SACRAMENTO — In a closely contested state Senate campaign, Assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani has been urging voters to judge her on her legislative achievements, saying on her website that she is “proud to have a record of standing up for the people of my district.”
Voters who try to examine the record of the Central Valley Democrat may come away with the wrong impression.
They would not be able to tell that Galgiani remained silent during 136 votes, …

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DUBAI, Oct 24 (Reuters) – Kuwait risks sliding into Arab Spring-style protests over a forthcoming election that has polarised opinion in the Gulf Arab state and posed an unprecedented challenge to the authority of the once revered emir, a close Western ally.

Kuwait saw some of the worst violence in its recent history when tens of thousands of demonstrators – out of a native population of just 1.2 million – protested this week at changes to …

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Russell C. Means, the charismatic Oglala Sioux who helped revive the warrior image of the American Indian in the 1970s with guerrilla-tactic protests that called attention to the nation’s history of injustices against its indigenous peoples, died on Monday at his ranch in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was 72.

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Trayvon Martin’s school records and social media profiles will be turned over to the defense team of his killer, George Zimmerman, ahead of Zimmerman’s murder trial, a judge ruled today.

Judge Debra Nelson ruled today that the academic, attendance and disciplinary records, along with the 17-year-old’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, would be made available to Zimmerman’s attorneys. The information could become public if Zimmerman’s attorneys use it at trial.

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DES MOINES — Celebrity Chef Jose Andres told a group of diners inside the ballroom of the downtown Marriott in Des Moines on Wednesday that corn subsidies have to end if America wants to get serious about fighting world hunger.

A few minutes before Andres took the podium, Oxfam President Raymond Offenheiser warned the same group about corporate and government land grabs and 30 Project co-founder Ellen Gustafson wondered aloud why there are “a billion hungry …

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(Reuters) – A man who was arrested in the Supreme Court’s museum corridor for wearing a jacket emblazoned with the slogan “Occupy Everywhere” is suing the federal government over the incident.

Fitzgerald Scott was looking at exhibitions in the court in Washington, D.C., in January when a police officer asked him to remove the jacket, according to a suit filed in federal district court in Washington on Wednesday.

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(BELFAST, Northern Ireland) — The first abortion clinic on the island of Ireland opened Thursday in downtown Belfast, unleashing angry protests on the street and uniting Catholic and Protestant politicians in calls to investigate the new facility.

The clinic, run by the British family planning charity Marie Stopes, will be permitted to provide abortions only in exceptional circumstances to women less than nine weeks pregnant.

But the opening caught Northern Ireland’s socially conservative politicians off guard, and …

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The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on behalf of people who say they were denied bail for minor offenses after being flagged by immigration authorities.

British filmmaker Duncan Roy, who says he spent nearly three months in L.A. County jails without a chance to post bail, is one of the five plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which will be filed today in U.S. District Court.

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“. . . no part of my experience—not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners—was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated? Would he believe that I once yearned to be sat down in a padded, soundproof room, blindfolded, and …

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(Reuters) – Environmental groups sued the state of California on Tuesday in an effort to stop hydraulic fracturing as regulators attempt to devise new rules for the controversial oil and gas extraction practice.

The lawsuit accuses the regulator, the California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, with failing to evaluate the risks, even though fracking was used for more than 600 wells in the state last year.

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