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Two towns in California have passed laws requiring newly built homes to install solar panels. Is mandating green energy the wave of the future?

Can you force people to go green?Two cities in the Golden State have recently made it mandatory that new homes install solar panels.On Tuesday, Sebastapol, a small town in the Sonoma Valley, become the second city in the state to pass an ordinance requiring all new buildings and additions to put up solar voltaic panels.The liberal town of Sebastopol has fewer than 8,000 residents and passed the law with little controversy. Sebastopol’s ordinance orders that the solar systems must provide 2 watts of power per square foot or offset 75 percent of the structure’s electricity use.

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Highest level in millions of years.

Some records we’d prefer not to be broken. Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since the U.S. government began recording the concentration of the gas in the air, and likely the first time in millions of years. High levels of carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere and increases global temperatures. The last time it reached 400 parts per million was in the epoch called the Pliocene at least 3 million years ago, when sea levels may have been as much as 60 to 80 feet higher than they are today. For all of human civilization, carbon-dioxide levels have hovered around 280 parts per million.

Read it at The New York Times

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By Seema Mody, reporter Doing business in the U.S. almost exclusively, rather than expanding abroad, is looking like a pretty good recipe for success.According to Thomson Reuters, 150 of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 make 95 to 100 percent of their revenue inside U.S. borders.Thomson Reuters analyst John Kozey calls them the "Sold in the USA" portfolio, and these basket of stocks on average are outperforming the S&P 500 benchmark on a 12-month and 24-month basis.

Over credit card lawsuits.

Watch out Eric Schneiderman, there’s another rising Democratic attorney general going after banks. In a suit filed by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, the state is accusing JPMorgan Chase of having “committed debt collection abuses against tens of thousands of California consumers.” The thousands of lawsuits filed by JPMorgan allegedly used questionable documents and incomplete court records, creating a deluge of legal abuses for consumers and the state.

Read it at CNBC

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Just days after Glenn Beck picked up a deal with the cable provider, he’s back to the headline-grabbing antics that ended his days at Fox News. Does Cablevision know what it’s getting into?

Say this for Glenn Beck: the guy really knows how to make an entrance.Just as it was announced last week that the cable distributor Cablevision has picked up the conservative shock-jock’s fledgling Internet channel, The Blaze, Beck has again found himself fending off a series of controversies of his own making.First, there was his keynote address at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in which he appeared to compare Mike Bloomberg to Hitler—only to later say that in fact, he was only comparing the New York City mayor to Lenin.

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The ‘end of journalism as we know it?’ The media’s hysteria over the bogeyman billionaires’ interest in buying Tribune Co. reflects our heretical politics.

When billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett forked over $142 million to purchase 63 newspapers last year, most other newspapers didn’t take much notice. Buffett’s decision seemed backward-looking but deserving of praise: to us journalists, anyone rich and reckless enough to assume the cost of operating a newspaper in this grim media environment was worth celebrating.But absent from the scattered coverage of the Buffett mega-purchase was the usual finger-wagging and moralizing about media concentration and the potential dangers of a politically engaged owner interfering in his newspapers’ political coverage.

Should students get the same loan rates as banks at the discount window?

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has just introduced a new bill, the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, to offer student loans at the same rates that the Federal Reserve charges big banks through its discount window lending program.  At the moment, that rate is about 0.75%.  The rates on federally guaranteed student loans, meanwhile, is set to double to 6.8% this summer."Some may say we can't afford this proposal," said Senator Warren as she introduced the bill.

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By Darren Booth Updating your Facebook status and garnering followers on Twitter could get you VIP treatment at the airport from American Airlines.American has partnered with Klout, a website and mobile app that tracks an individual's power in social media, to provide a complimentary free day pass to any of the airline's Admirals Club airport lounges to people with a Klout score of 55 or above.What's a Klout score, you ask? It's a numerical value of 1 to 100 derived from a proprietary algorithm that measures the breadth and strength of a person's online social influence.

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Just when everyone wrote us off as the next Greece, we started shrinking our deficit, then shrunk it some more. Daniel Gross on what’s behind the numbers.

A few funny things happened this spring as the U.S. hurtled along the road to fiscal degeneracy. The annual deficit shrunk by nearly a third, the size of the debt owned by investors began to shrink, and the government borrowed money for free.Yes, the Golden Age of Deficit Reduction has begun.The official April Treasury Monthly Statement comes out on Friday. But the Congressional Budget Office’s monthly review for April, released earlier this week, bears good news.

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In just a matter of hours.

You really can find anything on the Internet these days. A group of cyberthieves pulled off two precision operations in February and made off with more than $45 million from thousands of ATMs in just a matter of hours, according to an indictment that was unsealed by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Thursday. The thieves, who were located in over a dozen countries, pulled off the heist with “surgical precision,” according to The New York Times, and made 36,000 transactions in just 10 hours. The organization’s suspected ringleader, a 23-year-old named Alberto Lajud-Peña, was found dead on April 27 in the Dominican Republic. Seven other people, all American citizens, have been charged with conspiracy to commit “access device fraud.”

Read it at New York Times