Texas continues to lead other states on capital punishment. But the decline in new death sentences and executions reached a record low.

East Texas has been hit by several severe rainstorms this spring, and several counties have declared disasters.

Jasper’s second Black mayor wants to help residents pay their bills while a younger city council wants to invest in the city’s culture. Residents call their heated arguments at city council meetings “foolishness” and “embarrassing.”

The quiet East Texas town of Jasper came together immediately after the racist murder of James Byrd Jr. Now, Texas is leading the nation in incidents of white supremacist propaganda.

Women in Deep East Texas drive over an hour to give birth after the last obstetrics unit in the area closed in 2019. But if closing the unit was hard, reopening it is proving nearly impossible.

In conservative Sabine County, it’s hard for teens to access contraception or sex education beyond lessons on abstinence. The Deep East Texas region has one of the highest teen birth rates in the state.

Running elections in Texas has never been easy. But since 2020, the scrutiny elections administrators face has grown — even in small Republican-controlled counties that former President Donald Trump carried.

Local governments in Texas have spent the summer preparing their budgets for next year, wrestling with inflation and a law that prohibits them from raising property tax revenues beyond 3.5% without voter approval.

Authorities say they might have found the weapon used to kill a 5-year-old Houston boy whose body was allegedly kept in a storage unit before being discovered in an East Texas motel early this month.