A fourth Texas high-tech startup that received taxpayer dollars through Gov. Rick Perry’s signature economic development fund has filed for bankruptcy in the $194 million portfolio’s biggest bust yet.
The collapse of bioenergy producer Terrabon Inc., which was awarded $2.75 million in 2010 and was backed by large Perry political donors, raises questions about whether the state’s Emerging Technology Fund launched in 2006 could now be worth less than what taxpayers have put into it.
Attorneys representing around 600 school districts argued Monday that Texas’ school financing system is so “hopelessly broken” that it violates the state Constitution while keeping students from being prepared for the well-paying jobs of tomorrow.
The state countered that, even though the system is flawed, it’s nowhere near a crisis point.
Six lawsuits have been filed on behalf of about two-thirds of school districts, which educate about 75 percent of the state’s roughly 5 million students. They have been rolled into a single case, which opened before state District Judge John Dietz in Austin. The trial is expected to last into January.
Associated Press SAN MARCOS — Texas State University on Thursday became the latest in a string of universities across the…
Oil has long lived in harmony with farmland and cattle across the Texas landscape, a symbiosis nurtured by generations and built on an unspoken honor code that allowed agriculture to thrive while oil was extracted.
Proud Texans have long welcomed the industry because of the cash it brings to sustain agriculture, but also see its presence as part of their patriotic duty to help wean the United States off “foreign” oil. So the answer to companies that wanted to build pipelines has usually been simple: Yes.
The Rev. Clint Dobson was sitting in his church office writing a sermon when a convicted felon began scouring the neighborhood for a car to steal.
The felon honed in on the church, where investigators say he suffocated the young pastor and severely beat his secretary before fleeing in one of their cars.
Police have launched a rare investigation of the Texas child protection agency after a 22-month-old girl died and her mother claimed her military husband’s deployment overseas left her too stressed to care for their three children.
Suspended TCU quarterback Casey Pachall is leaving school for the rest of the semester and entering an inpatient rehabilitation facility.
Coach Gary Patterson made the announcement Tuesday, five days after the junior starter was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving in his second brush with the law in the past eight months.
Patterson said most of the inpatient programs like the one Pachall will enter are 30 to 60 days.
A federal court judge exceeded her authority by granting a reprieve to a Texas man sentenced to death in the slaying of a 12-year-old girl near Houston 12 years ago, the state attorney general’s office said Tuesday.
Steven Lawayne Nelson, age 25, was convicted Monday in the 2011 murder of the Rev. Clinton Dobson, a 2008 Truett Seminary graduate and pastor of Nort Pointe Baptist Church in Arlington.
Nelson was found guilty of capital murder on Monday and could face either life in prison without parole or the death penalty.
A Dallas woman who super-glued her 2-year-old daughter’s hands to a wall also beat the girl so badly that she suffered bleeding on her brain, a doctor testified Monday during the mother’s sentencing hearing.
Elizabeth Escalona faces up to life in prison after pleading guilty in July to attacking her daughter, Jocelyn Cedillo, last September. Police say the 23-year-old mother attacked the toddler due to potty training problems.
TCU quarterback Casey Pachall was suspended indefinitely Thursday, hours after he was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated — his second brush with trouble this year and one that clouds the 15th-ranked Horned Frogs’ push for a Big 12 title.
Coach Gary Patterson announced the suspension, saying his quarterback “obviously needs help.”
The verbal jabs flew fast Tuesday night in Texas during the U.S. Senate debate, with Democrat Paul Sadler calling his heavily favored, tea party-backed opponent Ted Cruz a “troll” and Cruz labeling Sadler an unapologetic liberal scheming to raise taxes.
Rick Perry on Monday proposed a four-year tuition freeze for incoming college freshmen and suggested that some of the money the state spends on schools should be tied to the number of students they graduate.
Perry, who announced his education priorities during a news conference at a Dallas high school, also called on schools to give families a better understanding of the amount of money they’ll spend on college, depending on how long it takes the student to graduate.
Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb, asked a federal appeals court Wednesday to uphold an ordinance that would ban illegal immigrants from renting homes in the town.
The full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to rehear the case after a three-judge panel from the court ruled in march that Farmers Branch’s ordinance is unconstitutional and impermissibly interferes with the federal immigration system.
Bomb threats are apparently becoming the newest, sickest national trend.
Only days after bomb threats caused evacuations of three college campuses including the University of Texas at Austin, Valparaiso University in Indiana and North Dakota State University, Lousiana State University received one as well.
Dr. Bill Powers, president of the University of Texas at Austin, justified the university’s decision to hold the evacuation ten minutes before the bomb was set to explode in a noon press conference on Friday. The university scheduled the press conference at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center to discuss the bomb threat as well the university’s response.
Powers opened the press conference with a declaration the university was safe.
University of Texas Austin junior Salimah Jasani was on her way to a 10 a.m. class when she received an emergency text message from the university, but she ignored it – it wasn’t until she saw a missed call from her roommate that she began to suspect something was happening.
By Jim Vertuno Associated Press AUSTIN — University of Texas says all Austin campus buildings will re-open at noon after…
SAN ANTONIO — A military jury sentenced an Air Force basic training instructor to a year in prison Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to having sex with a trainee.
The San Antonio Express-News reported the jury also sentenced Staff Sgt. Kwinton Estacio on Wednesday to reduction in rank to airman and a dishonorable discharge.
Neighbors and friends knew Shania Gray as a friendly, vivacious athlete. Few knew the 16-year-old had reported a man for rape until she disappeared last week and turned up dead.
The man she accused, Franklin B. Davis, has confessed to police and in jailhouse interviews to killing her. Police have said he did so to prevent Gray from testifying against him in a sexual assault case scheduled for trial next month.
CARROLLTON — A Texas man accused of raping a 16-year-old girl used social media to lure her to a meeting, abduct her from her school and drive her to a river, where he killed her to keep her from testifying against him, an arrest warrant said.
The man insisted in a jailhouse interview Monday that he only wanted to talk to the teen and prove his innocence but said he was overcome by “demons” once they were face-to-face.
The Army psychiatrist charged in the 2009 Fort Hood massacre twice offered to plead guilty and “accept full responsibility” for the crime earlier this year, his lead defense attorney said Thursday.
The Texas Transportation Commission has approved the 85 mph speed limit for a 41-mile-long toll road near the increasingly crowded Interstate 35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio. The road runs several miles east of the interstate between two of the state’s largest metropolitan areas. And while some drivers may be eager to put the pedal to the metal and rip through the Central Texas countryside, others are asking if it is safe.
A court-martial due to start in the case against a Texas Air Force basic training instructor accused in a sex scandal at a San Antonio air base was delayed without explanation Wednesday.
The trial of Master Sgt. Jamey Crawford had been scheduled to begin Wednesday afternoon at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. But no attorneys were present as the scheduled start time passed, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
A plastic surgeon was charged with capital murder Thursday after prosecutors said he hired a man to kill another doctor who was dating his ex-girlfriend and paid for the murder using silver bars.
The Army psychiatrist charged in the Fort Hood shooting rampage should be forced to shave his beard to avoid any potential jury bias in his pending murder trial, say some military experts and the judge overseeing his pending court-martial.
A Texas man condemned for a robbery in which three people were shot, one fatally, apologized to a woman who survived the 2002 attack and family members of the slain man before receiving a lethal injection Thursday.
A local businessman who investigators called a “kingpin” on the South Texas cockfighting circuit was slapped with a $1.25 million bond on Thursday even though he isn’t suspected in the fatal shootings at a cockfight last week that helped lead authorities to his doorstep.
State regulators have given final approval for a Dallas-based company to begin burying low-level radioactive waste at a West Texas site near the New Mexico border, according to a letter posted online Thursday.
A state senator from El Paso said Thursday the University of Texas System regents should overturn a decision by Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa to ban a high-profile boxing match from the Sun Bowl over unspecified security concerns.
