Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Travis County DA serves subpoenas for Youth Commission files and records.

Federal regulators on Friday charged that unknown individuals illegally profited from advance knowledge of the proposed $32 billion buyout of electric utility TXU Corp.

Gov. Rick Perry on Friday appointed a special master to investigate reports of sexual abuse and a cover-up at the Texas Youth Commission, though he stopped short of placing the troubled juvenile detention agency under a conservatorship.

With its rapid population growth, the Southwest is looking at critical water shortages over the long run.

The emerging alliance of business and environmental special interests may well prove powerful enough to give us cap-and-trade in CO2. But don't believe for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming.

Around the nation, day labor sites for casual laborers have operated for years with little fanfare. But increasingly, they're flash points in communities coast to coast. . .

Whatever its impetus, Perry's current grandstanding – and the backlash against it – has been the talk of the 80th Legislature.

With less than a week until his execution, there remain serious questions about whether Nichols' execution is legally justifiable.

CHIP, which provides health coverage for working families who cannot afford private insurance, has an enrollment of 325,500, down from more than 500,000 in 2003.

Beyond the sexual abuse, TYC suffers from a 48 percent annual employee turnover rate, producing youth/staff ratios nearly twice the nationally recommended maximum of 12:1. The result has been bedlam.

Austin, start repairing school finance 'solution'.

Failure to protect teenage inmates from staff sexual abuse demands Texas Youth Commission shake-up.

The furor over sex abuse of troubled offenders in the Texas Youth Commission has focused on a single facility in far West Texas. But it wasn't the only case.

As state officials move quickly to sweep TYC's management clean – a result of the West Texas sexual abuse and subsequent cover-up – the scope of the scandal is expanding.

An internal report detailing how a sexual molestation scandal went undetected for more than a year in the Texas Youth Commission was altered, to delete references that top agency officials were alerted to the abuse but did nothing to stop it, a previously secret document showed Thursday.

In the CHIP program alone, 200,000 Texas children were cut when the Texas legislature, under HB 2292, turned social services in Texas from a brick-and-mortar commitment to people into a call center-based virtual reality committed to profit. For the love of money, Texas' lifeline to working-class families became a telephone line.

Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, quizzed Health and Human Services Commissioner Albert Hawkins over the performance of his agency in providing basic health care services Wednesday.

We have, in effect, turned the U.S. into a winner-take-all casino economy, substituting the gambling hall for the factory floor as our governing economic metaphor, an assembly of individual strangers whose fortunes depend overwhelmingly on random luck rather than collective hard work.

Gov. Rick Perry's staff learned last fall of a Texas Rangers investigation into allegations of sexual abuse in 2005 at a West Texas state juvenile facility, but the governor took no major action to reform the Texas Youth Commission until after the report became public last week.

The second most powerful member of the Texas House has circulated a Georgia lawmaker's call for a broad assault on teaching of evolution.