Browsing: News

Automatic government spending cuts could see military operations across Texas lose at least $1.7 billion before the end of the fiscal year, the U.S. Defense Department said late Friday.

In a letter to Gov. Rick Perry obtained by The Associated Press, the department said that no deal in Congress to stave off $85 billion in federal budget reductions means $41 billion will evaporate from the Defense Department budget by Sept. 30.

The Homeland Security Department released from its jails more than 2,000 illegal immigrants facing deportation in recent weeks due to looming budget cuts and planned to release 3,000 more during March, The Associated Press has learned.

The newly disclosed figures, cited in internal budget documents reviewed by the AP, are significantly higher than the “few hundred” illegal immigrants the Obama administration acknowledged this week had been released under the budget-savings process.

Little Rock may not be a likely terrorism target or a gang crime hotspot, but the Arkansas capital has decided to follow the example of high-security cities by expanding electronic surveillance of its streets.

A police car with a device that photographs license plates moves through the city and scans the traffic on the streets, relaying the data it collects to a computer for sifting. Police say the surveillance helps identify stolen cars and drivers with outstanding arrest warrants.

After almost three years in custody, the Army private accused in the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history said he did it because he wanted the public to know how the American military was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with little regard for human life.

Bradley Manning, 25, pleaded guilty Thursday at a military hearing at Fort Meade, Md., to 10 charges that could carry a maximum sentence of 20 years. Prosecutors plan to pursue 12 more charges against him at court-martial, including a charge of aiding the enemy that carries a potential life sentence.

Margaret Fiester is no shrinking violet, but she says working for her former boss was a nightmare.

“One day I didn’t do something right and she actually laid her hands on me and got up in my face and started yelling, ‘Why did you do that?'” said Fiester, who worked as a legal assistant for an attorney.

A commercial craft carrying a ton of supplies for the International Space Station ran into thruster trouble shortly after liftoff Friday, and flight controllers scrambled to fix the problem.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said three of the four sets of thrusters on the company’s unmanned Dragon capsule did not immediately kick in, delaying the release of twin solar panels for two hours.

Campus Rec is offering a CPR certification course from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Saturday in 314 McLane Student Life…

Ladies and gentlemen, get ready to strap on your stilettos because a stampede is coming to town.

Registration for the Stiletto Stampede begins today.

The event will take place on April 27 at Heritage Square to help educate and raise awareness about breast cancer.

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.

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.

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.

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

Meeting the operators of IBM in Italy, taking a cablecar up a mountain in Innsbruck, walking through the Euronext stock exchange in Paris and discussing business with Lloyd’s of London — all in three weeks for six hours of course credit.

From June to July, two Baylor faculty members are leading Baylor students in the European Business Seminar. It is a study abroad program focusing on the business practices of several international companies in Europe.

“We are not sitting in classrooms in Europe. We are visiting companies,” said Richard Easley, the director of the program. “You are getting access to people that you would never have access to, typically, unless you were in that particular industry.”

Expanding your world-view can be difficult, but the Global Community Living and Learning Center approaches it in an unconventional way.

The Global LLC program was started in 2008 by Janet Norden, a lecturer in the Spanish department. Along with a group of students, she came up with an idea to expand global education and language-immersion skills.

Students who are a part of the program have a target language that they want to learn, and then they can choose to be placed in a full-immersion suite.

It’s not very often two 20-year-old students own a million-dollar company.

Waco junior Yaseen Waqar and Plano junior Rayyan Islam are the co-founders of www.LuxuryLites.com, an electronic cigarette and hookah site.

In the last seven months, their company has made $1.7 million in sales with a profit of more than $320,000.

he leader of a legislative effort to link higher education funds to graduation rates said Wednesday there seems to be some quiet resistance from major universities that have publicly endorsed the idea.

Republican Dan Branch of Dallas, chairman of the House Higher Education Committee, told a news conference that while the major university systems have endorsed the idea publicly, “they seem to be sending emissaries in to the folks on subcommittees and trying to put the brakes on things.”

“We need to identify where the tension seems to be,” Branch said.

She sits tall on a rock, eyes behind her famous circle-frame glasses, staring defiantly across the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks’ 9-foot bronze statue was unveiled in a ceremony Wednesday that included remarks from President Barack Obama and leaders of Congress, echoing words of her determination and legacy for the future.

“We make excuses for inaction,” Obama said, addressing the members of Congress and guests in the National Statuary Hall. “We say to ourselves, ‘It’s not my responsibility. There’s nothing I can do.’ Rosa Parks tells us there’s always something we can do.”

Two pontiffs, both wearing white, both called “pope” and living a few yards from one another, with the same key aide serving them.

The Vatican’s announcement Tuesday that Pope Benedict XVI will be known as “emeritus pope” in his retirement, be called “Your Holiness” and continue to wear the white cassock associated with the papacy has fueled concerns about potential conflicts arising from the peculiar reality now facing the Catholic Church: having one reigning and one retired pope.

Benedict’s title and what he will wear have been a major source of speculation since the 85-year-old pontiff stunned the world and announced he would resign Thursday, the first pope to do so in 600 years.

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices voiced deep skepticism Wednesday about a section of a landmark civil rights law that has helped millions of Americans exercise their right to vote.

In an ominous note for supporters of the key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Anthony Kennedy both acknowledged the measure’s vital role in fighting discrimination and suggested that other important laws in U.S. history had run their course. “Times change,” Kennedy said during the fast-paced, 70-minute argument.