Word: california
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Polls suggest that up to 75% of Americans back mercy killing, though most state efforts to make it legal have not succeeded. Voters in Oregon passed a Death with Dignity Act by a 60% majority last year, making it the only state to legalize assisted suicide. California and Washington defeated "aid in dying" referendums in the early 1990s. And Michigan rejected an assisted-suicide initiative this year by a landslide of 71% to 29%. (No state allows the sort of mercy killing that Kevorkian aired last week.) Courts have largely bowed out of the issue. In 1990 the Supreme Court...
...California freeway from Mountain View to Cupertino was jammed late Tuesday afternoon. Netscape's entire work force was traveling as if in procession to a nearby college auditorium--one big enough to accommodate all 1,200 for what would be the saddest-ever of Netscape's legendary "all-hands" meetings. The rumors had become official: America Online was buying their feisty company. As you might imagine, none of the people there greeted this as good news. "Netscape is dead," an employee said bitterly. "This was the funeral...
Giannini also made a career out of lending to out-of-favor industries. He helped the California wine industry get started, then bankrolled Hollywood at a time when the movie industry was anything but proven. In 1923 he created a motion-picture loan division and helped Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith start United Artists. When Walt Disney ran $2 million over budget on Snow White, Giannini stepped in with a loan...
...switched focus. Feeling betrayed, Giannini returned to retake control. He had always encouraged employees and depositors to become shareholders of the bank. To win a 1932 proxy fight, he knocked on doors again, getting all those working-class shareholders to give him their votes. He then consolidated TransAmerica's California bank holdings under the Bank of America name, which would survive when regulators forced TransAmerica to break up in the '50s, just a few years after A.P.'s death...
...could have been a billionaire but disdained great wealth, believing it would make him lose touch with the people he wanted to serve. For years he accepted virtually no pay, and upon being granted a surprise $1.5 million bonus one year promptly gave it all to the University of California. "Money itch is a bad thing," he once said. "I never had that trouble...