Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat.

Results from the exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills showed that minority students were the most severely affected by the graduation test requirement as 20 percent of Hispanics and 23 percent of black students failed, leaving them off the stage when other students receive diplomas during graduation ceremonies this spring.

These are real shortages, not the whining of empire-building executives. Often the problem isn’t that the Legislature didn’t authorize enough positions but that the pay is too low to attract or keep a guard, a caseworker, a trooper.

Among officials and departments using state money to pay for flights and billed more than $20,000 apiece for the time period were Governor Rick Perry ($24,537); Attorney General Greg Abbott and staff ($21,943); TxDOT ($130,568); the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality ($56,560) and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples and staff ($50,302).

The age at which a student immigrates is important, as are family income, the quality of education back home and the educational backgrounds of parents.

The state lottery has been transferring about $1 billion yearly to the Foundation School Program, a fund that goes to local school districts, since 2004, but the amount could slip below that number this year.

If the United States doesn't quickly do something to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the economic impact could be even worse.

Unfortunately, too many of our young people didn't cross the stage to get their diplomas. Across Central Texas, about 7,000 students who could and should have graduated this spring won't be part of the celebration.

Texas law requires e-mails to be kept in an electronic, searchable format. Governor Perry's office requires each staffer to print or save e-mails that need to be retained before they are deleted.

The ordinance would have required apartment managers or owners to obtain and maintain evidence that tenants are U.S. citizens or legal residents. Opponents argued that it would saddle apartment personnel with the duties of immigration officers, unfairly burdening them with deciding who was eligible to rent.

State and local officials nationwide will cast about for ways to solve these problems until Congress finds the political courage to reform the deeply flawed immigration system.

The real issue is how schools in Dallas and across Texas educate so many Hispanic children, whether they are first-, second- or third-generation Latinos. This responsibility starts with Latino families ensuring that their children show up at school, master their classes and ultimately succeed.

Under pressure from the authorities, UBS is considering whether to divulge the names of up to 20,000 of its well-heeled American clients. Federal investigators believe some of the clients may have used offshore accounts at UBS to hide as much as $20 billion in assets from the Internal Revenue Service.

About every place you turn these days, someone in Texas is preaching that the state needs to graduate more students from college. We're going to be honest, though. No amount of bellyaching will matter if middle-class Texans can't afford college. And, yes, we mean middle class.

I see much of the same behavior that led to the "S&L Hell" of two decades ago. Indeed, some of the fixes for the last problem led directly to this one. Once again, too many people had access to other people's money with too little oversight.

The Texas environmental agency is suing the state's top attorney, hoping to keep secret documents related to its decision earlier this year to allow the Asarco smelter to reopen in El Paso.

Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts. Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. The words are “strengths and weaknesses.”

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

In wonkish circles, energy efficiency used to be known as “the fifth fuel”: it can help to satisfy growing demand for energy just as surely as coal, gas, oil or uranium can. But in these environmentally conscious times it has been climbing the rankings.

A study finds that even low levels can permanently damage the brain. The research also shows that exposure is a continuing problem despite efforts to minimize it.