“The settlement was reached after intensive negotiations spanning more than six months, sessions in which the parties’ interests were fully and vigorously represented and all issues robustly negotiated,” the mediators said in a statement.

Nestled in Silicon Valley, San Jose is one of the nation’s most prosperous cities, possibly making it easier for businesses to raise prices without suffering a drop-off in sales, says Michael Reich, the University of California-Berkeley economics professor who has been studying the effects of San Jose’s higher minimum wage.

Newspapers have long been vessels to move public opinion. Unfortunately what some call crony capitalism others call public service and of course the majority of citizens don’t care.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday that the Justice Department is formally supporting a US Sentencing Commission proposal to allow some nonviolent drug offenders currently doing time in federal prisons to seek sentence reductions. The proposal would extend sentencing reforms already approved by the commission by making them retroactive.

Majority leader Eric Cantor apparently lost all contact with his constituents, rarely showing up locally and, when he did, surrounded by eight staff members. When a poll was taken early in the year, those who favored Cantor were outnumbered by two to one by those turned off!

I learned that Magisterial District Judge John Winters and his staff, had various ex parte communications with DEFENDANT Cheuvront’s attorney and law partner, Bob Wee to have Mr. Vonderheide’s complaint withdrawn, prior to yesterday’s hearing and without Mr. Vonderheide’s involvement! Mr. Vonderheide’s complaint alleges that Attorney Cheuvront initiated a physical altercation as a direct result of Mr. Vonderheide’s attempt to expose the ugly side of the court system. That the ‘system’ would then conspire to thwart Mr. Vonderheide’s attempt to get justice for this assault on both his person and First Amendment rights, should trouble you.

LEHIGH VALLEY MORNING CALL: A month after state lawmakers decided to study legalizing online gambling, Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire owner of the Bethlehem Sands casino and an ardent foe of online gambling, gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association.

THE GUARDIAN: …Iraqi officials told the Guardian that two divisions of Iraqi soldiers – roughly 30,000 men – simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters. Isis extremists roamed freely on Wednesday through the streets of Mosul, openly surprised at the ease with which they took Iraq’s second largest city after three days of sporadic fighting.

FORTUNE:… A new study from researchers at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Indiana estimates that corruption on the state level is costing Americans in the 10 most corrupt states an average of $1,308 per year, or 5.2% of those states’ average expenditures per year.

NEW YORK TIMES: …Around the same time that [Sydney Nye] was turning her attention to college applications, Delaware’s governor, Jack Markell, announced a program called Getting to Zero. Its goal was to get all high-school seniors with an SAT score of at least a 1,500 (out of 2,400) on the SAT to enroll in college. In recent years, state data show, about 20 percent of such teenagers did not

Apparently Rose doesn’t’ think what he did was so wrong as to merit a public apology. He has admitted he did it and paid a big price. Why isn’t he entitled to his beliefs?