Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

San Antonio prosecutors said that in light of the decision, they will probably move forward with their case against a 73-year-old chaplain, Bill Day, who has suffered from AIDS for 10 years and who county health officials say is a pioneer in area efforts to stop the spread of AIDS among addicts.

U.S. House and Senate negotiators voted late last week against including a privatization ban in a $300 billion farm bill that lawmakers hope to finish this week. The ban would have prevented states from allowing employees of private companies to interact with people who are applying for food stamps or to decide someone's eligibility.

The American-Statesman on Friday disclosed that under a long-standing practice, some House members had full-time employees who were not working 40-hour weeks, as required. In a subsequent letter to lawmakers, Goolsby ordered all House members to comply with House policy and state law by removing ghost workers from the full-time payroll.

Even before individuals or small-business owners decide health insurance is too costly, they're often stymied just trying to find the numbers. Texas insurance companies are notoriously stingy with rate information. Figuring the price of insuring a small group can be Kafkaesque.

The moral issue aside, the number of uninsured Texans costs all of us. St. Joseph Regional Health Center in Bryan and its outlying facilities provided more than $40 million in charity care last year. It wrote off another $49 million in unpaid bills for treatment of uninsured patients.

With 14 "toxic hot spots" across the state, the report's authors, representing four environmental groups, called for lawmakers and regulators to establish stricter and more enforceable standards for those compounds known as hazardous air pollutants. What's more, they said, industry leaders should make pollution reduction their top priority.

M.D. Anderson says it instituted the pay-upfront policy for initial visits in 2005 after its unpaid patient bills jumped by $18 million to $52 million that year. The hospital told the Journal that its increasing bad-debt load threatened its mission to cure cancer, a goal on which it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

People who possess drug paraphernalia as part of a needle-exchange program can be prosecuted, the Texas Attorney General's Office said Monday, clearing the way for a case involving three activists who passed out clean syringes to move forward.

With rising temperatures putting more pressure on Texas' water supplies, state policymakers should fold climate change into their planning, according to scientists who are meeting at the Capitol this week.

Dallas County's record-setting list of innocent inmates cleared by DNA testing grew to 15 Wednesday when officials learned that Charles Allen Chatman could not have committed a rape for which he has served almost 27 years in prison.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared strong voter ID requirements, saying they are good for honest elections, at least in theory, Texas Republicans say there's nothing to stop them from making it the law here in 2009.

Nationally, Texas ranked third — behind Oklahoma and Idaho — in premium increases from 2001 to 2005, according to the report on employer-offered insurance by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J.

The court ruled 6 to 3 that the requirements enacted by Indiana's legislature were not enough of a burden to violate the Constitution. Because the law, which requires specific government-issued identification such as driver's licenses or passports, is generally regarded as the nation's strictest such measure, the ruling bodes well for other states that require photo ID and for states that are considering doing so.

Our public schools have educated generations of Texas leaders, from Ann Richards to Henry B. González; from Lyndon Johnson to Barbara Jordan. So, let's invest now in our future generation of Texas leaders.

Hundreds of thousands of Texas businesses, fresh from paying their federal income taxes earlier this month, are now busy calculating what they owe the state under its new business tax – and many don't like what the numbers show.

As the babies born then turn old enough to vote in this year's November election, politics in the Houston area has a much deeper Hispanic tinge. Hispanics on the voter rolls have nearly tripled in the passing of a generation; the number of Hispanic lawmakers from here is inching upward. The Democratic Party, if it captures county judgeships and government positions for the first time in 14 years, will owe much to a stimulated Hispanic vote and Hispanic candidates, such as Houston councilman Adrian Garcia, who is running for sheriff.

Some students at a historically black university are wondering why an investigation by the office of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott into alleged voting rights violations is still not finished.

Even though El Paso and the rest of Texas has managed to avoid much of the crisis, many college students now receiving financial aid are finding that money is no longer readily available.

The goal is to create a "Houston account" and have it ready for the public by mid-September. All participating banks would offer the same terms for the starter checking account, such as no minimum balance requirement and the acceptance of alternative identification cards, such as those from Mexican and Guatemalan consulates.

The average high-school senior was able to answer only 48.3 percent of the questions correctly in the Jump$tart Coalition's recent biennial survey of high-school students' financial knowledge. That was a decrease from 52.4 percent correct the previous time the survey was done, in 2006.