbreak of an infectious disease.
A Mississippi grand jury found on Monday that a white police officer had committed no crime when he fatally shot a black man he had been chasing after the man was pulled over in Tupelo.
A Chicago officer whose police powers were suspended after the officer shot an African-American teenager in the back last week was wearing a body camera, but the device was not operating and did not record the fatal encounter, officials said on Monday.
A federal judge on Monday blocked North Dakota's voter identification law after a group of American Indians said it unfairly burdens them -- the court ruling follows similar ones in North Carolina and Wisconsin this week that charge the laws disproportionately affect minorities.
Texting 911 could be valuable in emergencies like the Orlando shooting or a domestic violence incident, where it is unsafe to make any noise let alone talk out loud about the danger at hand. So far few states and cities have adopted 911 texting, but that will change over the next several years, as utility companies abandon old copper phone lines for fiber optic cables.
The new state law allowing guns inside college buildings went into effect Monday. Here’s a rundown of what that means for people on campus.
Federal, state and local public health officials are working together to investigate the current outbreak, which is estimated to have begun in February, with most cases in the past two months.
Schools, cities, state agencies and other public employers across Oregon will have to pony up an extra $885 million next biennium to fund the state's public pension system. That's about 10 percent higher than previously forecast and a 44 percent increase from the $2 billion per biennium that public employers are currently paying to support the system.
Early education across the United States is a mishmash of day care, Head Start and preschool programs with a wide range of quality and effectiveness. But a federally sponsored program in 20 states has been effective at giving those states a way to assess and quantify early-childhood education options and make that information available to parents, educators and legislators, according to a study the U.S. Education Department plans to release Monday.
From ballot boxes to the governors’ desks in Oregon and Washington, a corner of the nation that seemed poised only a few years ago to become a new energy hub is now gripped by a debate over whether transporting volatile, hazardous crude oil by rail through cities and environmentally delicate areas can ever be made safe enough.
Since the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling in the voting-rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, critics argue, the blatant efforts to keep minorities from voting have been supplanted by a blizzard of more subtle changes.
At the 11th hour, House and Senate lawmakers reached a deal on rules governing ride-for-hire services like Uber and Lyft. The final product calls for a state-run driver background check and establishing a 20-cent-per-ride fee on the companies.
Medicaid has become the safety net for millions of people who find themselves unable to pay for nursing home beds or in-home caregivers. Medicaid was never intended to cover long-term care for everyone. Now it pays for nearly 40 percent of the nation’s long-term care expenses, and the share is growing.
Finding that Republican lawmakers had discriminated against minorities, a federal judge Friday struck down parts of Wisconsin's voter ID law. The ruling came the same day a federal appeals court struck down numerous voting laws in North Carolina and a week after a different appeals court ruled a photo ID law in Texas violates voters' rights.
A new state law governing paid employee sick leave has prompted a lawsuit by more than 30 state legislators and members of several city councils across Arizona that had been debating such ordinances when Gov. Doug Ducey warned in January that cities adopting employment ordinances would lose state shared revenue.
Federal appellate judges on Friday struck down a 2013 law limiting voting options and requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls, declaring in an unsparing opinion that the restrictions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
After Congress left cities to fend for themselves, four new cases -- possibly the first to be contracted by mosquitoes in the U.S. -- suggest how difficult it is for them to combat the virus on their own.
A prosecutor in Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane's looming criminal trial told a judge Tuesday that Kane's request to tell a jury about her unearthing of offensive emails would mire jurors in "a distraction, a red herring."
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the city of Austin in Travis County district court, trying to force the city to comply with his reading of the state's open carry law and allow license holders to openly carry handguns in city hall.
Just a day after beleaguered City Manager David Chiverton stunned elected leaders by resigning his office in the course of a federal criminal investigation, Opa-locka officials announced they were close to broke and would not be able to pay their workers -- including police officers -- come September.
The six officers charged in Freddie Gray's arrest and death have been assigned to paid administrative duties until the completion of internal affairs reviews that will determine whether they should be fired or disciplined.
Boston police hired fewer than 10 percent of minority applicants who took the Civil Service exam to become a patrol officer and join the most recent class of recruits, according to data obtained by the Herald.
A drug used to sedate elephants and other large animals, 100 times as potent as the fentanyl already escalating the country's heroin troubles, is suspected in spates of overdoses in several states, where authorities say they've found it mixed with or passed off as heroin.
As the world's second-largest economy falters, pensions and tax revenues here are feeling the pinch.
America's largest state park is a battleground between conservation activists and small towns desperate for development.
Tax incentives aren't always the best way to lure businesses. Many are simply going where the talent is.
Boulder County, Colo., pioneered the movement. What can others learn from their experience?
The inability of most rural places to recover from the economic downturn is fueling political and social problems around the nation.
Officials in Maryland's Montgomery County gave unionized workers — and themselves — big raises. Now they can't afford them.
Frontier Town was the lifeblood of North Hudson, N.Y.'s economy. Now, like much of the town, it's empty.
In a small but growing number of states, expectant inmates are getting help dealing with the trauma of giving birth and then having to say goodbye.
Palo Alto’s city manager wants governments to rip up the IT rule book to make better investments.
Chicago and many other municipalities are focusing on reforming the rigid and inconsistent rules of procurement.
Several factors are behind the drastic differences in funding.
Republicans have been losing the key demographics’ support since 2000. Democrats hope Donald Trump will keep that trend going.
Chris Sununu's rivals for the Republican nomination for governor assailed his vote for a Planned Parenthood contract, in one of a few heated exchanges during a debate Wednesday.
The clock hit 2 a.m. Wednesday, and lo and behold, bartenders were still serving drinks at the Bank and Bourbon restaurant inside the swanky Loews Philadelphia Hotel in Center City.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has been tapped as the national chairman of the super PAC dedicated to electing Donald Trump as president.
Alabama Supreme Court Justices have found Sumter County Sheriff Tyrone Clark guilty of willful neglect of duty and corruption in office.
A state law that capped unemployment benefits for laid off workers at 13 weeks has been found unconstitutional by the Missouri Supreme Court.
A major rating agency on Tuesday downgraded Kansas’ credit rating for the second time in two years because of the state’s budget problems.
The governor’s office on Tuesday announced a number of recent bill signings by Gov. Pat McCrory, including a statewide district for five low-performing schools that is meant to improve student proficiency.
<i>The Week in Politics</i>: Governors' Campaign Finance Problems, Oldest Legislator Ousted and More
The most important election news and political dynamics at the state and local levels.
The Major League Baseball team wants a big break on property taxes. Will they win?
The Atlanta mayor’s recent and abrupt termination of two agency leaders left many shocked.
Conservatives and liberals are teaming up to restrict or ban the laws that let officers seize billions of dollars a year from people who haven’t been convicted or, sometimes, even charged with a crime.
In an era of tight budgets and slow revenue growth, there’s pressure on legislators to be open and honest about what states can and can’t afford.
Blue Lives Matter bills that would increase the penalties for attacking police are popping up in states and Congress.
Prosecutors dropped all remaining charges against three Baltimore police officers accused in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray in a downtown courtroom on Wednesday morning, concluding one of the most high-profile criminal cases in Baltimore history.
When Clifton Hilton decided to quit drinking this month, he called a residential drug and alcohol detoxification center in this coastal Maine city on a Friday afternoon and was told a bed was available for him.
Death and infertility were just two of the risks a doctor described to Kryston Skinner when she chose to have an abortion last year.
A group that wants to end marijuana prohibition, and to have pot be regulated like alcohol, has endorsed conservative Republican Frank Edelblut and liberal Democrat Steve Marchand for governor.
Anne Holton, wife of Hillary Clinton's running mate pick Tim Kaine, resigned Tuesday as Virginia's secretary of education.
Arizona is rejoining a children's health insurance program for low and middle-income families, becoming the last state in the union to provide coverage for health care, dental care, speech therapy and other services to families who don't qualify for Medicaid.
A state of emergency was declared Tuesday for Los Angeles County, where the Sand fire has scorched 37,701 acres, destroyed homes and led to at least one fatality in Santa Clarita Valley.
The cereal’s new look shows how and why one small state could change the rules nationwide.
Often-uninformed city leaders struggle with the decision, and taxpayers pay the price for their lack of financial knowledge.
States are increasingly pairing mental health and substance abuse patients with peer specialists -- people who have experienced some of the same problems themselves.
Cities are increasingly viewing parking in a negative light and rethinking its place in metropolitan America.
Clinton and Trump clash on them. Congress and some states have been trying to defund them. But no one can seem to agree on what it means to actually be a sanctuary city.
The federal change won’t just hit state and local personnel costs.
The four candidates seeking the Republican nomination for Missouri governor have spent a combined total of more than $10.4 million in the past three weeks, leading into Tuesday's primary, new records show.
Mississippi's state flag didn't last long on Broad Street in South Philadelphia.
Tennessee inmates infected with hepatitis C filed a federal lawsuit against state prison officials late Monday, asking the court to force the state to start treating all inmates who have the potentially deadly disease.
The Alaska Supreme Court has invalidated the state law requiring physicians to give two days notice to parents before performing abortions on girls under 18 years old.
The Virginia Supreme Court Friday struck down Gov. Terry McAuliffe's executive orders restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 felons, declaring that the 13,000-plus who have registered to vote must be stricken from the rolls.
Texas has agreed to expand the types of documents parents can present to secure their children's birth certificates, loosening the state's grip on birth certificates for U.S.-born children of immigrants who are not in the country legally.
School districts completely surrounded by a single larger district often have vast disparities.
If done right, employing kids can improve their academic performance as well as reduce violence, incarceration and mortality rates.
Hillary Clinton's running mate is one of the few people in American history to serve as a mayor, governor and U.S. senator. (Oh yeah, he was also a city council member.)
New York is set to become the first state to require schools to regularly test their water for lead. But it's far from the only place with the problem.
At a time when the job of elections administration is becoming more complex and more scrutinized, a major university has started formal training.
Two teenagers walked into McGuckin Hardware in downtown Boulder, Colorado, grabbed a $600 power saw, and shoved it into a backpack, only to be apprehended by a security guard in the parking lot.
Jennifer Winn said she planted 70 campaign signs in Haysville last week, thinking they would be protected by a new state law requiring cities and counties to let campaigns post yard signs on street rights-of-way.
A top ally of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner abruptly resigned from the Illinois House on Sunday, citing "cyber security issues" that also prompted him to delete his social media accounts.
Nevada's Department of Corrections is changing a series of policies and practices that the U.S. Justice Department says illegally discriminate against prison inmates with HIV by housing them separately and denying access to work assignments that can speed their release.
The Hillary Clinton campaign, responding to leaked internal Democratic Party emails that threatened to revive tensions with Sen. Bernie Sanders' followers, moved quickly to squelch the problem Sunday as the party's embattled chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced she would step down at the end of the convention week.
Governors are rarely VP picks, yet Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both selected one for the increasingly powerful office.
The latest employment estimates show the biggest gains in the West.
In a ruling with strong implications for the Nov. 8 presidential election in Michigan, a federal judge on Thursday blocked Michigan's recent ban on straight-party voting, saying the change would result in longer lines and wait times at polling places and that it would disadvantage black voters the most.
A measure to exempt state and local sales taxes on tampons and other feminine hygiene products was signed into law Thursday by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. New York joins 10 other states with such sales tax exemptions.
Instead of working to solve problems like underfunded pensions, too often we spend our time and energy pointing fingers.
We ought to be doing what many other countries are doing: making far more use of public-private partnerships for infrastructure.
The Obama administration went to court Thursday to block two major health insurance mergers, siding with consumer advocates and medical groups worried that the consolidation of large national health plans could lead to higher premiums.
Attorney General Maura Healey stepped up the ban on military-looking rifles yesterday, prompting licensed gun enthusiasts to flood gun shops on what they believed might be the last day to buy AR-style guns here.
A Cook County judge on Wednesday tossed from the fall ballot a constitutional amendment to take away the General Assembly's power to draw legislative district boundaries, dealing a loss to Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and a win to Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is in the spotlight this week as the man Donald Trump has picked to be his running mate.
The NBA announced late Thursday afternoon that it is moving the 2017 All-Star Weekend out of Charlotte, in reaction to concerns with the North Carolina law known as House Bill 2.
The tests found something fishy in the water.
A roundup of money (and other) news governments can use.
Fed up with the rising number of opiate overdoses in Western Pennsylvania, an Allegheny County judge is making convicted drug dealers buy lifesaving naloxone kits for the communities where they've sold drugs.
It’s summer 2017. The governor’s radical vision for Vermont’s portion of the interstate highway system, a cornerstone initiative for the new administration, has fallen into place.
It was 3 a.m. on a November Sunday, and the car had just turned left onto Adams Street in Newark, N.J. Al-Sharif Scriven was in the front passenger seat, a .40 caliber handgun under his jacket, with hollow-nose bullets and a large-capacity magazine stowed elsewhere in the car.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence Wednesday night told the crowd of delegates and guests at the Republican National Convention that he accepts the party's nomination to run and serve as vice president of the United States.
Texas’ voter identification law violates the U.S. law prohibiting racial discrimination in elections, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
The most important election news and political dynamics at the state and local levels.
There's something wrong when many California public university students can't get enough to eat while campus presidents' compensation is soaring.
Not for most local officials. But they may not all be using their time wisely.
Paring back the state's voter ID law four months before the presidential election, a federal judge ruled Tuesday that Wisconsin voters without photo identification can cast ballots by swearing to their identity.
