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Ferguson, Missouri, has paid about a half-million dollars to the monitor team overseeing its police and court reforms, but city leaders question what they’ve gotten for their money, especially after the departure of the original lead monitor. […] Concerns over the cost of monitoring were detailed in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press. The money spent on monitoring is costly in Ferguson, paid for entirely with city funds. The community of 20,000 is much smaller, with far less money, than most cities subject to Justice Department consent agreements. Money is so tight that Ferguson voters twice in 2016 approved tax...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A tearful Corrine Brown made her plea to the court Thursday afternoon, asking the judge to consider all she has done in her life and to show “mercy and compassion.” Brown, 71, was convicted in May of 18 counts of conspiracy, fraud and filing false tax returns. She said those charges run contrary to everything she's ever done in her life, and that she considers her decades of public service an honor and a privilege. Corrine Brown Headlines Corrine Brown with her attorney, James-Smith Corrine Brown's attorney: People 'deserve second chances' After tears, tough questions, Corrine Brown...

BRUSSELS Gov. Jerry Brown, arriving in Brussels after collegial events in Germany, sparred publicly with British politicians when confronted over his climate change record at the European Parliament on Wednesday. Steven Woolfe, a British politician on the parliament, was first to pierce the pleasantries, accusing Brown of supporting state intervention “at a huge scale” and spending and increasing taxes “like it’s going out of fashion.” Brown’s climate change policy, he argued isolates the state from much of the U.S. Woolfe dismissed California’s cap-and-trade carbon market a “tax-and-spend” policy. And he teased the governor as potentially being interested in joining the...

VATICAN CITY Gov. Jerry Brown challenged the world’s religious leaders to further engage as he minimized the negative effects of President Donald Trump on meeting the climate-change challenge. “The Trump factor is very small, very small indeed,” in comparison to the commitments taking place around the world, Brown said to a burst of applause Saturday at an event organized by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “That’s nothing to cheer about, because if it was only Trump that was a problem, we’d have it solved. But that’s not our only problem. “The problem … is us. It’s our whole way...

Gov. Jerry Brown challenged the world’s religious leaders to further engage as he minimized the negative effects of President Donald Trump on meeting the climate-change challenge. “The Trump factor is very small, very small indeed,” in comparison to the commitments taking place around the world, Brown said to a burst of applause Saturday at an event organized by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “That’s nothing to cheer about, because if it was only Trump that was a problem, we’d have it solved. But that’s not our only problem.

In a contentious interview with BBC radio, California Governor Jerry Brown has threatened to sue the Trump administration over climate change, while vowing to “stabilize the ship of state.” “The president is working to delegitimize the very notion of climate change,” Brown told Jim Naughtie of the BBC in a program that aired Tuesday, while the position of California is to go “against the policies of President Trump.” “I hope the rest of the world does their part in providing a forceful opposition,” he said. “Trump has declared war on a majority of the American people under the guise of...

SACRAMENTO (CBS SF) — California Gov. Jerry Brown warns that catastrophic wildfires will keep ripping through the state as the climate warms. **SNIP** He said a warming climate has contributed to catastrophic wildfires. “That’s the way it is with a warming climate, dry weather and reducing moisture.” said Brown. “These kind of catastrophes have happened and they’ll continue to happen, and we have to be prepared to do everything we can to mitigate.” The governor has positioned himself as a leader in the fight against climate change.

SACRAMENTO — California will beef up protections for undocumented immigrants beginning in January under a controversial new law Gov. Jerry Brown signed Thursday to create a statewide sanctuary policy. Brown signed the bill and 10 other immigration-related bills on the same day as a critical deadline for immigrants aided by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, who must file by Thursday for a final two-year extension before the program is phased out.

California’s Governor Jerry Brown visited China recently and came home with a radical new idea: banning the internal combustion engine in automobiles sold in what is already the greenest state in the nation.

California on Friday expanded its market for buying and trading permits to emit greenhouse gases to include the Canadian province of Ontario. The market is the centerpiece of California’s cap-and-trade program, which aims to reduce carbon pollution over time by capping emissions and requiring companies to obtain permits to pollute. Quebec is already part of the market. California is aiming to reduce emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030. The two Canadian provinces have similar or stricter goals. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the agreement Friday in Quebec at a meeting with officials of both provinces, capping off...

The Vietnam War, the ten-part, 18-hour documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is running on PBS. Thursday’s episode 5 showed the conflict on the brink of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Future episodes will deal with the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973, which paved the way for the victory of the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese Communists in 1975. One California state senator has considerable experience on that front. The Communists changed the name of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City and Janet Nguyen was born there in 1976. Her father was a South Vietnamese soldier and imprisoned when...

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday called President Donald Trump’s approach to climate change and North Korea “stupid and dangerous and silly,” sharpening his criticism of the president and comparing his supporters to ignorant cave dwellers. “They’re both kind of very similar,” Brown said at a climate change event in New York. “You should check out the derivation of ‘Trump-ite’ and ‘troglodyte,’ because they both refer to people who dwell in deep, dark caves.” Brown, the Democratic governor of the nation’s most populous state, has been rushing to recruit other state and local governments to sign onto their own non-binding...

Pro Football Hall of Famer and Cleveland Browns legend Jim Brown panned current football players who choose to protest during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, saying “I don’t desecrate my flag and my national anthem.” Brown, who fought for social causes throughout his career, told ThePostGame.com he empathizes with jobless quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who began the trend of kneeling during the anthem last season when he played for the San Francisco 49ers. But Brown said Kaepernick and other players who demonstrate – such as a dozen Cleveland players who knelt Monday – are going about their crusade the...

Addressing the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night in Charlotte, N.C., California Attorney General Kamala Harris told a crowd of 20,000 that she wants an “America where opportunity is open to everyone … where everyone plays by the same set of rules.” The first big boost to her career, however, came not because of her legal prowess but because her boyfriend was the (married) California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who went on to become the mayor of San Francisco.

There was a spate of headlines last week claiming that new scientific discoveries disproved the historical narrative of the Bible. Headlines included, "DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites" and "Study disproves the Bible's suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out." The problem is that the reverse is actually true: The discoveries confirm what the Scriptures explicitly state.Not surprisingly, these headlines didn't come from obscure, Bible-bashing websites. Instead, they came from Cosmos Magazine, Yahoo.com, New Scientist (claiming that the discovery helped unravel the "true fate" of the Canaanites), and others. As stated in the New York...

Jerry Brown has signed a tax increase taking the price-based excise gas tax from $.10 a gallon to $.50 a gallon, but Brown and his ultra liberal legislature does not pay one cent for the gasoline that they use! They actually get free gas! They gave it to themselves in 2008, so the crazy gas tax they just passed does not effect them!

For advocates of stricter gun laws, a sweeping package of new legislation signed by California’s governor in July 2016 — and a similar set of measures approved by the state’s voters in a referendum four months later — served as rare bright spots in a year that they would otherwise rather forget. The new restrictions included an expanded version of the state’s assault weapons ban, designed to close a loophole that had been exploited just months earlier by ISIS-inspired gunmen; a prohibition on owning high-capacity magazines; and a requirement for background checks on sales of ammunition. California’s beefed-up laws came...

Gov. Jerry Brown of California on Thursday reinforced his reputation as America’s de facto leader on climate change, announcing to cheering crowds in Hamburg, Germany that his state would gather leaders from around the world for a global warming summit next year. Speaking by videoconference to the Global Citizens Festival in Hamburg, where President Donald Trump is joining other world leaders for the Group of 20 economic summit, Governor Brown said the president “doesn’t speak for the rest of America” in pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change.

In 2016, same-sex “marriage” was legalized in Colombia. One year later, the courts have now recognized a polyamorous “family” of three men. And there is no slippery slope. As reported by the Daily Mail: Actor Victor Hugo Prada and his two partners, sports instructor John Alejandro Rodriguez and journalist Manuel Jose Bermudez, have signed legal papers with a solicitor in the city of Medellin, establishing them as a family unit with inheritance rights. “We wanted to validate our household … and our rights, because we had no solid legal basis establishing us as a family,” said one of the men,...

There’s a bizarre argument I’m hearing these days which basically goes like this. “Look at how many churches are embracing homosexual practice. This proves we’re getting closer to the truth.” To the contrary, all it proves is that more and more churches are apostatizing. The logic behind this argument is as wrongheaded as it is unbiblical. First, to argue that greater acceptance of homosexuality by churches is proof of spiritual growth is like arguing that greater acceptance of obesity by doctors is a proof of medical progress. The reverse is actually true. Second, the Bible often warns us against compromise...