News

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus has been drawing fire all year from far-right lawmakers, including members of the so-called “Texas Freedom Caucus” in the State House of Representatives, who have called for Straus’s job.

A new oil and gas study suggests that hundreds of traditional vertical oil wells in Oklahoma have been damaged by more recently drilled horizontal wells, dug for the purpose of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.”

It’s now been ten years since Amarillo’s Western Plaza was demolished, and The Amarillo Globe-News has published a brief remembrance of what was for many years Amarillo’s largest shopping mall.

In fact, upon its construction in 1968 Western Plaza was said to be the biggest mall between Denver and Dallas. The 400,000 square foot shopping mall’s first tenant was Montgomery Ward.

Amarillo, Texas has made a top 15 list of cities that you should see before the word gets out.

In fact, Amarillo was the only Texas city to make a new Expedia list called 15 under-the-radar cities you need to visit – coming in at the number one spot.

The description of Amarillo on Expedia’s Viewfinder travel blog website, reads as follows:

As a southwest Kansas farmer takes a path to extend the life of the Ogallala Aquifer, his daughter is doing her part, as well.

As Kansas Agland reports, Dwane Roth of Holcomb changed his mind about the use of irrigation to water his corn crop a few years ago, after realizing that even though the top couple of inches of soil was dry, the water beneath it was sufficient to water his crop.

It’s been called the “Texas Miracle,” the notion that the Texas economy can weather any storm and will continue to sail smoothly while other states founder.

But now, according to a prominent expert on the Texas economy, that miracle may have come to an end.

There are a lot of players in farm bill discussions nowadays, and as Politico reports, all of them - in one way or another - are related.

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Tuesday, Elise Golan, sustainable development director at the USDA, said the farm bill is flawed in that it segregates by topics such as nutrition, trade, conservation and horticulture.

The Colorado Department of Corrections is asking the state to add $11 million to this year’s budget to lease a private prison while it attempts to reopen a closed one in Canon City.

As The Denver Post reports, the department of correction’s supplementary budget shows it wants $10.9 million to open a 250-bed private prison because of an unexpected increase in prisoners.

A new Texas law gives financial institutions greater authority to stop transactions that they suspect are aimed at defrauding elderly or disabled clients.

Prompted by a man she had never met, an elderly woman in Dallas County recently decided to sell her home and wire the $200,000 windfall to a mysterious bank account, a victims advocate recalled. 

The man, who claimed to be communicating from Nigeria, promised to marry her. It was all a scam. Today, the woman is homeless.

Some farmers and soil scientists are starting to realize that the most important thing you can do is view topsoil itself as a living thing.

As Politico reports, since the invention of the plow, farming has focused on tillage - disrupting the soil to make it productive.

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus has asked the State Preservation Board to remove a plaque in the State Capitol that honors the Confederacy, reports The Austin American-Statesman. Straus and other critics have charged that the plaque distorts history in order to glorify the Confederacy.

The Oklahoma Education Department has released a new plan to address the ongoing woes of the state’s education system, reports Oklahoma Watch.

The goals of the plan include reducing the state’s recent reliance on emergency certified teachers and raising the state’s high school graduation rate to 90 percent. The plan will also try to ease hunger in schools, and force underfunded public schools that have gone to a four-day school week to fix their calendars.

What’s the difference between a tax and a fee?

As The Denver Post reports, that's the question being asked in three major court cases in Colorado.  

Five Kansas universities will collaborate on an agricultural research project examining the role that microorganisms play in the environment.

As the Topeka Capital-Journal reports, the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, Fort Hays State University, Wichita State University and Haskell Indian Nations University will cooperate on the $20 million research project, being funded by the National Science Foundation.

Texas Senator Kel Seliger formally announced his bid for re-election this week, reports The Amarillo Globe-News.

First elected to the state Senate in 2004, Seliger says he is particularly interested in maintaining local control for Texas communities, after the Texas Legislature recently passed a number of bills aimed at weakening the power of Texas municipalities.

Last month, Amarillo’s Jenkins Chapel celebrated its 91st anniversary. The little church was packed with visiting worshippers from nearby churches like Johnson Chapel and Mount Zion.

A new law will allow Texas school districts to store and distribute leftover food from the cafeteria.

The attorneys general from Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas, along with about three dozen others have served subpoenas on several opioid manufacturers to determine what role they might have played in the nation’s opioid epidemic. This after the coalition of attorneys general sent a letter asking the insurance industry to re-examine the way it may support over-prescription of the potentially deadly and addictive drugs.

Kansas has earned a D in a new analysis of states’ fiscal health.

As The Topeka Capital-Journal reports, Kansas has the highest taxpayer burden of any Great Plains state, according to an analysis by the Chicago-based group Truth in Accounting, which found that each Kansas taxpayer would have to cough up $7,800 to help the state catch up on funding its liabilities.

Over the last year, more than 100 Kansas kids placed in the foster care system had to spend the night in offices instead of homes.  Kids slept on couches or makeshift beds in the offices of the private organizations that handle foster care placement. 
 
Lawmakers and child advocates heard about the issue during a meeting of a foster care task force in Topeka. Republican Representative Linda Gallagher is one of the group’s members.

After the Affordable Care Act became law, insurance rates in America dipped to historic lows. But those uninsured rates are on the rise again, thanks to uncertainty in the insurance markets. And uninsured rates can vary wildly across states.

The personal finance website Wallethub recently set out to find which states had the lowest rates of uninsured citizens.