With two days to go before a planned strike, the Minnesota Nurses Association is going public with stories of alleged poor patient care to back its assertion that Twin Cities hospitals are dangerously understaffed. The union, which says hospital staffing is at the core of its dispute with management, has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon to tell some of those stories.

Santa Barbara received a special visit from Queen Meg on Friday, a comedic performance of a royal pain who claims to be running to be the next governor of California. The farcical impersonation of candidate Meg Whitman was sponsored by the California Nurses Association, who created the guerilla theater at Shoreline Park to illustrate what they claim are Ms. Whitman's unscrupulous defense of business and her attacks on the environment.

Republicans have yet to formally decide their gubernatorial nominee, but California Democrats are already launching their campaign against the candidate they expect to win: frontrunner Meg Whitman.

After spending more than $80 million and building a major lead in public opinion polls, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman may finally have met her match Tuesday in the parking lot of the Asian Garden Mall. The billionaire candidate was delivering her stump speech to about 150 people at an open-air rally when about 50 protesters from the California Nurses Association and its schoolteacher allies interrupted by chanting and blowing whistles just a few dozen yards away.

Thousands of nurses in Minnesota and California on Friday announced plans to walk off the job for a single day next month if they don't reach contract agreements with hospitals. The nurses — 12,000 in the Minneapolis area and nearly 13,000 at hospitals across California — both set June 10 as a strike date. The walkout stands to be the largest in U.S. history.

More than 12,000 California registered nurses remain scheduled to strike for 24 hours next Thursday, most of them at University of California hospitals, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United announced today.

In a stunning whistleblower lawsuit, the world's largest pharmaceutical company is being sued over the dangerous practice of illegally promoting a kidney transplant drug for unapproved uses -- and targeting African-Americans, even though they are at high risk of complications.