In the News

As we continue to navigate the pandemic, Texas policymakers must allow Texas employers to decide their own best practices to maintain workplace health and safety. To do otherwise would establish a concerning precedent of state interference into determining what workforce health and safety policies are best, without regard for a particular industry’s needs or the differences in manufacturing work environments.

Republicans in the Texas Legislature face an uphill battle as they try to pass a bill exempting most of the state’s workforce from vaccine requirements enacted by their employers. In another sign of trouble, Texans for Lawsuit Reform…came out against one of the bills ordered up by Abbott, House Bill 155, which the Texas House State Affairs Committee considered Wednesday.

Elon Musk seemed strangely casual in dropping the biggest news to come out of Tesla’s virtual shareholder meeting on Thursday afternoon. Streaming from inside the so-called Gigafactory the company is building in southeastern Travis County, on a raised dais in front of a red-and-white-painted manufacturing assembly line, the billionaire announced that Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to the Austin area. Musk—himself a newly minted Texan—didn’t offer much of a satisfactory explanation why.

As fires ravaged Northern California, lawyers have descended on the region in a bid to sign up survivors as clients. The wildfire litigation industry has become big business for attorneys, but some survivors of past fires have a message for more recent victims. Buyer beware. From the California newsroom collaboration, KQED’s Lily Jamali reports.

The first case in Philadelphia over alleged health risks associated with Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder came to an end Friday as a state jury cleared the company of claims alleging it contributed to a woman’s ovarian cancer diagnosis, according to a report in Law 360.

Donald Trump tried to overturn at least three state elections in 2020. But liberal groups in North Carolina are trying to overturn or sidestep four separate elections in that state from 2018 and 2020. Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, a filing last week suggests North Carolina’s Supreme Court is willing to entertain the political revanchists’ claims.

The Austin-based 3rd Court of Appeals will decide whether a whistleblower lawsuit by the former officials, who say they were improperly fired last year in retaliation for reporting the allegations, can move forward.

The Republicans trying to unseat embattled Attorney General Ken Paxton are unsparing in their criticism of the incumbent from their own party — and beginning to draw some hard contrasts with one another. During separate one-on-one interviews for the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival, the three Republican primary challengers took Paxton to task for the legal problems he has accrued in office, with two even saying he should resign.

As a small business owner in Bakersfield, I know firsthand how desperate the California small business community is to catch a break during the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has already gone on longer than anyone expected, but instead of receiving help from our state leaders in Sacramento, we are left to suffer needlessly with no end in sight.

The number of criminal cases pending before Harris County courts stands at more than 94,000.

Forty-six percent of these cases are considered backlogged — defined as misdemeanors pending more than six months and felonies older than one year — beyond which the likelihood of conviction plummets as investigators retire, victims withdraw and witnesses’ memories fade.