News

New Hampshire voters will decide in November whether or not to add a ban on personal income taxes to the state’s constitution.

Six more patients at the Exeter Hospital have been infected with hepatitis C, bringing the total to 10.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning on a challenge to a plan to redraw the districts for the State’s House of Representatives.

The five petitioners representing towns across the Granite State argue that the House plan is too rigid in its interpretation of the US constitution’s one-man-one-vote clause. A lawyer for the petitioners, Martin Honigberg, says that a looser interpretation is not only legal, but required by an amendment to the New Hampshire constitution.

However much he saw of the world, Ernest Hemingway’s economical style of writing is often referred to as the iceberg theory…meaning that only one-eighth of the story behind a narrative needs to be above water.  We were reminded of this when we found the article "The Art of the Police Report" last year in the Writer’s Chronicle. The article drew lessons for crafting powerful prose from police reports filed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

This year’s effort to pass a school funding constitutional amendment failed where such efforts tend to fail – the New Hampshire house. 

In the words of author Stephen Amidon, “no other figure is the focus of so much passion, controversy, expectation, and disappointment…” regardless of whether it is football or soccer, figure-skating or hockey, watching the world’s top athletes borders on hypnotic… and sometimes stands as proof of our ability to exceed physical human limitations and become something like the gods.

Dr. Daniel Palanker is associate professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University, a member of the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, and senior author on a paper published last month in Nature Photonics describing his work on photovoltaic retinal prosthetics.

Enacting any constitutional amendment is tough. It requires a three-fifths vote by both House and Senate, and two-thirds support from voters at the polls.  Add to this the fact this amendment deals with school funding and that lawmakers have killed 80-odd  Claremont-inspired amendments over the past 14 years, and the guardedness of even the boldest of lawmakers is understandable.

While most of the public’s attention is focused on the education funding amendment, two tax proposals are also up for consideration.

One would ban an income tax, the other would make it much harder to raise new or existing taxes and fees.

If there is any sign of Republican domination of the Legislature, it’s that these two amendments are – basically - flying under the radar.  

GOP leaders like Senator Jeb Bradley are thrilled that after years of talk, they believe voters will finally have a chance to weigh in on the income tax question.  

Thirty-five teens died in car crashes in New Hampshire from 2006 through 2010.  A new study estimates 14 of them would not have died because they wouldn't have been in crashes if the state had made it harder for teens to get driver’s licenses.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group funded by the insurance industry.

The institute looked at death rates nationwide. Then, it looked at how hard it is for a teen to get a license in each state.

The analysis covered 1996 – 2007.

Rising costs and concerns about safety have many people re-evaluating what they eat and where it comes from. A huge portion of Americans consume fatty, sugary and cheap industrial food. Some Americans have started their own crops in community and backyard gardens, and many others would like to start gardening, but don’t know where to begin.  Brett Markhamis an engineer and third generation farmer in New Ipswich, New Hampshire.

As though extra vacation time isn’t a good enough excuse for a modern monarchy, scholars this week will gather to contemplate how the English Crown has remained relevant when so many others have faded away.  The New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler wrote about a revival in academic scholarship regarding the modern royals.

Tomorrow will bring a long-awaiting moment for the internet…it’s IPV6 Day, when a whole new version of the web will officially go live. But don’t worry, says our next guest, there should be no change in the way most of us use the internet…as long as everything goes as planned. Here to explain IPV6 and a few other tech stories bubbling up is Rob Fleischman. He’s a web developer and entrepreneur, CTO of Xerocole, and Word of Mouth’s explainer of all things wired. 

Rob explains some challenges for developers when IPV6 goes live:

Representatives of five New Hampshire towns say the Environmental Protection Agency is imposing wastewater limits on the Great Bay that are a financial burden. They made their case to two members of the Congressional Committee on Oversight at a field hearing held in Exeter Monday. While towns and regulators haggle over the cost of improving waste water treatment, time may be running out for the Great Bay estuary.

A Contentious Issue