Nestled in an industrial estate near the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, Jiamushi Furniture Company has crafted quality wooden furniture since 2002. Its sweeping showroom teems with minimalist Scandinavian, rustic European and ornate Chinese styles, though when it comes to the wood itself, one variety is the undisputed favorite: North American red oak, known for its versatility and distinctive grain.
There is hardly a rifle that is more enshrined in American culture than the lever-action. These are the rifles that helped tame the Wild West. These are the rifles that have been in the hands of guides and trappers and frontiersmen.
These rifles for a time were the most common afield in search of deer for the family table and a nice trophy for the den wall. And if there is one cartridge modern shooters associate most with the lever-action rifle, it is the equally venerable .30-30 Winchester.
PennEast Pipeline LLC yesterday vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a lower court ruling that looms as a major impediment to its proposed 120 mile-project to bring natural gas from Pennsylvania into New Jersey.
The company announced in a press release it would seek to overturn a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that denied PennEast’s bid to condemn state-owned lands for its $1 billion project.
Can Congress authorize a private corporation to sue a state over it's objection? This might be a very interesting 11th amendment - sovereign immunity case if it makes it to the Supreme Court. If the Court finds in the favor of PennEast, it would give Congress enormous power to allow them to grant any party the ability to sue a state over any thing Congress see fits. But I doubt the Supreme Court will go that far, but I don't see how you open the barndoor part the way without opening all the way.
I've always thought sovereign immunity is a terrible concept in law, a throwback to the era of Kings and Queens. I don't think the government should be above the law, but instead should be held to same standard as private individuals and businesses. Yes, that would make life more expensive for taxpayers when government screws up. But it would make government more responsible like private businesses.
The total amount of money raised in property taxes by local governments increased by 2.4 percent this year to a total of $36.6 billion, according to a report released Tuesday by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office.
The report found the majority of that revenue, nearly $23 billion, was levied by school districts.
County governments collected $6 billion in property tax levies, about 16 percent of property taxes in the state.
Property taxes in the state are capped at 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. Local governments can vote to override the cap, which has been in place since 2012.
New Yorkers pay some of the highest property taxes in the country and the highest as a percentage of home value. Still, the last decade has led to a slower growth of tax levies statewide.
The report found that from 2017 to 2019, property tax levies grew the most in cities, 6.1 percent. In towns, the levies grew 4.4 percent. School district leaves have grown an even 4 percent.
Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.
Here in the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet — or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium. Nowhere else has the United States saddled another country with so much of its nuclear waste, a product of its Cold War atomic testing program.