By Angela Hart, Sacramento Bee A hotly contested battle over rent control in California just got more explosive. Tenants rights activists have qualified for the November ballot an initiative that would clear the way for cities and counties across California to pass strong rent control laws, as local and state lawmakers struggle to address a […]
Read more
By Dakin Andone and Jessica Campisi, CNN There’s not a single state, county or metropolitan area in the entire United States where a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment. And if those workers wanted to? They’d have to work 122 hours a week. Every […]
Read more
By Kurtis Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle When Anne Faught got a knock on her front gate recently, she was surprised to find two uniformed men at her rural Marin County property, one with a clipboard. The firefighters had come to her home for an impromptu safety inspection. They were making sure she had cleared hazards […]
Read more
While it’s free for now, officials are looking to start charging for parking at Van Sickle Bi-State Park on the South Shore. “As far as the fees, I would expect Van Sickle will follow along with all the rest of the state parks fees. We have recently gone to a standard entrance price across the […]
Read more
By Richard N. Velotta, Las Vegas Review-Journal The operator of a Northern Nevada casino has settled a state Gaming Control Board complaint that it illegally operated an unlicensed interactive gaming system by linking to websites based in Curacao. A representatives of BCH Gaming Reno, doing business as Boomtown Reno in Verdi, agreed to pay […]
Read more
By David R. Baker, San Francisco Chronicle A web of power lines stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific weaves all the western states and Canadian provinces into one vast electric grid. But control of that grid is anything but unified. Thirty-eight separate organizations, known as balancing authorities, run their own portions, some as […]
Read more
Sunday is not the day to plan to be outside, at least in Lake Tahoe, according to the National Weather Service in Reno. That “s” word (snow) is even in the forecast at elevations above 9,500. For the rest of the basin it could be rain and thunderstorms. Temperatures are expected to be 10 to […]
Read more
By Zlati Meyer, USA Today Under pressure by environmentalists, McDonald’s said Friday that it will start testing alternatives to plastic straws at select locations in the U.S. later this year. The burger giant also announced that it will adopt more eco-friendly paper straws across all its 1,361 restaurants in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a region where the company […]
Read more
By Yvonne Gonzalez, Las Vegas Sun Tens of thousands more voters were registered as neither Democrat or Republican this midterm election compared with 2014, with most of that growth coming from Libertarians. Voters outside the Democratic and Republican primaries had a limited ballot of nonpartisan candidates in their jurisdiction to choose from. A slew of […]
Read more
By Margot Kushel, The Conversation One-quarter of homeless people in the U.S. live in California, despite Californians making up only 12 percent of the population. Not only is homelessness more common on the West Coast, but it is also more visible because a higher proportion of homeless people are unsheltered. In the U.S., 24 percent […]
Read more