Megapublisher Pearson’s high-school textbook Biology ran into trouble this fall with State Board of Education-appointed reviewers. Citing supposed errors in passages focusing on evolution, Ide Trotter, a chemical engineer by training and a creationist, recommended rejection one of the most widely used texts in the country. In response, Pearson stood…
Senator Ted Cruz, the uncompromising Tea Party standard bearer, the bane of the establishment GOP, is the most influential man in the world (according to 11 percent of Americans, anyway). He almost singlehandedly led his entire party over the cliff during the government shutdown to defund Obamacare. His personal style…
An affluent Keller teen who killed four people while driving drunk and stoned on Valium has become the latest object of outrage. Ethan Couch, 16 at the time of the crash, was handed 10 years of probation, which will include a stint at a pricey rehab paid for by his…
The State Board of Education left us with a bit of a cliffhanger last month. Despite the concerted efforts of creationists, nearly all of the biology textbooks sailed through the adoption process. Two, however, became mired in completely unsurprising ideological objections from the appointed expert reviewers. Pearson’s Biology, one of…
The shaking around Azle and Reno, which I will hereafter refer to as “San Andreas Minor,” has attracted the attention of the U.S. Geological Survey precisely because the area has almost no record of seismic activity. A few studies, including one recently from SMU, point to correlation between the epicenter…
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst unveiled his interim charges to the Senate Committee on State Affairs Friday, and they are, to say the least, pretty ambitious. They read like red meat for the paranoid-hacker constituency at times, but they also include the bones of some common-sense privacy protections. And they may…
Nearly a quarter million homes and businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are without electricity as a winter storm encases North Texas in ice. Some 2,500 Oncor Electric Delivery linemen and contractors are currently working to restore power. “We’ve been prepping for this all week,” Oncor spokesperson Jeamy Molina tells…
At the request of Governor Rick Perry, the Texas Department of Insurance rolled out an additional set of requirements Obamacare “navigators” will be subject to. On top of the training and certification the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandates, TDI will require an additional 40 hours of continuing…
On October 14, Bobby Bennett was scooting across a cul-de-sac in an office chair in front of two advancing Dallas police officers. He held a knife, but he stood flat-footed, his arms at his sides, a safe distance from the cops. Seconds later, Officer Cardan Spencer inexplicably opened fire. Bennett…
Texas is one of a handful of states that hasn’t adopted the coming Common Core curriculum standards, but former State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar nonetheless believes that the creep of “socialized education” is apparent in a new environmental science text. In an innuendo-heavy segment that could be debunked…
The creationists didn’t win Friday when the State Board of Education took up new biology textbooks in an ideologically fraught, historically contentious adoption process. Most of the materials sailed through. But they didn’t exactly lose, either. Biology, one of the top two or three most widely used textbooks in the…
State Senator Troy Fraser had clearly been spoiling to tee off on Texas’ electric regulators. At a committee hearing Monday, Fraser excoriated Texas Public Utility commissioners Donna Nelson and Brandy Marty for proposing changes to the state’s electric marketplace that could cost Texans billions of dollars. In a series of…
As light rain fell from a dull gray sky onto the crowd bracing against the Arctic blast just down Main from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza Friday, I became depressed at the caliber of craven I’d encountered so far on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. Apart from a…
Governor Rick Perry’s newest appointee may have broken the deadlock at the Public Utility Commission of Texas, but rigging the electricity marketplace to benefit large generators won’t happen without drawing blood. At a PUC meeting late last month, Commissioners Donna Nelson and Brandy Marty each signaled their intention to set…
The State Board of Education doesn’t vote on new high-school biology textbooks until Friday, but the Discovery Institute — an avowed foe of teaching evolution in public schools — is bracing for the worst. Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, an institute board member, tells Evolution News and Views that the proposed…
Watchdog group Public Citizen and landowners along the Keystone pipeline’s route through Texas have raised serious questions about the frequency with which TransCanada excavates sections of its line for repair. TransCanada told Unfair Park last week that it had indeed replaced some 700 feet of the 485-mile project, set to…
For David Tran, October 29 was a very good day. He beat a drunk-driving rap he picked up in Arlington three years earlier, when he was 17 years old and blew a .095 into the Intoxilyzer — just a shade over the .08 legal limit. The offense could be expunged…
Casting Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott as a union buster isn’t tough to envision. At least that’s the narrative the Texas State Troopers Association is pushing in a recent lawsuit filed in federal court. It argues Abbott and the Department of Public Safety are bent on “breaking apart a public…
Raymond Bohlin holds a doctorate in molecular biology. He received his master’s degree in population genetics, the study of how adaptation and speciation is expressed by DNA. In other words, he possesses more than a passing knowledge about the theory of evolution. At the University of North Texas, he participated…
In a matter of weeks, crude oil will begin flowing through the Gulf Coast portion of the Keystone pipeline in Texas. The question watchdog group Public Citizen asks: Is it ready? That’s because, with the help of landowners along the line’s course, they say they’ve identified 125 separate instances in…
Somewhere along the way, the purifying imperatives of evolution decided to dial back our bodies’ ability to rapidly regenerate tissue. Nobody knows exactly why. It could be because cancer in mammals would grow like wildfire if it didn’t. But this ancient property remains in fetuses and infants and diminishes significantly…
Flexing the new muscle given to it by the Legislature last session, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission enacted sweeping new rules Thursday to halt the seemingly inexorable takeover of Texas lakes by zebra mussels. Since the Eurasian bivalves incursion into Lake Texoma in 2009, they’ve spread steadily southward, to…
