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Neil Thomas was an investigative reporting fellow at The Texas Tribune in 2017. He received a master's degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a writer and an editor for the Kennedy School Review. He previously worked at the Australian National University, the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center, and Danwei Media.
State Rep. Cecil Bell is a member of a committee that oversees utility districts in Texas. Many of those districts give his construction companies big contracts, while some of their lawyers contribute to his campaign. Full Story
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Since 2016, public entities have had to reveal the businesses they have large contracts with. These "1295 disclosures" reveal numerous legislators among the contractors — and some of those lawmakers have sponsored or voted on bills that help those same public entities. Full Story
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U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is pushing legislation to rename the street outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., after pro-democracy dissident Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who died in Chinese custody on Thursday. Full Story
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