Your State

A Coast Guard Station South Padre Island boatcrew catches up to fleeing poachers aboard a Mexican lancha near the U.S.-Mexico maritime border Jan. 25, 2015.

Satellite observations of huge oil and gas basins in East Texas and North Dakota confirm staggering 9 and 10 percent leakage rates of heat-trapping methane. “In conclusion,” researchers write, “at the current methane loss rates, a net climate benefit on all time frames owing to tapping unconventional resources in the analyzed tight formations is unlikely.” In other words, even the alleged benefits of fracking are undermined by its general horribleness.

Houston has joined New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago in having an open data policy, making a clean sweep for the top five largest US cities.

Over three dissenting justices, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Texas from enforcing key provisions of HB 2, the massive anti-abortion omnibus bill that has closed all but eight clinics in the state.

The managing partner of a Republican research firm says that it was "kind of stupid" to list Josh Eboch, Texas Sen. John Cornyn's political director, as treasurer of five super PACs his firm recently set up, and that Eboch will be removed from that role. The PACs placed at least 500,000 robocalls in four competitive Senate races in September, but has no relationship to the second-ranking Republican Senator, he added.

Freight drivers in Texas voted to unionize. The workers at Con-Way in Laredo drive for the busiest inland port in the US, with over 7,000 trucks crossing the border each day.

The Voter ID law passed in Texas was promised to be a relatively benign fix to a (non-existent) voter fraud problem. Democrats were wary, and for good reason. Methods for distributing these mandated IDs have fallen far short than what was promised, leaving many likely disenfranchised.

New mapping technology is helping Austin combat a growing youth obesity problem.

Eight: the number of legal abortion providers that, barring a federal court’s intervention, will remain in Texas as of Monday, September 1, when the final provision of Texas’ omnibus anti-abortion law, HB 2, goes into effect.

Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he is fighting a criminal indictment with the law on his side — not to mention a legal team with formidable records in big cases. His lead attorney took on BP after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Another is George W. Bush's former lawyer during the Florida recount that decided the 2000 presidential election. That doesn't even include the Austin attorney who's been paid at least $80,000 in taxpayer money since a grand jury was first seated in April to consider abuse of power allegations.

Undeterred by indictment, Texas Gov. Rick Perry intends to travel to three major 2016 primary states during the next two weeks even as he faces the prospects of a highly unpresidential booking on felony charges. Perry, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, could answer two felony counts of abuse of power this week and be forced to sit for a booking photo and fingerprinting in response to a political dispute that has roiled his home state.

Max Soffar has a long history of self-medicating. When he was four, his parents found him passed out next to their car, gas cap in hand. Since birth, Max's brain has been damaged. That damage has been made worse by years of physical and mental abuse by adoptive parents and staff at mental institutions.