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.
Businesses in California, Hawaii, even Georgia, are responding to Friday furlough days for state workers by offering discounts and other benefits, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper calls it an unintended benefit of furlough days. Well, we’ll leave that up to the furloughed state workers to decide. Funny, the paper didn’t interview anyone from New Mexico. Friday was the fourth of five furlough days ordered for most state workers this year. It’s hard to know whether that means New Mexico businesses aren’t providing discounts or that the Journal just ignored our humble, little state.
Meanwhile employers across the nation added 162,000 jobs in March, giving economists and some Americans a reason to cheer that the economy may have turned an important corner, reports the New York Times. The surge was, in part, due to the U.S. Census Bureau’s temporary hiring of workers to carry out the nation’s decennial survey.
But the good news appears to be only a thin sliver of silver lining in an otherwise dark economic cloud. More and more Americans are having their wages garnished by creditors who sometimes collect much more than the original debt, the New York Times reports. The lesson here, according to the story: consumers often get a better deal if they show up in court to fight the creditors’ demands.
Yesterday Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law legislation that requires labor unions and corporations to disclose how much they spend on political campaigns following a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, according to AzCapitolTimes.com. Earlier this year the nation’s top court lifted a decades-old ban on corporations and labor unions getting involved in political campaigns.
On the fuel emissions front, California led the charge for increased vehicle fuel efficiency — a campaign New Mexico joined a few years ago. Now the nation’s largest state is feeling vindicated with the Obama administration’s decision to raise combined gas mileage standards for cars, SUVs and minivans by 40 percent beginning with the 2016 model year, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The new standards require manufacturers to meet a combined 35.5 miles per gallon, up from 25.4 miles per gallon, for all the vehicles they make.
On the other side of the country Dan Barry, the New York Times wonderful national columnist, gives a preview of sorts of one aspect of the recently passed health care reform law. Barry visited a Portland, Me. community health center on Thursday, the same day President Obama visited the city to tout the new law.
In Massachusetts, meanwhile, tough questions are buffeting local school district officials in South Hadley after a 15-year-old student killed herself in January, apparently due to bullying, according to the New York Times.
Turning from government policies, in academia literary scholars are turning into cognitive scientists, sort of, as research in the humanities turns increasingly to the theory of mind (to figure out what this means, read the story,) according to the New York Times.
