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California’s taxing power on the ballot
Californians will face two competing tax measures this November. The first is the Billionaire Tax Act, a onetime, 5% levy on the accumulated net worth of the state’s richest residents. Lesser known is the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act, which would draw constitutional lines around what Sacramento can and cannot tax, prohibiting new levies on retirement accounts, personal savings and individually owned assets and banning retroactive taxation. Everyone with even just a little bit of money set aside — not just the California billionaires targeted by the wealth tax — ...
Schools are more than just buildings
Little kids walk through the doors clinging to a parent’s hand, not sure how to navigate this strange new world of letters and numbers. By the time they walk out for the last time, they have made friends, lost them, laughed, cried, grown several feet, outgrown a lot of shoes and become almost adults. Schools are not just the places where children learn. They are where they grow up. This isn’t just one place. For most students, “school” is a series of schools. There may be one for preschool, one or two for elementary school, another for middle school and one for high school. ...
Dam removal hikes safety, conservation
I stood on the riverbank in Milltown, Indiana, with Allen Pursell of the Sam Shine Foundation. We watched young people fishing on either side of the low-head dam on Blue River. May 31 is National Dam Safety Awareness Day, and I wanted to learn why the Sam Shine Foundation was committed to dam removal. Milltown’s dam is not one that will come out anytime soon, but it is the first one Allen and his colleague Cassie Hauswald considered. It all started about 10 years ago when the Nature Conservancy, a global environmental nonprofit, received an unrestricted gift for freshwater ...
US adult cigarette use drops
NEW YORK — The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 11 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released this week. Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it’s long been considered the leading cause of preventable death. The preliminary findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were based on survey responses from more than 24,200 adults. In the survey, CDC officials defined current cigarette smoking as smoking at least 100 ...
Helping hand: Caregiver tech could aid aging population
DURHAM, N.H. — After outliving Booker T. Bones, their second service dog, Brenda and Brian Marquis still needed help with some of the more difficult parts of daily life. They found Robbie, a robot that rolls out of a hallway into their living room several times a day. “Do you want to ...