States

The 23 states affected by Monday's high court ruling are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. In 1990, Colorado voters adopted the first measure restricting how long members of Congress could serve.

Nearly half of all test-tube conceptions in the U.S. were performed in just five states in 2000, said the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Women in California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and New Jersey underwent 45,303 of the 99,629 procedures performed.

The powerful one-two punch wielded by Iowa and New Hampshire in picking the nation's president would lose some of its clout under a recommendation made Saturday by a panel of Democrats to involve more states in the early voting. The recommendation, motivated in part by a desire to get more minority voters involved early, would add one or two caucuses after Iowa's but before New Hampshire's leadoff primary.

Days before President Clinton is expected to sign a bill overhauling the welfare system, his administration granted waivers to four states allowing them to implement their own welfare rules. New waivers were approved for Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota and Hawaii, the Health and Human Services Department announced Friday. Forty-three states now have waivers. Under the massive welfare overhaul Clinton is expected to sign next week, states will not need federal permission to write their own rules.

The inability of President Clinton and Congress to find common ground on welfare reform has become a fiscal nightmare for some states, a policy straitjacket for others and for a few, a good reason to stall in the face of public clamor for change. In California, the federal impasse has blown a $1.6-billion hole in the state budget. In Connecticut, it has forced officials to ease a proposed 21-month limit on welfare benefits.

Reversing a 50-year trend, regions of the United States have been growing apart economically in this decade as income growth in booming coastal states outstripped the rest of the country, the government said Thursday. The Commerce Department said that, from 1929 until 1979, the differences in individual incomes in different geographic areas had been narrowing. However, since 1979, these differences have widened dramatically, it said.

UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer, has agreed to pay at least $12 million to end state investigations into the processing and payment of claims. UnitedHealth will pay that sum immediately to 36 states and the District of Columbia, the company said Thursday. The Minnetonka, Minn.-based company may have to turn over as much as $20 million more later if it fails to improve over the next three years, according to the company and state regulators.

California's population increased by 654,000 during the 1991-92 fiscal year to a record 31.3 million, the state Department of Finance said in a report released Tuesday. Foreign immigrants accounted for nearly half the population gain, and births exceeded deaths by 605,000 to 212,000, the department's demographic research unit reported. That was California's second-highest annual number of births, falling 4,000 short of the record of 609,000 births the previous year.

A House subcommittee Tuesday approved a bill to grant the District of Columbia statehood, the first step in a long legislative process that proponents hope will lead to the creation of a 51st state. The bill, approved 4 to 3 by the House District Committee's subcommittee on fiscal affairs and health, would create the state of New Columbia and grant it full voting representation in the House and Senate, a right the 630,000 residents of the city of Washington do not have now.

State officials from California to Rhode Island are fuming over a provision, slipped into the massive year-end spending bill expected to clear Congress next week, that says federal regulators should decide where liquefied natural gas terminals are built. Many lawmakers say they didn't know about the provision when they voted for the voluminous bill last month. But state regulators know about it -- and they don't like it.