I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
California state lawmakers once again topped the list of best-paid legislators in the nation, reports the New York Times, with salaries of $95,000 a year for the rank and file. Meanwhile, New Mexico is one of the few states that doesn’t pay state lawmakers a salary. Some folks, including former Republican Gov. Garrey Carruthers, have advocated paying legislators here beyond travel and lodging stipends, arguing that salaries would create a greater diversity of people who could afford to serve in the Legislature while also increasing the quality of those serving. But so far the argument hasn’t taken hold. With the economic troubles don’t expect the case for legislative salaries to win over many more converts anytime soon either.
Here’s an interesting angle on the fight over health care reform coming out of Arkansas. More than a dozen states may have decided to fight the new federal health care reform law based on a states’ rights argument. But Arkansas is staying out of the fray. That state tried the same argument in 1957 and lost, Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, told the Washington Post. That fight occurred when the state attempted to defy the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School only to watch the federal government send in troops to enforce the law. “I think you got to tell people the truth. And if I understand the law, the truth is the federal government can’t just be defied by the state governments,” Beebe told the Post.
For science geeks everywhere, today is a day of great rejoicing. The Large Hadron Collider began smashing subatomic particles together in Switzerland, causing physicists and other scientists to predict a coming era of new scientific discovery that could tell us more about how the universe functions, the New York Times reports.
Meanwhile, the federal Food and Drug Administration is feeling pressure to crack down on “food fraud,” the sale of items marketed as high-quality or pure that are anything but, reports the Washington Post.
Now onto a story about the wonders of crowd sourcing. Hundreds of folks in Portland, Oregon heard a boom Sunday night. But rather than waiting until the next day to let the police figure out the mystery, many individual did a little online snooping, the geeks at ReadWriteWeb tell us. In a matter of hours, a Google Map plotting hundreds of individuals’ description of how loud the explosion sounded to them had pinpointed a pattern: based on the map the explosion seemed loudest around a certain city park. Police investigated and found a detonated pipe bomb.
On the media front Michael Calderone, the media blogger at Politico.com, is departing, the latest in a series of departures from the online political journal, reports the Huffington Post.
