With California a day away from issuing IOUs instead of paying its bills, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the legislature remain at odds over how to close a now $26.3 billion deficit. Schwarzenegger on Thursday ordered a third unpaid furlough day for 235,000 state employees. With its $1.7 trillion economy sputtering and 11.5% unemployment surging, California's difficulty in balancing its budget could affect the national recovery. They begin with the 1978 property tax revolt and the victory of Proposition 13. ...

The attorney general of South Carolina on Tuesday asked the state law enforcement division to review Gov. Mark Sanford's travel records after the governor admitted to more visits with his mistress than previously disclosed. "In light of the governor's disclosure of additional travel today, I have requested that SLED conduct a preliminary review of all Governor Sanford's travel records to determine if any laws have been broken or any state funds misused," Attorney General Henry McMaster said in a statement. ...

Jesse Levey is a Republican activist who says he believes in family values, small government and his lesbian mothers' right to marry. Levey is part of the "gayby boom" generation. The 29-year-old management consultant is the son of a lesbian couple who chose to have a child through artificial insemination. He's their only child. Critics of same-sex marriage say people such as Levey will grow up shunned and sexually confused. Yet he says he's a "well-adjusted heterosexual" whose upbringing proves ...

The financial crisis in California grew worse this week as State Controller John Chiang warned that if legislators and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fail to come up with a budget-balancing package, he would begin paying California's bills with IOUs on July 2. The last time the state did this was during the Great Depression. What has brought California to such a perilous state How did its government become so wildly dysfunctional One obvious cause is the deep recession that has ...

The dramatic and at times deadly post-election fallout in Iran dominated the Sunday conversation. And as we watched more demonstrations on the streets of Tehran, the debate among key policy-makers in the United States centered on whether the Iranian regime was potentially near a tipping point and whether President Obama has been too cautious his handling of this major challenge. (CNN) -- The dramatic and at times deadly post-election fallout in Iran dominated the Sunday conversation. And as we ...

Even sequestered by government order in our hotel, we could still hear the sounds of protests in the night. TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Even sequestered by government order in our hotel, we could still hear the sounds of protests in the night. Voices shouted "God is great!" from rooftops, from faces hidden in the dark. Earlier in the day, throngs of protesters took to the streets for a sixth consecutive day to show their support for Mir Hossein Moussavi, the ...

As the sun set on the fourth day of turmoil over Iran's disputed election result, the political conflict looked less like a "Tehran spring" challenge to the Islamic regime than a high-stakes game of chicken among its rival factions. Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei confronts one hard reality: if you summarily ignore the votes that millions of citizens have cast in good faith, even if those votes are against your favorite, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, you could fatally undermine the popular acceptance of Iran's ...

Anti-war protesters have criticized a decision by the UK government to hold an investigation into Britain's involvement in the Iraq war behind closed doors. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the House of Commons on Monday the inquiry into the war would hear evidence in private so witnesses can be "as candid as possible." He added that it would be held along the lines of the Franks inquiry into Britain's war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the early ...

It was billed as tragedy — an insurrection that would topple the Labour Party's flawed hero, Gordon Brown — but it played out like a Marx Brothers farce. The June 8 meeting that would determine Brown's fate attracted so many Labour MPs and members of the House of Lords that a House of Commons committee room quickly filled to capacity. And still they came, squeezing their way into the mass of bodies politic. When a clutch of tardy ministers ...

Center right and minority parties make gains across Europe as turnout in elections for the new European Parlimanent dips to a record low of 43 percent. Below is a country by country selection of some of the key results at national level. Austria Two far-right parties -- Hans Peter Martin's eponymous anti-EU party and the Freedom Party -- shared nearly a third of the vote as the ruling Social Democrats saw their vote slip by around 10 percent to 23.8 ...