The latest mayor to realize that nonprofit donations provide city government some extra flexibility in pursuing difficult-to-fund projects is Los Angeles’s Eric Garcetti. The challenge is to make sure the nonprofit doesn’t devolve into a venue for special interests to buy face time and favors from politicians.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a Massachusetts law that provided for a 35-foot “buffer zone” around clinics providing abortions. The Saturday after, protestors showed up in greater numbers in Boston and Worcester, pushing beyond that previously established line.
It has been a very consequential run of decisions by the Supreme Court. This week, expect the court to make a momentous statement about the future of public sector unions.
Whether or not one likes what Pope Francis has done since his election to the papacy last year, there is no question that he has raised the bar within the Catholic Church regarding a level of thoughtfulness and commitment to religious teachings. By his lifestyle, Pope Francis is a challenge to U.S. bishops who, one writer suggests, had gotten comfortable with a different kind of behavior—and a different kind of pope.
ProPublica filed a public records request for information the Red Cross had been required to provide to the N.Y. attorney general’s office. But law firm Gibson Dunn, representing the Red Cross, appealed to the attorney general to block some of the Sandy information under the Freedom of Information Law’s trade secret exemption.
An embarrassing state government screw-up in Illinois shows up in troubled nonprofit performance, but the roots of the problem are in the faulty design and inadequate implementation of an important anti-violence initiative.
In a deal that will result in the 13th largest public garden in the United States, the Cleveland Botanical Garden and the Holden Arboretum, established within one year of each other in 1930 and 1931, have agreed to merge.
This story reads like a joke: a Chinese millionaire philanthropist shows up in New York City, holds a gourmet luncheon for homeless persons, promises them $300 checks, sings karaoke and does magic tricks, and then reneges on the money. It sounds criminal, but completely complicit was the New York Rescue Mission, which ferried homeless people to the luncheon and apparently got itself $90,000 from the “philanthropist.”
The board of the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky has chosen to preserve a smaller portion of last February’s sinkhole as an exhibit. The serendipitous hole in the ground has contributed to a nearly 60 percent increase in attendance in the last quarter over the previous year.
Authenticity sometimes seems like a rare commodity – yet it is valuable beyond words in the work we do. Here we reprint a moving speech by Paul Hogan to the Buffalo Society of Artists about art, mental health and personal and organizational purpose.
The United Nations and Congressman John Conyers believe that the plans of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to cut off water to 150,000 customers are inhumane and, according to the UN, a potential violation of human rights. Will we “save” Detroit from its bankruptcy, $5 billion of which is DWSD indebtedness, and ignore a potentially serious violation of the human rights of many of its poorest citizens?
The news that the IRS rejected the 501(c)(4) application of a liberal-leaning group in Arkansas is more evidence that the IRS was examining more than just Tea Party organizations during the days of the Lois Lerner scandal. Nonetheless, the recent performance of the IRS on a number of issues, particularly the lost Lerner emails, suggests that it is time to take this brouhaha out of the hands of an overly politicized Congress and give it to an independent counsel, not just to figure out who might have been culpable for doing things wrong, but to resurrect the Service as a vital federal agency that Americans should be able to rely on and trust.