Some people who don’t use broadband think they’re not missing much. But for those whose homes, libraries, public safety networks and healthcare facilities will have broadband access because of the $1.8 billion the government awarded last week, it will make a huge difference. One of the larger of the 94 broadband projects funded last week – $28.8 million to Peoples Telephone Cooperative (PTC) in eastern Texas - will connect as many as 190 community institutions to broadband, benefitting as many as 241,000 people and 10,300 businesses, and creating an estimated 100 jobs. The grants and loans announced last week are only a portion of the $7 billion

Federal and California officials are weighing tiny tweaks to the state-administered food stamp program that advocates claim could cut the total amount of benefits received by certain beneficiaries, according to Alexandra Zavis of the Los Angeles Times. It now looks like the US Department of Agriculture is encouraging California to drop certain provisions peculiar to the way the state has managed food stamp programs since 1974.

Another day, another food recall. A California slaughterhouse is voluntarily recalling 1 million pounds of ground beef after seven people sickened by E.coli contamination had their illnesses traced to the meat. According to an Associated Press brief in The New York Times, the recalled ground beef was processed by

Crews may be battling wildfires from San Diego to Siskiyou counties as California's fire season gets underway in earnest, but officials here are focusing on one of last year's most publicized blazes---a deadly conflagration perhaps made worse by a delayed response. Smokey the Bear himself is now in the firing line. According to Paul Pringle of the Los Angeles Times, both of California's U.S. Senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, along with a number of Southland congressmen are demanding

Dave McKinney of the Chicago Sun-Times reports: "The stagnant economy and double-digit unemployment rates in parts of Illinois have led to a record number of families getting food stamps." But hard times aren't the only reason: the program's accessibility and consistent federal funding are also partly responsible.  In Illinois, 781,000 households now get food stamps, an 11.9 percent jump from a year ago. Applications are rising even faster:

Broadband funding in the stimulus bill was largely billed as for rural areas without internet access. However, Chicago  will also get some of that federal money, the Associated Press reports. Two Chicago groups will get a combined $16 million in stimulus money for broadband, with the Dept. of Commerce providing $7 million to the Smart Chicago Broadband Adoption Program and $9 million to the Smart Chicago Public Computer Centers project.  The public computer centers project will

They may be preliminary, but the results are nonetheless shocking: Nearly 70 percent of the 19 different brands of foreign and domestic extra-virgin olive oil tested by researchers at UC Davis weren't what they claimed. Despite the assurance of labels and premium prices, much of the oil was adulterated with cheaper refined oils, pressed from olives already past peak, damaged by heat or light or just plain old and stale,

Federal regulators are on the verge of approving the world's first 'Frankenfish' -- genetically modified Atlantic salmon engineered to grow from fingerling to filet in half the time.  According to Les Blumenthal of McClatchy Newspapers, "if the Food and Drug Administration approves it, the salmon would be the first transgenic animal headed for the dinner table."

Some 4,200 bags of spinach, possibly tainted by E. coli, were recalled by California-based Ready Pac Foods Inc. yesterday, after federal labs detected the bacteria in a random sample test, according to the Associated Press. The source of the contamination is unknown.

A new California law is settling the ruffled feathers of the state's chicken ranchers, requiring eggs imported into the state to meet the same anti-cruelty standards as those laid in California.