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Texas Observer
Texas Still Issues Thousands of Permits for Natural Gas Flaring
In Texas, State Rule 32 prohibits flaring, or burning off, natural gas at the wellhead except under a few specific conditions. Oil and gas companies are sometimes forced to flare gas during emergencies, to release high pressure in pipes, but more often they flare unwanted gas that comes to the surface in the oil drilling process. Flaring contributes to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
No Path to Redemption for Devout Death Row Inmates
Texas offers religious education to the condemned but rarely values spiritual growth when considering clemency requests. Now, as his lawyers and advocates seek clemency from Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, Speer’s faith is central to their pleas. Speer is one of many on Texas’ death row who have asked for life in prison over the death penalty due to their spiritual devotion in prison—but the God-fearing state doesn’t typically grant clemency for that reason.
Study: More Infants Die in States that Restrict Abortion
The United States has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates out of any other high-income country and, in 2021, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. was 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births. This research supports previous studies that have found that abortion restrictions are linked to increased maternal and infant death rates which disproportionately affect Black communities.
Abbott Lobbies for More Money As Border Wall Burns Through Budget
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s fencing flip-flop, the Texas governor doubles down on his own barrier. In early October, President Joe Biden announced that his administration would resume building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. To do so, Biden suspended several federal laws to accelerate construction in rural Starr County, where former President Donald Trump’s own wall efforts were met with fierce resistance from landowners.
In Mexico, Tensions Rise Again over 1944 Water Treaty
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
The Tower Sniper’s Wife
A new book from UT Press provides a troubling twist on the vow “until death do us part.”. An unusual new book dives deeply into the mind of an all-but-forgotten victim of the University of Texas Tower Shooting: the sniper’s wife, Kathy Leissner Whitman. Told in vivid detail through an enormous trove of letters that Leissner’s brother kept long after her violent death, the reader plunges immediately, uncomfortably, and intimately into the life and thoughts of a doomed woman. They see that woman in love, browbeaten and abused, and finally, stabbed to death by her husband in the pages of Unheard Witness: The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman, out this month from (appropriately) the University of Texas Press.
Choose Native Plants!
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
Abbott’s Voucher Fight Isn’t About Kids. It’s About Money, Politics, and Religion.
The Senate passed its bill this week as the governor continues to pressure House members to compromise. As the Senate passed its voucher bill, Senate Bill 1, by a vote of 18-13 last night, Governor Greg Abbott gave a progress report on work with state House members to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a right-wing think tank whose board members include billionaires Tim Dunn, Doug Deason, Stacy Hock, state Senator Mayes Middleton, and James Leninger—all who have been bankrolling the push to privatize public education in Texas.
Texas Wants to Adopt Outdated Cancer Risk Standard Despite Concerns
The state is proposing to approve a 17-year-old standard that leading scientists and public health officials call inadequate. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has quietly proposed maintaining a target cancer risk level for air pollution permits that scientists and public health officials consider inadequate to protect public health, especially for communities like those east of Houston that are exposed simultaneously to many sources of industrial emissions.
Strangest State: Alligators, Tigers & Hailstorms, Oh My!
A version of this story ran in the September / October 2023 issue. Texans head for spring-fed rivers or hide out in air-conditioned homes and cooling centers during heat waves. But what do animals do? At the Fort Worth Zoo, tigers, lions, and primates play with huge ice cubes, and elephants and gorillas cavort in sprinklers. “Just like humans,” a Zoo spokesperson told the Guardian, “we’ve all kind of adjusted.”
A Possible Reprieve for the Mentally Ill on Death Row
Scott Panetti was deemed incompetent for execution. What does this mean for other prisoners?. A federal judge has declared that Scott Panetti, a longtime resident of Texas’ death row, is incompetent for execution due to the severity of his mental illness. The decision comes more than 15 years after the U.S. Supreme Court determined—also in Panetti’s case—that the Eighth Amendment bars the state from executing someone who doesn’t understand the reason for their execution.
USPS Is Falsifying Safety Docs As Its Workers Die of Heat
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
Abbott Demands Vouchers—Or Else
From bullying legislators to co-opting church pulpits, the governor and the billionaires behind him are determined to defund public schools. “There’s an easy way to get it done, and there’s a hard way,” Abbott said during a September 19 tele-town hall. “If we do not win in that first special session, we will have another special special session and we’ll come back again. And then if we don’t win that time … We will have everything teed up in a way where we will be giving voters in a primary a choice.”
Domestic Violence Murders in Texas Are Going Up
A new report from the Texas Council on Family Violence analyzed hundreds of deaths in the Lone Star State. Takara Hightower was talking with agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) at her home in Humble on September 22, 2022. Hightower, 34, was describing the ongoing violence she was experiencing at the hands of her husband, Gregory Hightower. Just days before, she had begun looking into filing a protective order. As she spoke, she held their infant in her arms, and the couple’s 3-year-old was nearby.
Biden Administration Waives 26 Laws to Accelerate Border Wall Construction
The Biden administration is bypassing 26 laws, including crucial environmental, public health, and cultural preservation laws, in order to continue building the barrier along the border in southern Texas. The construction will be centered around what border officials say is a particularly busy crossing point of “high illegal entry” in Starr County.
Ghosts from Texas’ Past
A version of this story ran in the September / October 2023 issue. Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their...
The Lonesome Writing Guru
How author Larry McMurtry—and George Getschow, editor of a new book about McMurtry—helped shepherd a Lone Star literary community. The word “guru” fits George Getschow, a Dallas-based former Wall Street Journal editor, member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and director of the Archer City Writers Workshop. For years, George has encouraged and cajoled young journalists (and older ones) and other Texas writers of all types into writing their first books. But Getshow too had a mentor: Larry McMurtry.
Advocates Request Clemency for Jewish Man on Death Row
Jedidiah Murphy is set to be executed on World Day Against the Death Penalty. Jedidiah Murphy doesn’t claim to be innocent. He confessed to police shortly after killing 79-year-old Bertie Lee Cunningham during a carjacking in Dallas County on October 4, 2000. He was 25 at the time—he used Cunningham’s stolen credit cards to buy alcohol and cigarettes. He told the Texas Observer that he “confessed to this case before I was ever arrested, and that was because I wanted people to know the truth.”
DPS Still Avoiding a Public Hearing on Uvalde Massacre
Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McCraw suspended Kindell in September 2022, accusing him of acting incompetently during the horrific attack on Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School earlier that year. After an internal investigation, McCraw followed up in January by firing Kindell over the objection of the ranger’s superiors.
Ricardo Nuila: The People’s Doctor
A version of this story ran in the September / October 2023 issue. Ricardo Nuila is a third-generation physician at Ben Taub Hospital, a busy public facility operated by Harris Health in the Texas Medical Center. An internal medicine specialist, he’s part of a staff dominated by residents and graduates of Baylor College of Medicine. And in his spare time, he writes. His compelling essays and new book,The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine (Simon and Schuster, 2023), focus on how many people get stranded in healthcare limbo—or needlessly lose their limbs or lives—in America’s cumbersome and costly healthcare system because of uncontrolled costs, overbilling, and greed promoted by health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. Nuila thinks a good public hospital network across America could outperform even the most expensive private alternatives. He spoke to the Texas Observer about why.
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