California, Internet | featured news

A Berkeley city councilman has proposed a tiny levy on senders of large batches of unwanted time-wasters. The most courageous politician in California — probably the nation — is a Berkeley city councilman, Gordon Wozniak.

A California woman has been fired from her job as an ice cream store manager after she referred to President Barack Obama with a racial slur on Facebook and wrote “maybe he will get assassinated."

The California tax man cometh, and he's headed for the Internet. State tax collectors are preparing to crack down on renegade Internet merchants who don't collect sales taxes, and nearly 100 new state auditors, lawyers and other specialists are being hired to help over the next three years.

Conservative media publisher and activist Andrew Breitbart, who was behind investigations that led to the resignations of former Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York and former U.S. Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod, has died in Los Angeles. He was 43....

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says his company is now seeing almost 250 million tweets every day, up from 100 million at the beginning of 2011. That’s a billion tweets every four or five days. Costolo made the comments in an on-stage interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Monday night.

Lawmakers on Friday sent Gov. Jerry Brown a compromise bill that delays California's effort to force online retailers such as Amazon.com to collect the state's sales taxes while retailers lobby Congress for national rules governing online sales taxes. The state Assembly approved AB155 on a bipartisan, 59-8 vote in the final hours of this year's legislative session. The bill had passed the Senate, 36-1, hours earlier.

Amazon.com Inc has proposed a hiring spree of 7,000 jobs in California if state leaders put a recently enacted online sales tax on hold for two years.

Hackers launched another online attack Wednesday against a California transit agency that found itself in the middle of a debate about free speech after it turned off cellphone service in its stations last week to thwart a potential protest.

The online retailer wants voters to strike down the California law requiring the company to collect sales taxes. Wal-Mart, labor groups and other opponents could wage a costly, noisy battle against such a referendum. Escalating its fight to thwart a new levy on Internet purchases, Amazon.com says it will ask California voters to overturn a state law requiring all companies with operations or affiliates here to collect sales tax.

Amazon.com Inc., the world’s largest Internet retailer, said it will sever ties with its affiliates in California if the state enacts a new law that requires the company to collect taxes on online purchases. California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation yesterday mandating sales-tax collections by Web retailers, including Amazon, on purchases by state residents. The state’s pending budget plan counts on $200 million from the law. In an e-mail before the bill was signed, Amazon said the legislation was “unconstitutional and counterproductive.”