Los Angeles mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti flip-flopped days before the March 5 primary election, embracing Parent Trigger, the dramatic law now spreading nationwide that lets disgusted parents take over bad schools through petition.

On February 15, when L.A. Weekly pressed the five top mayoral candidates for their positions on Parent Trigger, Wendy Greuel, Jan Perry, Kevin James and Emanuel Pleitez backed it. Garcetti, who is getting campaign help from UTLA, the powerful teachers union that hates …

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SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown has pointed to reams of documents to make the case in court and on the stump that California’s prison crisis is over, and inmates are receiving good care.

But there is at least one document the administration wanted to hide.

New court filings reveal that the state suppressed a report from its own consultant warning that California’s prison suicide-watch practices encouraged inmate deaths.

Click here for the full story. …

Where did the whole idea of sequestration originate? It goes back to 1985. The tax cuts of Ronald’s Reagan early years, combined with his aggressive defense buildup, produced a growing budget deficit that eventually prompted passage of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act. GRH set out a series of ambitious deficit reduction targets, and to put teeth into them it specified that if the targets weren’t met, money would automatically be “sequestered,” or held back, by the Treasury …

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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Thursday said it was “wrong” and “appalling” that she was not consulted about a federal decision to release hundreds of immigrant detainees to cut costs ahead of looming sequestration.

“It’s wrong, and it’s outrageous and it is appalling to do something of this magnitude and not contact myself or my homeland security people, is just unbelievable,” Brewer (R-Ariz.), who represents a border state, said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

Her comments came …

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Leaving aside issues concerning some fishy doin’s at the Vatican Bank (recounted here by Lynn Parramore), or the sexual harassment scandal that inspired this week’s resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien, archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh (in which three priests and one former priest accused the cardinal of making sexual advances toward them*), we focus our gaze here on 10 cardinals who either aided and abetted the priests who abused children, or who served as …

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Helen Becker of Northampton, Pa. has received a hot meal from volunteers with Meals On Wheels of Northampton County every day for the past several years.

“That’s the biggest part of my diet, having the cooked meal,” Becker, 89, said in an interview. On Mondays it might be rotisserie baked chicken with yams, Tuesdays maybe spaghetti with meatballs accompanied by half a cup of applesauce and a dinner roll. And so on, every weekday at lunchtime.

The …

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Many students on St. Lawrence–a remnant of the land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait thousands of years ago with a current population of less than 1,400–say they want to go to college. But half of them drop out of high school, and only 2 percent graduate from college. The benefits of a degree can seem remote here. Families live a subsistence lifestyle, hunting walruses, seals, and whales in the spring, and gathering berries in …

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Without a last-minute deal by lawmakers across-the-board reductions in funding to every federal agency — known as sequestration — will happen Friday. While public schools wouldn’t see most of the cuts take effect until the new fiscal year on July 1, education officials at the local, state and federal levels are warning of dire consequences for programs and services that assist the most vulnerable students.

Talking with reporters last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan …

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Los Angeles asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to allow police and city workers to seize or destroy property that homeless people leave unattended on sidewalks, saying Skid Row homeless encampments presented a public-health risk.

The greater Los Angeles area has one of the nation’s largest populations of homeless people, and the city’s legal fight is seen as having implications for how other municipalities deal with transients.

The city had removed or …

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) – Puerto Rico’s governor on Tuesday approved turning over the operations of Puerto Rico’s largest airport to a private company as part of an estimated $2.6 billion deal that began under his predecessor and has been fiercely protested.

Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla said that while he would have managed things differently, the U.S. territory’s government already had committed to the deal.

“Puerto Rico gave its word and we must be firm and …

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