Year: 2013

Though many Texans might forget the significance of March 2 in Texas history, the Historic Waco Foundation will be celebrating Texas Independence Day a little early with food, fun and music.

Tonight, Wacoans are invited to participate in the third annual Texas Independence Day Celebration of the Historic Waco Foundation.

Prepare for nicotine withdrawal and short tempers, because the Baylor student government has plans to turn Baylor into a tobacco-free campus.

With a vote of 29-12, student government passed a campus-wide tobacco ban Thursday.

A 22-year-old man was charged with murder Thursday in the death of a mayoral candidate, whose body was found near a river levee in the Mississippi Delta this week.

The Coahoma County Sheriff’s Department said in a news release that Lawrence Reed of Shelby was charged in the death of Marco McMillian, 34, a candidate for mayor of Clarksdale.

The No. 1 Lady Bears will make their first trip to Morgantown to square off against West Virginia at 6 p.m. Saturday. This will be the second meeting between these teams since West Virginia joined the Big 12. Last time the two teams met on Jan. 19, Baylor’s defense did its job holding West Virginia to 32.8 percent shooting.

West Virginia struggled offensively from the three-point line as well and only made four of its 14 attempts. Free throws were also a problem and ended up making a difference in the game. Baylor won the last meeting by 18 points; West Virginia missed 17 free throws.

The Baylor Bears are set to take on the No. 13 Kansas State Wildcats at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Ferrell Center. The Bears are fresh off of a 65-62 road win against West Virginia and are trying to gain momentum for the last three games of the Big 12 Conference schedule.

“It was a good road win for us,” senior guard A.J. Walton said. “We’ve been working hard in practice just trying to stay focused and stay together and not get down on ourselves. We’re 1-6 now in games under five points so it’s good for us to get that win. It just shows how much we’ve been working and how much we’ve grown.”

The No. 20 Baylor softball team (15-2) will compete in the Wilson/Demarini Invitational from Friday to Sunday in Tempe, Ariz. Baylor will put its 14-game winning streak, which is tied for the best in program history, on the line as it faces off against North Carolina. Baylor will finish the weekend with a game against Arizona State.

On Friday, Baylor will start with a double-header against North Carolina at 10:00 a.m. and will play North Dakota at 12:30 p.m. North Carolina (11-5) is coming off of five straight wins, including the Carolina Classic. However, they have a 1-3 record against ranked teams. Lori Spingola, 2012 ACC Pitcher of the Year, is 4-3 and has 66 strikeouts in 60 innings. Spingola was also named Pitcher of the Week on Tuesday. The pitching staff collectively has an ERA of 2.24 and the Tar Heels are hitting .292 as a team.

The third annual Baylor Percussion Symposium, with events both today and Saturday, hopes to not only offer audience members an auditory and visual experience, but a visceral one as well.

“We had our sights set on this at the beginning of the year,” said Dr. Todd Meehan, assistant professor of percussion.

A Baylor student will share the stage with some of the biggest names in country music on Sunday.

McGregor sophomore Trannie Stevens will sing at the 2013 Texas Heritage Songwriters’ Hall of Fame Awards Show. Stevens will join Toby Keith, Jack Ingram, Larry Gatlin, Ronnie Dunn and Sonny Curtis as performers at the show in Austin.

A Baylor graduate student from Kenya is studying how to provide education to children on the streets in his country.

Brooke Olonde’s passion for the children of Kenya stems from his childhood experiences. Olonde grew up as an orphan in Kisumu, Kenya, and became sponsored by Compassion International at the age of 9.

Common Grounds customers will soon see a change in cups. The coffeehouse will replace its Styrofoam cups with completely decomposable cups as a part of their green initiative.

This will make the shop Styrofoam-free. Blake Batson, owner of Common Grounds, said the shop will order its first shipment of Styrofoam-free cups Monday.

An old cliché goes the clothes make the man, and according to Dr. Paul Martens, perhaps it’s time to rethink this statement.

“Everyone attempts to say something with their clothes,” said Martens, a Baylor religion professor. In his lecture Thursday, “You Are What You Wear,” he encouraged students to think about where their clothing comes from and how to rethink society’s obsession with clothes.

February brought with it a new choice for people with severe allergies.

A new epinephrine auto-injector, Auvi-Q, hit pharmacies. Epinephrine is given to people experiencing severe allergic reactions. Auvi-Q is the first injector that has an audio component that talks through the injection process.

Before the release of Auvi-Q, the EpiPen was the only epinephrine auto-injector available. These devices use a needle to inject the medicine. Epinephrine is a drug of choice for many abusers, and owners of epinephrine should be wary of the dangers of their medicine falling into the wrong hands.

Your recent editorial, “Regents shouldn’t choose rep for students” on Feb. 27 suggests a misunderstanding of the goal of Baylor regents when they chose to appoint to the board, in a non-voting capacity, a member of the student body and a faculty member.

Last year, regents decided to include in their future meetings one individual to provide a student perspective and one individual to provide a faculty perspective. The board did this without the expectation that these individuals would represent the opinions of all faculty or students. Instead, the board was acting to ensure that the voice and perspective of a Baylor student and faculty member would be present during board discussions and deliberations. This is consistent with the process by which others are appointed to the Baylor board. Leaders who are pastors, educators, physicians, corporate CEOs, lawyers and more bring their expertise to bear in service to Baylor as Regents. What these regents provide is a valuable perspective that emerges out of their experience. Such is the board’s expectation with the appointment of a student and faculty regent.

A country music legend will perform 9 p.m. on Saturday at Whiskey River.

Johnny Lee, a Texas Country Music Hall of Fame artist with chart toppers from the late 1970s, will headline the event. Some of his top singles include “Lookin’ For Love,” “One In A Million” and “Bet Your Heart On Me.”

Sam Badar, owner of Whiskey River on Bosque Drive, said he looks forward to having Lee on the Whiskey River stage.

In a typical day, how many online or digital accounts does a person access?

Most of us have at least 10 profiles and accounts we use on a daily basis all with different security settings and passwords (or variations of the same password). Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, email accounts and not to mention the several Baylor accounts we need just to function in school have bogged down our lives with the constant need for connection to the cyber-world. We don’t mean to get overly morbid, but what honestly happens to all of this when you die?

Saturday night, the Waco Symphony Orchestra will perform its second concert of the year, entitled “Paris of the Roaring Twenties.”

The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Waco Hall.

Stephen Heyde, music director and conductor of the Waco Symphony Orchestra, said the program will hearken back to a time and place that was unique and perhaps unparalleled in cultural history.

Benedict XVI left the Catholic Church in unprecedented limbo Thursday as he became the first pope in 600 years to resign, capping a tearful day of farewells that included an extraordinary pledge of obedience to his successor.

As bells tolled, two Swiss Guards standing at attention at the papal palace in Castel Gandolfo shut the thick wooden doors shortly after 8 p.m., symbolically closing out a papacy whose legacy will be most marked by the way it ended — a resignation instead of a death.

Squabbling away the hours, the Senate swatted aside last-ditch plans to block $85 billion in broad-based federal spending reductions Thursday as President Barack Obama and Republicans blamed each other for the latest outbreak of gridlock and the administration readied plans to put the cuts into effect.

So entrenched were the two parties that the Senate chaplain, Barry Black, opened the day’s session with a prayer that beseeched a higher power to intervene.

“Rise up, O God, and save us from ourselves,” he said of cuts due to take effect sometime on Friday.

Two years after historic spending cuts to Texas classrooms, budget writers in the Senate on Thursday approved a $1.4 billion hike for public education in the first clear signal that the new Legislature may pour money back into financially ailing public schools.

How much lawmakers will ultimately spend on schools remains to be hammered out over the next few months. But education groups who rallied 2,000 supporters during a march on the Capitol last weekend greeted the spending bump by the Senate Finance Committee with optimism.

Republican state Sen. Tommy Williams, the committee chairman, called a new $40 million chunk back into a prekindergarten grant program slashed in 2011 a “down payment.”

The 20th anniversary of the disastrous raid on the Branch Davidians compound near Waco passed quietly Thursday, as colleagues of the four agents who died gathered in private and local officials made no plans to mark the day.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives held a ceremony in Waco to honor agents Conway LeBleu, Todd McKeehan, Robert John Williams and Steven Willis, the four agents who died in the Feb. 28, 1993 raid. Six Davidian members also died in that raid, which began a 51-day standoff that ended with the compound burning and the deaths of about 80 more sect members, including two dozen children.

The Association of Black students paired with Zeta Phi Beta held their monthly Grab the Mic event Wednesday.

Grab the Mic has been a part of Baylor tradition for many years, and it is a time for students to get on stage at the Bill Daniel Student Union building and share works of poetry, spoken word and song.

It is held in the SUB once every month, and students of all backgrounds and skill levels are welcome.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his rising-political-star son, George P. Bush, urged Texas on Tuesday to dismantle the “monopoly of public education” by dramatically expanding access to charter schools, embracing online learning and overhauling how teachers are evaluated.

But neither man offered any hints about his political future.

The elder Bush, who is often mentioned as a possible contender for president in 2016, told an education forum organized by the Texas Business Leadership Council, “I urge you to be big and bold, and if people get offended, so what?”

President Barack Obama is pulling out all the stops to warn just what could happen if automatic budget cuts kick in. Americans are reacting with a collective yawn.

They know the drill: Obama raises the alarm, Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of holding a deal hostage, there’s a lot of yelling on cable news, and then finally, when everyone has made their points, a deal is struck and the day is saved.

Maybe not this time. Two days before $85 billion in cuts are set to hit federal programs with all the precision of a wrecking ball, there are no signs that a deal is imminent. Even the White House conceded Wednesday that efforts to avoid the cuts were unlikely to succeed before they kick in on Friday.

The musical numbers on Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast by most accounts were hit and miss, but in some respects the most impressive song wasn’t one of the big production numbers from “Les Miserables” or “Skyfall.”
It was the one host Seth MacFarlane and singer Kristin Chenoweth sang while the closing credits rolled, “Here’s to the Losers.”

In a drastically revamped version of the Jack Segal-Robert Wells ode to underdogs recorded by Frank Sinatra for his 1964 album “Softly, as I Leave You,” MacFarlane and Chenoweth served up a swinging musical salute to those who ended up with the short end of the Oscar stick Sunday.

It’s time to walk for a cause. Student Life presents the National Eating Disorder Awareness walk at 6 p.m. today…