Sacramento
A budget at last: Facing a $42 billion deficit and looming bankruptcy, California lawmakers last week ended a four-month impasse and passed a budget requiring severe reductions in state services. The $130 billion budget includes $15.1 billion in spending cuts and $12.8 billion in tax increases and fee hikes. Half the cuts are to come from the education budget, and officials from the state’s 23-campus university system said they would have to dramatically shrink enrollment. The cuts also will force changes in the prison system, already under a federal court order to reduce the inmate population. Authorities say they’ll likely give many prisoners time off for good behavior and curtail supervision of paroled inmates.
Springfield, Ill.
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Burris hangs on: Two top Illinois Democrats have added their voices to calls that Illinois Sen. Roland Burris resign, but Burris says he has no intention of quitting. Burris made a “giant mistake” in accepting the appointment and should step down, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn said, and Dick Durbin, the state’s senior U.S. senator, agreed. Burris was appointed in December by then–Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, just before he was thrown out of office for allegedly trying to sell Barack Obama’s old Senate seat to the highest bidder. Burris had said that he never offered anything in return for the seat, but he now admits that he did try to raise money for Blagojevich’s re-election campaign. Burris said through a spokesman that he planned to “fight” to keep his seat and “rehabilitate his reputation.”
New York City
Defamation settlement: Drawing a curtain on a bizarre sideshow to the 2008 presidential campaign, lobbyist Vicki Iseman and The New York Times reached a settlement on her $27 million defamation suit against the newspaper. Iseman filed the suit after the Times ran an article last February that Iseman says falsely suggested that she had had an affair with Republican presidential nominee John McCain. In exchange for her dropping the suit, the Times agreed to run a statement from Iseman’s lawyers that deplored “the tremendous harm” the article did to “our client’s personal as well as professional identity.” The Times said the article merely reported McCain aides’ concerns that he might have been romantically involved with Iseman. The paper did not retract the article.
Washington, D.C.
A break in the Chandra Levy case: Police said this week they had solved the murder of Chandra Levy, eight years after her murder. Levy, 24, disappeared in 2001 while jogging in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Her remains were found a year later. Police now say they have DNA evidence linking a 27-year-old Salvadoran immigrant to the murder. The suspect, Ingmar Guandique, is currently serving a 10-year sentence for attacking two women in the same park. The case proved the political undoing of then–Rep. Gary Condit of California, who admitted to an affair with Levy, but vehemently denied any involvement in her murder, despite intense press speculation. Police say he was never a suspect. After losing his 2002 re-election bid, Condit retired to Arizona, where he sells real estate.
New Orleans
Mardi Gras mayhem: Violence marred Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans this week, when seven people, including an infant, were injured in a shootout between two teenagers. None of the injuries was believed to be life-threatening. Police arrested a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old shortly after gunfire broke out along the route of the Rex parade, which climaxes the festivities. Despite the violence, city officials rated this year’s Mardi Gras a success, saying crowds nearly matched those of 2004, the last Mardi Gras before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, in 2005. The celebrations bring as much as $300 million into the city.
Houston
A judge’s crimes: A federal judge this week pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice and agreed to resign from the bench, just a day before his trial on sexual-abuse charges was set to begin. Prosecutors alleged that U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent, 59, had groped and fondled two female employees and pressured them for sex. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dropped the sex-related charges, and Kent pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to authorities investigating the women’s complaints. The first federal judge convicted in a sex-crime case, Kent faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But as part of the plea deal, prosecutors requested a three-year term.
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