California’s air quality regulators approved a much-disputed blueprint for meeting the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals.

While environmentalists urge conservation, some water officials want more infrastructure.

As California faces the prospect of a fourth consecutive dry year, officials with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California have declared a regional drought emergency and called on water agencies to immediately reduce their use of all imported supplies.

Across the nation, the pandemic has exposed problems with getting trash collected.

Washington state hospitals are pleading for help from the state as they’re hit with massive financial losses for the third quarter in a row — a deficit due to rising costs of labor, supplies, and patients staying longer. Health care systems in the state lost more than $1.6 billion in the first nine months of 2022.

NASHVILLE, TENN. — It was trivia night at Tribe, an LGBTQ club in Nashville, and drag queen Tracey Ottomey was quizzing the crowd on pop music, Christmas movies and Queen Victoria. At the same time, pop music videos — widely available on YouTube and other platforms — played on screens around the bar.

Oklahoma will not carry out a scheduled execution because convicted murderer John Fitzgerald Hanson remains in a federal prison in Louisiana. Oklahoma is now suing in federal court in Texas for his return.

Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin flourished, a Stateline analysis of local economies found.

Seven months after Texas saw one of the nation’s deadliest prison escapes, investigations into what went wrong have come back to one factor: The state’s lockups are dangerously short-staffed.

Combining recycled plastic with asphalt could cut costs and waste.

A judge in San Antonio has thrown out a lawsuit filed against a Texas abortion provider who intentionally violated a state law that allows anyone to bring a lawsuit against someone who “aids or abets” an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy.

Last year, 109,000 people died from a drug overdose, more than double the number in 2015.

Indiana has sued the popular social media platform TikTok over allegations it fails to protect children from mature content, and that it deceived users about the Chinese government's ability to access their data.

State transportation departments often resist attempts to slow traffic on busy urban state roads.

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"Race is the most potent predictor" of environmental harms.

Polling places opened for the Georgia runoff for U.S. Senate between Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, the last undecided Senate race in the country.

Eleven states allow children without permanent legal status to enroll in Medicaid or CHIP.

A new class of California lawmakers will be sworn in and thrust into the middle of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political fight with oil companies, testing the clout of an industry that spends heavily to influence the legislature and potentially affecting gas prices for Californians.

In 152 counties, no racial group makes up more than half the population.

A new proposal coming to the Washington legislature, the Washington Future Fund, would create a pool of money that every child born under the state’s Medicaid program, Apple Health, could access. The money can be used in adulthood to use toward homeownership, education or pursuing a small business. Washington would be one of the first states to create a trust fund program for babies born into...

Nationwide, 62 jurisdictions now let voters rank their candidates.

Just four years after Florida’s legislature made sure politicians would have to resign before running for federal office, they seem poised to change the rules again. The impetus is Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely speculated to be eyeing a presidential run, especially following this year’s landslide reelection victory.

Some states and localities are trying to publicize the help they offer to families.

Georgia voters set a single-day early turnout record as 301,500 people stormed to the polls on the first day they were open in most counties ahead of the U.S. Senate runoff.

The cost of road and bridge projects have increased by as much as 40%.

Backers of an Ohio recreational marijuana legalization proposal aim to place the initiated statute before voters in November 2023, an attorney representing the group said. Meantime, the General Assembly may pass by the end of the year a bill that would allow the drug for any condition “that the patient’s symptoms may reasonably be expected to be relieved from medical marijuana.”

Some cities have used salvaged wood in municipal construction projects.

The Texas Department of Public Safety wants $1.2 billion to turn its training center north of Austin into a full-time statewide law enforcement academy — starting with a state-of-the-art active-shooter facility that would need a nearly half-billion-dollar investment from Texas taxpayers next year.

Twenty-two Republican-leaning states have urged the court to block beneficiaries from suing.

Nearly 2,000 Californians could receive monthly cash payments between $600 to $1,200 as part of the nation’s first state-funded guaranteed basic income program, the state’s social services department announced.

The midterms showed the political potency of abortion ballot measures.

bostonglobe.com

Americans who need housing often aren’t in the same places as the vacant houses.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has so far paid more than $1.56 million to a politically connected contractor for a program to fly migrants from Texas to northeastern states — but the private jets chartered by the contractor cost only a fraction of that sum.

College costs have increased by more than 60% in the past two decades.

Catholic priests and officials assigned to the Archdiocese of Baltimore sexually abused and tortured more than 600 people over the past 80 years, and the church helped to cover most of it up, a report from the Maryland attorney general’s office found.

Students faced long lines, burdensome voter ID requirements and confusion during the midterms.

A group of South Carolina House Republican lawmakers, known as the Freedom Caucus, is suing Lexington County’s largest school district, claiming education officials are illegally training teachers how to incorporate race-centric lessons in their classrooms.

“The problem with fake reviews is there’s a lot of incentive to cheat.”

Georgia can no longer enforce its ban on abortion that took effect earlier this year, a Fulton County judge said, allowing the procedure again to be performed in the state after a doctor detects fetal cardiac activity.

Some states will embed electromagnetic coils in roads to recharge electric vehicles while they’re moving.

Search giant Google has agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states to resolve an investigation into how the company tracked users’ locations. The states’ investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press story, which found that Google continued to track people’s location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called “location history.”

State mesonets can fill the gaps in federal weather data.

Early voting won’t be allowed on a Saturday before the U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia because it’s the day after the state holiday formerly known as Robert E. Lee’s Birthday and two days after Thanksgiving.

“People really grossly underestimate the social cost of gun violence.”

The dust has hardly settled after Tuesday's midterm elections, but Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and allied lawmakers are ready to start pushing forward on policy agreements and logistical changes available for the Democratic-controlled state legislature. Whitmer pledged to boost manufacturing, repeal the retirement tax, protect the Great Lakes and improve access to education.

The midterms boosted abortion rights, but GOP gains could mean more restrictions in some states.

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Still, some conspiracy theorists won as voters faced isolated intimidation efforts on Election Day.