Headlines

Local Politics
Flores and Curnock Advance to Runoff in Republican Congressional Primary

According to an article in the Waco Tribune-Herald, Rob Curnock and Bill Flores are advancing to the primary runoff that will decide the Republican nominee for Texas Congressional District 17.

Texas A&M News
Texas A&M and University of Texas Share Budget Ideas

Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin are archrivals, but faculty members of the Texas’s two research giants united this week. The Bryan-College Station Eagle reports that both schools are Texas' only top-tier research universities and have fall student populations hovering near 50,000 and are the flagships for their systems. The two colleges have even more similarities this year: both, along with all of the state's public higher-education institutions, are bracing for a planned 5 percent state reduction. The schools are preparing for roughly the same amount of cuts -- about $28 million for A&M and $29 million for UT. The Texas A&M athletics department has not been asked to make reductions, while UT athletics would shoulder $5 million through trademark licensing, sponsorships, revenues and cash reserves. UT-Austin will place the burden on fiscal year 2011 and leave fiscal year 2010 -- the current year that began Sept. 1 -- untouched. At Texas A&M, the planned cuts would be roughly split between the two years.

Texas News
State Investigating Alleged Leak of TAKS Test

According to an article in the Houston Chronicle, the Texas Education Agency is investigating allegations that staff at a Houston ISD elementary school had access to a secure TAKS test and perhaps shared an essay topic with students before the writing exam, which is scheduled for today. The investigation centers on Jefferson Elementary, but in case the test question got shared with other HISD campuses, the TEA has issued a new secret essay topic for all elementary schools in the district. Agency officials do not suspect the test information was shared with other school districts, so the test change only involved the Houston Independent School District. The affected exam is the fourth-grade writing section of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Scores on the high-stakes exams factor into a school's state accountability rating — low marks can lead to public embarrassment and sanctions. HISD also awards performance bonuses — often worth thousands of dollars — to employees based on the scores, though the writing exam plays only a small part in the calculation.

National Politics
Majority of Americans Think Washington is Broken

An overwhelming majority of Americans think that their federal government is gridlocked by partisan infighting and turf battles and can't accomplish anything, according to a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll. Yet the anger and frustration with Washington aren't directed solely at either party and don't automatically add up to a tidal wave against the governing Democrats in this year's elections for control of Congress, the poll suggested. Four out of five Americans, 80 percent, said that Washington couldn't accomplish anything because of fighting between the political parties and branches of the government, the poll found. Only 17 percent disagreed. The sentiment is deeply held: Fifty-one percent strongly agree that gridlock renders the government impotent. It's also felt across the political spectrum, with 81 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of independents agreeing that the government is bogged down.

War and Peace
Airstrikes Kill Fewer Afghans Civilians But More Dying on Ground

According to an article by McClatchy News Service, even as U.S. forces take steps to reduce the number of Afghan civilians killed by aerial attacks, other civilian casualties remain stubbornly high — deaths in so-called escalation of force incidents in which edgy American troops fire on civilians who've come too close to their convoys or roadblocks. The number of Afghans killed in such incidents rose 43 percent in 2009 to 113, from 79 in 2008, while the total number of NATO coalition-caused civilian deaths and injuries declined 15.5 percent, to 535 from 633. How to avoid killing civilians has been a persistent problem for American troops since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when several well publicized incidents of U.S. soldiers killing friendly civilians soured many Iraqis on the American presence.

Economy
Federal Government Plans New Measure for Poverty

The federal government announced on this week that it would begin producing an experimental measurement of poverty next year, a step toward the first overhaul of the formula since it was developed nearly a half-century ago by an obscure civil servant in the Social Security Administration. The New York Times reports that advocates for the poor and technical experts have argued for years that the original standard, developed in conjunction with the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, was anachronistic. The civil servant who created it, Mollie Orshansky, based it on the Agriculture Department’s cheapest meal plan, on the assumption that the average family spent a third of its income on food at the time. Her formula has largely remained the same except for inflation adjustments. The new supplemental measure will be released for the first time in the fall of next year. It adapts National Academy of Sciences recommendations issued in 1995 and later embraced by, among others, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York to formulate antipoverty policies.

Environment
Weedkiller in Waterways Change Frogs' Sex Traits

According to an article in the Washington Post, a new study has found that male frogs exposed to the herbicide atrazine -- one of the most common man-made chemicals found in U.S. waters -- can make a startling developmental U-turn, becoming so completely female that they can mate and lay viable eggs. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, seems likely to add to the attention focused on a weedkiller that is widely used on cornfields. The Environmental Protection Agency, which re-approved the use of atrazine in 2006, has already begun a new evaluation of its potential health effects. In recent years, a series of scientific studies have seemed to show atrazine interfering with the hormone systems that guide development in fish, birds, rats and frogs. In many cases, the result has been "feminized" males, with behaviors or body parts more like those of females. The new study appeared to show an even more drastic transformation: Some male frogs became female, in everything but their genes.

Health Care
Anthem Blue Cross Manipulated Data to Justify Massive Rate Hike

Internal documents show one of the country's largest for-profit health insurers, in an effort to maintain profits, manipulated data to justify a rate increase on individual premiums in California this year by as much as 39 percent. TruthOut.org reports that last month, it was revealed that Anthem Blue Cross notified thousands of its 800,000 customers in California who hold individual plans that they would be affected by a rate hike as of March 1. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report, Insurance Companies Prosper, Families Suffer: Our Broken Health Insurance System, that identified how other for-profit health insurance companies were planning massive rate increases in Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.

Human Rights
Apple Admits Using Child Labor

According to an article in the London Telegraph, at least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple. The company did not name the offending factories, or say where they were based, but the majority of its goods are assembled in China. Apple also has factories working for it in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, the Czech Republic and the United States. Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. Apple has been repeatedly criticized for using factories that abuse workers and where conditions are poor. Last week, it emerged that 62 workers at a factory that manufactures products for Apple and Nokia had been poisoned by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause muscular degeneration and blur eyesight.

Civil Rights
Texas Governor Grants State's First Posthumous Pardon

Texas Governor Rick Perry pardoned a man this week who died in prison after serving more than 13 years for a wrongful rape conviction. The Austin American-Statesman reports that Perry granted the state's first posthumous pardon to Tim Cole in Austin after receiving a recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Cole was convicted of a 1985 rape of a Texas Tech University student in Lubbock. The Army veteran was cleared by DNA evidence in 2008, nine years after he died in prison of complications from asthma at age 39. The family had sought a pardon from Perry, who was sympathetic but maintained he could not legally grant a posthumous pardon. The state attorney general clarified the law in January, clearing the way for the pardon. Cole is the first Texas man to be posthumously cleared by DNA testing. The 2008 test cleared Cole and implicated convicted rapist Jerry Wayne Johnson, who confessed in several letters to court officials that date back to 1995.

Women’s Issues
Military to Review Ban on Women in Combat

According to an article in the Associated Press, US commanders are taking a second look at policies that bar women from ground combat, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have thrust female soldiers into the thick of the fight. Despite a policy designed to keep women away from units engaged in ground combat, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed women in battle with insurgents who do not operate along defined front lines.
As a result, women have earned medals for valor and praise for their mettle. Advocates of women in combat say such cases are rare, and that the military requires all parents to have firm plans in place for their children before they deploy -- or else leave the force.
More than 220,000 women have fought in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 120 of them have been killed in the conflicts, according to the Pentagon.

GLBT Issues
Lieberman Introduces Bill to Repeal DADT

Independent senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut introduced the Senate’s first “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal bill along with 11 Democratic cosponsors including Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, but no Republicans. The Advocate reports that the legislation, called the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2010, would repeal the 1993 law that banned lesbian and gay soldiers from serving openly in the military and replace it with a policy that prohibits discrimination against service members on the basis of their sexual orientation. Lieberman explained that the nondiscrimination provision would make the change “more permanent legislatively,” so a future administration couldn’t revert back to something akin to “don’t ask, don’t tell” by executive action. Lieberman, who has opposed the ’93 law since its inception, said ending the policy has significant support and that he would push for passing the bill this year, although he wasn’t sure he had the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.