State government

Local elected officials and civil rights groups urged legislators at a committee hearing today to implement more programs for women and girls in Texas prisons and jails.

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Hank Skinner is set to be executed for a 1993 murder he's always maintained he didn't commit. He wants the state to test whether his DNA matches evidence found at the scene, but prosecutors say the time to contest his conviction has come and gone. He has less than a month to change their minds.

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Kay and Rick both have some ’splaining to do.

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Teachers quit Texas charter schools at nearly three times the rate of traditional public school districts, according to state data. Dozens of individual schools lost well over half their teachers in the latest year.

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Texas ranks poorly among the states when it comes to letting taxpayers know how it's using federal stimulus dollars, according to a report released today by several nonprofit public interest groups.

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Some deep-pocketed trial lawyers didn't make the Twenty Who Gave Plenty list. Why not?

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Advocates for people with disabilities want the U.S. Justice Department to investigate state employees who were fired for abuse, but never criminally prosecuted for it.

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Thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter, we know the elected officials who represent us better than ever — sometimes in weirdly intimate ways. You can find out that Dan Patrick had to put his dog down, that Wayne Christian is a fan of real estate wunderkind and reality TV star Chad Rogers, and that Bill White just finished listening to a book on tape. But woe to the pol who hasn't updated her status in a year.

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More than a week after they surfaced in the Republican gubernatorial primary debate, the politics of abortion are again heating up.

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... against Washington, of course, and the less-than-resolute wing of his party: An interview with the Texas Railroad Commissioner, who'd like very much, thank you, to be the next Marco Rubio.

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Hu explores on the schism between Bushworld and Perrywold and the increasingly curious question of what Debra Medina wants; Stiles goes all Shark Week on gubernatorial campaign finance, with searchable databases, bubble maps and word clouds; M. Smith on what happens if there's a GOP runoff; Rapoport on the sniping between Perry and KBH on transparency; Hamilton on KBH's abortion issue odyssey; Ramshaw exposes the disgracefully low percentage of state school employees who abuse or kill profoundly disabled Texans and are then prosecuted for their acts; Thevenot on higher ed's tuition time bomb; Aguilar on the Latino pay gap; Ramsey on Farouk Shami's "gift" to Hank Gilbert; Ramsey and Philpott on the the Supreme's Court's corporate campaign cash fallout; and E. Smith's interviews with House Speaker Joe Straus with retiring Republican state representative — and future Texas State chancellor? — Brian McCall. The best of our best from January 18 to 22, 2010.

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How will Thursday's shooting change security guidelines at the Capitol?

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A review of campaign finance reports for the period from July to December 2009 reveals that some candidates for the Texas House are capable of raising serious money.

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A man entered Sen. Dan Patrick's office, then fired shots outside the Capitol. No injuries have been reported.

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Twenty percent of the nation's 17,000 human trafficking victims each year come through Texas, and Attorney General Greg Abbott said today the state should take the lead in collaboration among agencies to fight the scourge of modern-day slavery.

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Kinky to Gilbert: "Give the money back!"

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With each day that passes, David Nicholson fears that the man who killed his profoundly disabled brother will join the ranks of state school workers who are never convicted for their heinous acts.

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As she demonstrated in last week's debate, Kay Bailey Hutchison still struggles with how to describe her position on an issue that many Republicans consider sacrosanct.

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Your afternoon reading.

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Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the state's highest criminal court, will not be removed from the bench following a trial and review by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

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