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Makes observations about distinctions that have been made about possible recipients of an earthquake-relief package of $8.6 billion signed by President Bill Clinton. Illegal immigrants versus citizens; Argument that long-term aid should only go to legal residents; Why the discrimination may be hard to practice; Amount of undocumented immigrants in California; Figures from Governor Pete Wilson; How illegal immigrants contribute to California.

Mentions the California Environmental Dialogue coalition, which published a paper on the state's transport policy. Suggestion that tolls and congestion pricing be utilized; Support of economists for road-pricing; Concern of politicians over the issue of charging money to discourage driving; Acceptance of high-occupancy toll lanes or HOTS by California commuters.

Informs that the June 2, 1998 ballot in California was comprised of an open system in which voters could cross party lines. The vote producing the longest ballot paper in United States history; Voters electing Gray Davis, the candidate with the least amount of personal finances as governor; How the voters were actually voting against Davis' rivals; Disdain for money showing itsel fin the race for the Senate; Vote to dismantle bilingual education; Defeat of a bill to prevent trade unions from using members' dues for political purposes.

This article reports on the ban on plastic shopping bags by San Francisco, California. The bags are a ubiquitous scourge of city life and prohibited them may save up to 800,000 gallons of oil a year, while reducing landfill waste and municipal clean-up costs. Although several other cities around the world have already taken this step, San Francisco is the first American city.

The article focuses on the mayor's race in San Diego, California. Republican Dick Murphy, seeking re-election as mayor had expected a repeat of the 2000 election, a two-man run-off on November 2nd with county supervisor Ron Roberts. Instead he lost the headlines in a three-way fight to the Democrats' Donna Frye, a 52-year-old sun-bleached blonde surfer-turned-activist councilwoman and open-government campaigner. Frye had spurned the non-partisan March primary and declared her candidacy at the end of September. That was too late for her name to be on the ballot paper. So Frye invited her supporters to write her name in. More than 155,000 voters obliged. San Diego's reputation as a Republican stronghold is now more myth than reality. Though Republicans rule San Diego County, the city itself has a Democratic majority who, in the presidential election, gave John Kerry a 12-percentage-point victory over George W. Bush. Most of the nine-member city council are Democrats. One explanation for Frye's backing is that the political establishment is being punished for its own incompetence and perceived corruption.

Around five exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) of information was created in 2002, up from around two exabytes in 1999, according to the latest "How Much Information?" survey produced by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California in Berkeley. Overall, the amount of information being produced is growing by 30% a year. America is the single largest producer, producing around half of the new information on magnetic and optical media, and a third of the paper-based and film-based information. The researchers, led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, also estimated the volume of information flows through electronic channels, such as telephone calls, radio and television transmissions, and internet traffic.

As generations of biology students have discovered to their morbid delight, the mating behavior of insects can be bizarre. The classic example is lovemaking among praying mantises, where the female has sex with her partner, then eats him for dessert. But the mantis has nothing on its distant cousin, the orb-weaving spider. In this case, though, the male seems to offer himself as a sacrifice, to the point of actually killing himself before the female has a chance to. His heartbeat ceases and he curls up and dies--even before the female can begin attacking him. Theories abound that male self-sacrifice may be a logical extension of the practice employed by many animals, including insects and spiders, of the male bringing a gift of food to encourage the female to mate. Matthias Foellmer of Concordia University in Montreal and Daphne Fairbairn of the University of California, Riverside, believe they have found at least part of the answer. As they explain in a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, other males may fight over access to the female and try to dislodge any male that has an inserted palp. However, the palps of dead males are fixed in an inflated state, making them hard to remove. As a result, dead males may act as plugs to prevent other males from copulating, ensuring that the suicidal male, not a rival, fathers the offspring.

Reports on the plans of former Los Angeles, California, Mayor Richard Riordan, popular among journalists, to put $5 million of his fortune towards starting a new weekly newspaper in Los Angeles, the 'L.A. Examiner.' Editors Ken Layne and Matt Welch, two experienced newspapermen who were pioneers in the online world of weblogs, have put together a colourful 52-page tabloid full of articles by an array of seasoned L.A. journalists and a few well-known outsiders, such as Billy Crystal. The aim, says Mr Layne, is to reflect the cultural energy of the city and, naturally, to cover local stories better than the existing media does. This is a reference to the 'Los Angeles Times,' the dominant local daily. Until October, 2002, Los Angeles had two free weekly "alternative" papers, the 'Los Angeles Weekly' and the 'New Times LA.'

The city of Santa Clarita, California has launched a pilot diaper-recycling program. The town will collect used diapers from 225 families, and begin the process of turning them into things like shoe insoles, roof shingles and wallpaper. Santa Clarita is an appropriate place to start because three out of four Santa Claritans are under 44, and more than 150 new residents are born every month. The recycling plant itself is being managed by Knowaste, a New York-based company that specializes in the recycling of absorbent hygiene products and turning them into pulp and plastic. Santa Clarita currently recycles about 40% of its garbage, but it wants to increase that proportion to 75%, and, according to Knowaste, diapers are one of the main bits of home rubbish still going to landfills

Focuses on the mathematical puzzle of how to enclose the greatest volume within the smallest area of material. Discussion of how bubbles do this naturally; Paper by two mathematicians in California which takes another step in proving that soapy water traps two pockets of air as efficiently as it traps one; The work of Joel Hass and Roger Schafly; The double-bubble theorem.

The article reports on the outlook for fax machines. Stand-alone fax machines have been especially hard-hit due to the popularity of e-mail. Peter Davidson, a fax consultant, says that sales of fax machines worldwide fell from 15m in 2000 to 13m in 2001 and are still falling. He estimates that faxes now account for just 4% of companies' phone bills, down from 13% ten years ago. Americans especially are shedding them fast: by 2006, Mr Davidson predicts, their spending on fax machines will be less than half what it was in 2002. In January, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, fined Fax.com, a marketing company based in California, $5.4m for mass-faxing unsolicited advertisements in violation of a law passed in 1991. Stronger limits on fax marketing, requiring anyone sending an advertising fax to have written permission from the recipient, are due to come into force in January 2005. New technologies and regulations will not kill off faxes just yet. The machines are still helpful for communicating with people in rural areas or poor countries where internet access is spotty. They also transmit signatures: although electronic signatures have been legally binding in America since 2000, hardly anyone actually uses them. Publishers, among the first to embrace fax machines because they sped up the editing process, may be the last to bid them goodbye. Stephen Brough of Profile Books, a London publisher affiliated with The Economist, says that faxes are still useful in transmitting orders to distributors, and in allowing authors to indicate changes on page proofs easily. Because it is such a pain to operate, the fax is generally used with discretion. Faxes also allow lawyers, among others, to have exchanges that they can later shred, without leaving an electronic record.