The Midday Brief: Jan. 3, 2011

Your afternoon reading:

• '"The Tea Party in Texas has been working overtime to ensure that we have conservative leadership in the Texas House,' says the unknown producer of this anti-Joe Straus video, which appears on the website StopJoeStraus.com, itself something of a mystery." — Speaker's race: Any votes moving beneath froth?, Trail Blazers

• "A judge in Austin will consider challenges to his blocking of a proposal that could allow dozens of states to dump radioactive waste in far West Texas." — Hearing on order blocking nuke waste plan in Texas, The Associated Press

• "A letter purportedly signed by La Familia drug cartel announcing a one-month truce circulated Sunday in the western state of Michoacan." — Mexican cartel announces 1-month truce, The Associated Press

• "While Texas grew dramatically in the last decade, gaining four seats in Congress in the 2010 census, Ohio lost two congressional seats and grew only a little — adding 183,000 residents in 10 years. Texas grew that much in just five and a half months." — Ohioans' exodus to Texas is Lone Star State's gain, The Dallas Morning News

• "Mexico plans a shake-up of its corruption-ridden immigration institute, officials said, after a year that saw some of the worst atrocities against illegal migrants trekking through the country — including the mass slaughter of 72 Central and South Americans trying to reach the United States." — Mexico plans immigration shake-up, The Associated Press

New in The Texas Tribune:

• "When foster kids bounce from placement to placement, they leave their belongings with state child welfare workers — where advocates say they often get misplaced, given to the wrong child or even stolen." — Foster Kids Struggle to Claim Belongings From CPS

• "It was a very interesting and newsworthy year for Texas politics and public policy, so it makes sense that traffic on our still-new-ish site would be robust — but even we optimists at Trib HQ didn't imagine that it would this robust." — Lots of Good News in the Trib's 2010 Analytics