In case you were planning any trips to violence-ridden Mexico, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety says don’t — again.
TribBlog: DPS: No, Really, Don’t Go to Mexico
Posted inState Government
The Midday Brief: Jan. 28, 2011
Your afternoon reading: nursing homes at risk, and Susan Combs hints at lite guv
Posted inState Government
The Brief: Jan. 28, 2011
Settle in, because voter ID’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Posted in
Higher Education
Business: Hands Off Public Education
Lawmakers will soon take an ax to the state budget, but business leaders are hoping one big-ticket item will be spared. At its annual conference in Austin this week, the Texas Association of Business sounded warnings about potential cuts to public education. Erika Aguilar of KUT News reports.
Posted in
Politics
Fair Game?
Are families out of bounds in politics? A newspaper columnist’s recent unflattering piece on Anita Perry has what passes for a Royal Court at the Capitol debating that question.
Posted in
Energy
Bill Neiman Discusses Native Seeds
Bill Neiman, owner of Native American Seed in Junction, Texas, talks about how his career focus evolved from conventional landscapes to native plants.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Testing the Evidence
In police departments across Texas, tens of thousands of rape kits have been sitting on the shelves of property storage rooms for years — thanks to strained budgets, overworked crime labs and a law enforcement philosophy that such kits are primarily useful as evidence if a stranger committed the assault. Victims’ rights advocates and some lawmakers say they’ll work to pass legislation this year to take that evidence out of storage and create a DNA database that would help track rapists and perhaps even identify those who have been wrongly convicted. “I think we owe it to every person who has been raped,” says state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth.
Posted in
Higher Education
Bruce Zimmerman on UTIMCO
UTIMCO CEO Bruce Zimmerman explains what his organization does.
Posted in
Guides
Texplainer: What is UTIMCO?
The simple answer: It’s the acronym for University of Texas Investment Management Company, a nonprofit company with a single client, the University of Texas System (and, to a lesser extent, the Texas A&M University System). With the universities it serves under pressure not to hike tuition rates even though fewer state dollars are flowing their way, the company’s performance will be under intense scrutiny this session — and UTIMCO officials are still recovering from last session’s showdown over their generous bonuses. To explain all this for us, we called in an expert: CEO Bruce Zimmerman.
Posted in
Energy
The Constant Gardeners
From the highways of Texas to the San Jacinto Battleground, state agencies now aim to maximize the use of native grasses rather than opting for whatever was cheapest or fastest-growing, as they did decades ago.
