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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.
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