States

Across the country, state legislators and governors struggled Tuesday night to agree on spending cuts and tax hikes as they ran up against a midnight deadline to approve a budget. The day began with 14 states lacking a final budget signed by the governor. By evening, several had come to some agreement. But some states -- most significantly, Arizona and Pennsylvania -- faced the specter of a government shutdown for failing to have a budget in place by the start of the new fiscal year today.

The last time Indiana missed its deadline for passing a budget and had to shut down the government was during the Civil War. But on Monday, as lawmakers raced to hammer out an agreement over school funding, state agencies began preparing 31,000 workers to be temporarily out of a job. Republican Gov.

A record number of out-of-state and international students are planning to enroll as University of California freshmen in the fall, the result of a controversial effort by the revenue-hungry university to garner the much higher tuition that nonresident students must pay. More than 8% of UC's projected 37,151 freshmen will be from out of state or overseas, up from 6% for the school year just ended, according to figures released Wednesday. The change is concentrated mainly at UC Berkeley and UCLA, with Berkeley showing the most dramatic shift.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration has cleared what could be the final group of states to open their own health insurance exchanges this fall, advancing a key goal of the 2010 healthcare law to provide Americans with new options to shop for coverage. The conditional approvals announced for California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Vermont and Utah mean 17 states and the District of Columbia are on track to operate their own insurance exchanges this year. Exchanges in the remaining states will be run by the federal government or by state-federal partnerships.

President Obama's job approval rating declined in all but three states in 2011, with some of the steepest declines coming in likely battlegrounds he must win this fall to claim a second term. New state-by-state data released by Gallup on Tuesday (chart below) shows that a majority of respondents approved of the president's performance in only 10 states plus the District of Columbia, down from 13 a year earlier. Meanwhile the number of states where his approval rating was below 40% doubled in 2011, from 10 to 20. That list now includes New Hampshire, where his approval rating was 38.7% -- the lowest score in any of the states he carried in 2008.

The day Rick Santorum suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination saw President Obama in Florida. He'll be back in the Sunshine State on Friday. Floridians can expect to see a lot of the president, and of Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, as well as a deluge of television advertising over the next seven months. Florida is one of a handful of states - maybe as few as four or five - that likely will decide the election. Right now, Obama appears to have at least narrow leads in most of those states, judging by the most recent polls - two last month in Florida had him up by between three and seven points, for example.

SACRAMENTO - The wealthy conservatives behind a November ballot measure that would constrain organized labor's ability to raise political money say their initiative, Proposition 32, would help change the balance of power in California's Democrat-dominated Capitol. But the experiences of some states that have passed similar measures suggest that's not always the case. Union opponents have scored their biggest victories in "right-to-work" states, where labor is typically weaker than in California because workers are not required to become members or pay union fees.

They have plundered reserves, enacted hiring freezes and engaged in all manner of budgetary voodoo to shield us from the pain. But now state governments -- reeling from a historic free fall in tax revenue -- have run out of tricks. And Americans are about to feel it. In some cases, they already have. Nevada resident Margaret Frye-Jackman, 71, was diagnosed in August with ovarian cancer.

California and more than 20 other states will be "fully reimbursed" for hundreds of thousands of emergency prescriptions for seniors who ran into trouble with the new Medicare drug benefit, top federal officials said Tuesday. The promise was part of a seven-point plan by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to try to resolve the continuing frustration faced by many patients and pharmacists since the benefit took effect three weeks ago.

States can expect by mid-May to get a long-awaited $2.3 billion in federal help to buy new voting booth equipment and make other election improvements, the head of an electoral reform commission said Monday. Still, millions of voters again will be using the much maligned punch cards in this fall's presidential balloting. Many of the improvements, including plans for statewide computerized voter registration data, aren't expected to be in place before 2006.