A proposed citywide “soda tax” failed to win enough votes in Richmond, Calif. in 2012, but that hasn’t stopped other U.S. cities, and even foreign nations, from taking notice of the concept. Last month, elected officials in Mexico announced their intent to become the first nation in the Americas to impose a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages – and they are looking to Richmond for help.

The presence of an arts scene is always an indicator of great culture and L.A. boasts a thriving one. A stroll through downtown and its surrounding districts reveals a vast offering of art exhibits, ethnocentric festivals, and architectural gems. Not to mention all of those countless food trucks that churn out anything from Korean-Mexican fusion dishes by the Kogi truck to whiskey and Lucky Charms-flavored ice cream sandwiches by COOLHAUS, a philosophy of ice cream architecture inspired by the Bauhaus movement and Rem Koolhaas. 

Their sentiments echoed the findings of a poll released last week that shows that an overwhelming majority of Californians want the state to act now to address global warming instead of waiting for the economy to improve – with the strongest support voiced by Latinos, African Americans and Asians. The Public Policy Institute of California survey found that nearly two-thirds of whites felt that way, while 88 percent of Latinos, 83 percent of blacks, and 78 percent of Asians held that view.

California ranked just ahead of Texas, which finished in 42nd place. New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts earned the highest rankings, while Nevada, Mississippi, and New Mexico ranked lowest. The report, released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in partnership with Children Now, determined rankings by taking into account the state’s performance in 16 areas, including graduation rates, parental unemployment rates, and the percentage of children who are uninsured. California placed 41st in 2012 as well. 

Ro Khanna, formerly a high-ranking trade official in the Obama administration, announced this week his bid for California’s 17th District congressional seat, which is currently being held by the venerable Mike Honda. Khanna and Honda are both Democrats likely to be pitted against each other in 2014, due to new state mandates which allow two opponents from the same party to run against each other in the general election.  

Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla was the target of a lawsuit filed March 12 by a national organization that aims to gain access to Martin’s Beach, near Half Moon Bay in Northern California. Mike Wallace, a spokesman for the Surfrider Foundation, told India-West the national organization has been working on this issue for three years and learned while researching the case that Khosla was the owner of the 89-acre property above the crescent-shaped beach. 

In many people's experience, California consists of Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, and the highways that connect them. In reality, these urban centers make up only a fraction of the whole. According to the 2010 Census, geographically the state of California is more than 94 percent rural. Surprise Valley, Lost Hills, Raisin City, Mecca -- these are the communities that make up "the rest" of California. Photographer Lisa M. Hamilton  has delved into the collections of the California Historical Society to connect present-day stories with the past to create I See Beauty in This Life: A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California.

San Francisco is now part of a statewide trend that has resulted in majority becoming minority, with minority continuing to surge and multiply. The latest census showed that whites have slowly shrunk to 48 percent of the population in San Francisco, becoming another minority in a city that has no majority. The city's Asian population, on the other hand, has risen above the 33 percent mark. That is, one in three San Francisco residents has an Asian face. For the population under 18, the number for Asian closer to 40 percent.

On Election Day, Arizona remained a red state -- electing Sheriff Joe Arpaio to a sixth term in office, Republican Jeff Flake to the U.S. Senate, and voting for Mitt Romney for president -- while its neighbors, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, went blue for President Obama. According to political pundits, the reason those states voted Democrat this year was because of their fast-growing Latino populations. If having a large Latino population was all a state needed to turn blue, then Arizona, which is almost one-third Latino, should have been blue, too. But it wasn’t. 

The report revealed that the state had spent $4 billion on the death penalty while carrying out 13 executions since 1978, when the punishment was revived. The study further projected that by 2030, death penalty expenditure will balloon to $9 billion for death-row housing, health care, legal appeals and the actual executions. In addition, today’s California death-row population of 724 inmates—already the largest in the nation--would grow to more than a thousand.