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A bill making its way through North Carolina would make it mandatory for teens to provide notarized parental consent before being tested for STDs. The measure—the most explicit of its kind in any state—would also require parental permission for birth control, substance abuse treatment and mental health care.

A crude deceit is at the very heart of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's “Working Families Flexibility Act,” which the Virginia Republican recently slid through the House. It eliminates a central piece of America’s middle-class framework: the eight-hour workday and 40-hour week. Under the 1938 Fair Labor Law, bosses can make hourly employees work extra, but only by paying an overtime wage for the added hours. Cantor's plan takes that away.

As prompted by the state's new immigration laws, the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners is requiring already-licensed and credentialed medical doctors to prove their citizenship. It's an asinine move that will, at best, waste a lot of time and government resources or, in the worst case scenario, take away doctors from a state already in dire need of better medical care.

Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is considering whether the multibillion-dollar collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts should be considered city assets that potentially could be sold to cover $15 billion in debt.How much is the art at the DIA worth? Nobody knows exactly, but several billion dollars might well be a low estimate.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called climate change an “esoteric theory” when asked about the rising sea levels that 99-percent of scientists believe contributed to Hurricane Sandy’s devastation. It's not the first time Christie has ignored the other 99-percent of something.

A staggering new statistic does much to explain why fast food workers are striking from New York to Milwaukee. According to Fast Food Forward, 84% of fast food workers surveyed report having experienced wage theft at least once. For delivery workers, the number is an incredulous 100 percent.

Shoppers in the U.S. will soon have more information about where their meat comes from after new federal labeling rules went into effect Thursday. "Consumers want and have the right to know where their food comes from," the National Farmers Union says.

The Illinois senate voted 37-21 Wednesday in favor of legislation that would mandate comprehensive sex education in classrooms that teach sex ed, a move that would end abstinence-only programs in some schools and which has riled some religious activists.

Human and civil rights groups generally responded to Obama's foreign policy speech by saying that though they welcomed the president's decision to directly address long-ignored issues, but there remained enormous problems with his many of his declarations and formulations surrounding these controversial policies.

While Chicago insists it must close these schools to close budget gaps, it has just announced that it will be dedicated as much as $100 million in public funds for the construction of a new basketball arena at DePaul University — which is about a third of the cost of the project.