Headlines
Fri., Oct. 9, 2015
City Council meets today (Oct. 8) with primarily zoning work at hand, though a few other persistent matters are on the agenda: the proposed sobriety center, base zoning for the Grove PUD, the central booking facility, and perhaps short-term rental regulations. See " Council: Welcome to Solar City."
In apparent reverberation of the latest school massacre, in Roseburg, Ore., a threat on online site 4chan had Austin-area police on alert, although they described the threat – "don't go to school tomorrow if you're near Austin" – as "not credible." Several 4chan posters had praised the Oct. 1 shooting at Umpqua Community College.
Vincent Harding, former Travis County Democratic Party secretary, will succeed Jan Soifer as the new chair. Harding issued a statement, saying in part, "I am truly honored to be the youngest person ever elected to serve as chair and only the second African-American. I know that I stand on the shoulders of giants, and I am committed to opening doors for those who will follow me."
Professor Dumpster, Huston-Tillotson Professor Jeff Wilson, announced the launch of a new company geared towards super-small, affordable homes in centralized locations. Kasita, the end result (we suppose) of a year spent living in an East Austin Dumpster and additional time crashing at the houses of area strangers, projects to provide somewhat-mobile 208-square-foot apartments for $600 a month, starting service in 2016.
Publisher McGraw-Hill will revise a world geography textbook that refers to African slaves as immigrant "workers," after a Pearland mom posted a YouTube video denouncing the text found in her son's book. A Facebook apology from the publisher reads "our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves." Texas textbooks that hit classrooms this fall were crafted with heavy influence from the right-wing State Board of Education, and have come under widespread criticism for factual inaccuracies.
Leading medical organizations and 12 state attorneys general filed briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to block the Texas abortion law known as House Bill 2. The American Medical Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warn of the impending health care crisis if SCOTUS fails to step in, while legal scholars and attorneys general ask for meaningful judicial review and criticize the 5th Circuit's "uncritical deference" to Texas.
The Justice Department plans to release roughly 6,000 federal inmates this month as part an initiative to reduce overcrowding in prisons. Reports say most of those seeing release will be nonviolent drug offenders from the Eighties and Nineties, with about a third of them undocumented immigrants likely facing deportation.
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