On Thursday, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the commutation of 548 death sentences, reducing the sentence of everyone on the state’s death row to life without parole. California has more people sentenced to capital punishment than any other state, but for years there has been a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty. Newsom’s action ensures that the moratorium is…
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California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed SB 868, a bill legalizing residential solar panels for balconies. At a time when the Trump administration is unraveling federal climate progress, California’s so-called “Plug and Play Solar Act” enables homeowners and renters to purchase and plug lightweight solar panels into a regular power outlet and generate up to 1200 watts of electricity.
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California voters will soon decide whether to tax billionaires — but even if a majority says yes, the measure could still lose to either of two billionaire-funded measures designed to cancel it out. The billionaire-backed group Building a Better California designed two countermeasures to undermine the wealth tax and create multiple ways to defeat it. Recent polling shows slim majorities…
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During his time on death row in California, before he was found innocent and exonerated, Shujaa Graham said he was beaten and spent nearly entire days in a small cell at the facility formerly known as San Quentin State Prison. Even when he was let out in the yard, he could only look up at the sky through the cage that stretched over the roof. He remembered men around him, some of whom were also…
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Campaigners behind the one-time 5% billionaires wealth tax in California are calling out what they describe as trickery and deception by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who on Friday released a proposal for a national billionaire’s income tax even as he actively opposes the effort to tax the wealth of billionaires in the state that he and his party currently control. “Newsom does not want to…
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California voters are in the thick of a high-stakes governor’s race, in which single-payer health care, an issue that was once central to state politics, has been pushed to the sidelines. Of the top five candidates, only one unequivocally supports a health care model that would finally put California on par with the rest of the industrialized world. Billionaire Tom Steyer…
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