Federal Government

The tiny Alpine republic of Slovenia, intent on escaping economic and political turmoil by seceding from Yugoslavia, served notice on the crumbling alliance Wednesday that it will pay only limited support to the central government until the cost of its freedom is worked out.

The issue of illegal immigration is color-blind; it is not a racial but a legal issue. It is an issue that taxpayers, who have seen our tax dollars squandered on programs that have nothing to do with American citizens or legal aliens, understand. Each of us must ask ourselves: How many illegals can we educate, medicate, compensate and incarcerate before California goes bankrupt? Can we continue business as usual, wasting taxpayer dollars?

A public interest environmental law firm on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit aimed at forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to issue air pollution control regulations for oil rigs operating off the coast of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. "We lost our patience," said Marc Chytilo, chief counsel of the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, which filed the lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles.

Confirming an on-again, off-again program that federal officials earlier said was only under study, U.S. officials announced Wednesday the government will spend $20 million to buy California homes made unlivable by El Nino-related mudslides. Under the program, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay up to $140 per square foot of indoor space for houses made uninhabitable by mudslides and in danger of further damage.

Round one is over. But do not count the California gnatcatcher out just yet. The tiny bird was denied state endangered species protection last week, but now the spotlight shifts to a bigger arena--Washington. Federal wildlife officials are expected to make a decision within three weeks that will determine the fate of the four-inch songbird, a Southern California native that lives in the region's coastal brush. Petitioned a year ago by environmentalists, the U.S.

The federal government announced plans Thursday to expand the definition of AIDS, a change expected to add thousands of people to the official estimate of the caseload in this country. The Centers for Disease Control, which tracks epidemics, said that it intends to broaden the definition on Oct. 1 to include all AIDS-infected individuals who show evidence of a severely damaged immune system as measured by the level of CD4 cells in their blood.

After years of dispute, U.S. scientists finally may be closing in on an answer to one of the most controversial questions in the field of environmental pollution: Just how dangerous is dioxin? And the response might be "bad, but not as bad as we thought." Ever since the 1960s, when the first studies in animals showed that dioxin could cause cancer at high doses, the chemical has been identified in popular culture with the persistent label of "most deadly carcinogen known to man."

Every four years Americans are presented with different visions of the future and are asked to choose between them. This year, we've been told, the choice is between two conceptions of government: small versus big. The Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan has promised to "restore" America to its "small government" past. Any vision of the future is built upon a certain understanding of the past. Although past and future are inextricably linked, we spend much less time evaluating candidates as historians than we do assessing their skills as fortunetellers able to predict the future.

Gov. Pete Wilson sued the federal government Tuesday, seeking nearly $370 million for the cost of providing emergency medical care for illegal immigrants. The suit was the second of three Wilson plans to file against the Clinton Administration in an attempt to force the federal government to shut down illegal immigration or reimburse the state for the cost of services for illegal immigrants.

Like all such speeches, President Obama's second inaugural address included meditations on the uniqueness of the American experiment and calls for national unity. But without offering the sort of legislative laundry list found in State of the Union addresses, Obama also used the occasion to articulate a series of policy objectives. The forcefulness of the speech - along with recent actions such as his refusal to negotiate with Republicans on raising the debt ceiling - suggest that he will be a more ardent advocate for his positions in his second term than he was in his first.