On May 8, voters in Senate District 22 will choose one of these candidates as Kip Averitt's successor: a veteran lawmaker-turned-lobbyist in a bad year for that kind of hyphenate, a 9/11 Pentagon survivor with residency questions dangling over his campaign, a Tea-steeped nullification fan and ... a Democrat. Full Story
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The Port of Houston Authority is poised to make the Lone Star State the top U.S. trade partner with communist Cuba after gaining permission for its container vessels to sail there. Full Story
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Hey, Governor, you couldn't have served up that bit of Texas color in your Newsweek interview? Full Story
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Texas’ congested air space is preventing the deployment of unmanned aerial drones to the southern border, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Full Story
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Amid reports that a merger deal might soon be struck between Houston-based Continental Airlines and United Airlines, with the latter as the surviving company headquartered in Chicago, state Rep. Garnet Coleman discusses Houston's long-standing relationship with Continental. Full Story
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A U.S. district judge has sentenced embattled former state Rep. Terri Hodge to a year in prison in a Dallas City Hall corruption scandal that has already netted several other convictions. Full Story
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Debra Lehrmann may have violated campaign finance laws during her bid to become the Republican Supreme Court nominee, according to a complaint filed today with the Texas Ethics Commission. Full Story
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We've created three new maps for visualizing district-level demographics in Texas schools. Full Story
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In a new statewide ranking of public schools that we published yesterday, the Dallas Independent School District boasts seven of the top 25 high schools but also 18 in the bottom quartile. Not surprisingly, the best ones have a small student population, while the worst ones are megacampuses — an example of a larger trend in school rankings data. Full Story
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Hundreds of school districts can continue giving failing students inflated grades, after a Travis County Civil Court judge declined to rule in a lawsuit challenging the state’s interpretation of a new law mandating “honest grades.” Full Story
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Every Friday since a blast at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed 29 miners, graduate students at UT's LBJ School of Public Affairs have been treated to an insider briefing. The name of their course is Managing Crises, and their professor, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, is dealing with a big one. Full Story
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Criminal justice advocates today told the Texas Public Safety Commission that their proposal to fix the broken Driver Responsibility Program fell far short of the comprehensive approach needed to help more than 1.2 million Texans who have lost their licenses because of the program's steep surcharges. Full Story
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Setting a date for a tete-a-tete between Gov. Rick Perry and Democrat Bill White will take awhile. The Perry camp is refusing to debate White until the former Houston mayor releases more of his income tax returns. Full Story
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Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst went to El Paso today, talked with state, local and federal police, took an aerial tour over the dangerous borderlands and pronounced that Mexico's drug war is a "very serious threat" to all Texans — a threat the feds aren't protecting you from. Full Story
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It's an email you'd expect to see taped up at a coffee shop, not sent out from the Department of State Health Services: "Missing Puppy Found!" Full Story
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The Arizona immigration bill and Texas, earmarks for Kay and the dropout debacle. Full Story
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Even as violence near the border rages and security becomes a more pressing issue, discussions about unifying Big Bend National Park with Mexico may be gaining momentum. Full Story
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Since his appointment, the alternately amiable and peevish, typically cowboy-boot-shod chairman of the Texas Forensic Science Commission has comported himself as a virtuoso of the bureaucratic dawdle. With the commission's investigation of the now-notorious Cameron Todd Willingham case "still in its infancy," John Bradley has this to say about when it might conclude its review: "However long it takes, that’s however long it takes.” Full Story
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We've built a searchable database of public school rankings based on data collected by the Houston-based nonprofit Children At Risk. In contrast to the Texas Education Agency's "ratings," which rely almost entirely on the percentage of students passing the TAKS test, the rankings blend 12 different measures for elementary schools, 10 for middle schools and 14 for high schools — including TAKS results, ACT and SAT scores, AP exams, attendance rates, graduation rates and the percentage of economically disadvantaged students on every campus. How does your school stack up? Full Story
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Ask Gov. Rick Perrys chief spokesman, Mark Miner, a question on any issue these days and the answer will invariably begin, Liberal trial lawyer Bill White Full Story