Free Republic

A Texas district judge recently ruled the Service Employees International Union has no grounds to request a retrial following a court order directing the Chicago-based union to pay Professional Janitorial Services Houston $7.8 million. . . . Harris County District Judge Erin Lunceford also instructed the SEIU to turn over nearly 10 years of financial records and other information before the court determines whether PJS can seize the union’s assets.

Dr. Denton Cooley, a Houston native and a pioneer of heart transplants, died Friday. He was 96. Born in 1920, Cooley graduated with highest honors from the University of Texas Austin and earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1944. Cooley performed the first transplant of a human heart in the United States in 1968. The following year, he became the first surgeon to implant an artificial heart in a human.

A federal judge has advised two Democratic attorneys general leading the charge against ExxonMobil to appear for pretrial testimony on their climate-change investigations. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey are scheduled to undergo depositions by Exxon attorneys on Dec. 13 in Dallas, according to the Thursday order by U.S. District Court Judge Ed Kinkeade. Exxon is challenging the prosecutors’ subpoenas demanding thousands of documents and communications related to probes into whether the company committed fraud by misleading the public about its research on global warming. Exxon has argued that the investigations are politically motivated...

A religious watchdog organization is applauding a denominational group for its handling of a sexual ethics issue. The Baptist General Convention of Texas, aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention, recently notified a Dallas and an Austin church that their stances on affirming sexual relationships outside the scope of biblical marriage between a man and a woman puts them outside the bounds of cooperation with the state convention. That means the BGCT will no longer accept funds from the church, seat its messengers to the annual meeting and allow the church to express affiliation with the state convention, among other things.

A Texas television reporter is out of a job after she criticized President Obama and praised President-elect Donald Trump on her personal Facebook page — claiming the country went “downhill” under the outgoing commander-in-chief. Scarlett Fakhar said she was recently canned from her local news gig at Fox in Houston for posting last week that she was “happy and relieved” over Trump’s unexpected White House win. Fakhar had said in the post, which has since been deleted, that Obama made the “entire county hate one another” and claimed God “had a hand” in the election. She also said she could...

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz signaled willingness to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court Friday afternoon at a conference of conservative and libertarian lawyers in Washington, D.C. “What I will say is that history is long and can take unexpected paths,” he said in response to an audience question about his filling the vacancy. “I think it is absolutely vital that that seat and every other seat that comes vacant on the court be filled by principled constitutionalists who will be faithful to the law and will check their own policy preferences at the door...

The administration has already taken the first step to accommodate President-election Trump’s positions, agreeing Friday to take a timeout on President Obama’s push to kick-start his 2014 deportation amnesty. In documents filed with a federal judge in Texas the Justice Department said that in light of the new management that will take over next year, the case should be suspended. “Accordingly, the parties respectfully submit that further proceedings on the merits of this case, including the submission of a schedule for resolving the merits, should be stayed until February 20, 2017,” the Justice Department and lawyers for Texas said in...

ROBERTS COUNTY, TX (KFDA) - A small town in the Texas Panhandle is having to deal with some unwanted attention after being dubbed the "Most Pro-Trump county in the Nation." Though the election is over, voices of supporters for both parties remain loud and clear. But the small town of Miami is being criticized for how they voted. More than 95 percent of Roberts County voters cast their ballot for President-Elect Donald Trump, the highest of any county in the United States.

The US Geological Survey said Tuesday that it assessed what could be the largest deposit of untapped oil ever discovered in America. An estimated average of 20 billion barrels of oil and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids are available for the taking in the Wolfcamp shale, which is in the Midland Basin portion of Texas' Permian Basin. Based on a West Texas Intermediate crude oil price of $45 per barrel, those deposits are worth about $900 billion. US oil exploration companies have flocked to the superrich Permian Basin in recent years and used shale-drilling technology to create an...

A skit portraying the assassination of President-elect Donald Trump by two 10th-grade students at Marshall High School provoked anger and dismay from the parents of a student who watched it unfold last week. Harold and Melinda Bean said that in the skit, entitled “The Assassination of Donald Trump,” one of the boys made a gunfire sound effect with his cell phone as the other boy, portraying Trump, fell to the ground in mock death. “I don’t understand how the teacher can repeat an apology and be right there back at work on Monday morning,” he said. “Though we understand she...

Art Sisneros, one of 538 electors with the final say on who becomes the next U.S. president, says he's undecided on how to vote. The 40-year-old family man from Dayton is among the 38 people chosen to represent Texas in the Electoral College. That group will gather Dec. 19 in 50 state capitols around the country to vote on who wins the election. If all electors cast their votes in keeping with the winner of each state, then Donald Trump wins, even though Hillary Clinton received more popular votes overall.

A Texas state senator has filed a bill to “eliminate Sanctuary Cities in the State of Texas.” The bill will require local governments and law enforcement agencies uphold current immigration laws.

A fight is brewing among forces behind the Trump transition over the future of the Justice Department, with separate factions pushing Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. A cabal of wealthy Texas oilmen is aggressively promoting Cruz for attorney general, according to a person with direct knowledge of discussions behind the scenes who also said the one-time Trump rival wants the slot. On Thursday a new wrinkle emerged, with the Trump transition team releasing a statement about a meeting between Trump and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions. Trump, the statement said, 'has been unbelievably impressed with...

DETROIT (WWJ) – The youngest son of U.S. Representative John Conyers and his wife, Monica Conyers, has been reported missing in Texas. Houston police say 21-year-old Carl Conyers was last seen Tuesday afternoon by his roommate at their apartment in South Central Houston. Daisha Lewis, Conyers’ girlfriend, said she and several other friends received a message from Conyers’ Twitter account Wednesday morning and they momentarily thought he might have been located — but that didn’t turn out the be the case.

The youngest son of U.S. Representative John Conyers and his wife, Monica Conyers, has been reported missing in Houston. Houston Police say 21-year-old Carl Conyers was last seen Tuesday afternoon by his roommate at their apartment in the 3700 block of Southmore, about a mile southwest of the University of Houston. Monica Conyers tells KHOU 11 News her son told roommates he "had a bad day" before he disappeared. By Wednesday morning, the student's girlfriend said Carl was no longer answering his phone. Conyers is currently a student at UH. He’s described as a black male, about 6 feet tall...

The U.S. Geological Survey says it has found the largest continuous oil and gas deposit ever discovered in the United States. On Tuesday, the USGS announced that a swath of West Texas known as the Wolfcamp shale contains 20 billion barrels of oil and 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That is nearly three times more petroleum than the agency found in North Dakota's Bakken shale in 2013. As NPR's Jeff Brady reported, the amount of oil in the Wolfcamp shale formation is nearly three times the amount of petroleum products used by the entire country in a year....

<p>Three NBA teams reportedly are taking a stand against Donald Trump with their own form of protest.</p> <p>According to a report from ESPN’s Marc Stein and Zach Lowe, the Milwaukee Bucks, Memphis Grizzlies and Dallas Mavericks have stopped staying in Trump-branded hotels.</p>

Link only...Bloomie via Star Telegram$900 billion.

Tuesday the U.S. Geological Survey announced the largest ever assessment of “continuous oil” ever made in the United States. The Wolfcamp shale in the area of Midland, Texas is estimated to contain three times the oil and gas of the Bakken shale formation in Montana and North Dakota. From the USGS: The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This...

A vast field of shale rock in West Texas could yield 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the largest source of shale oil the U.S. Geological Survey has ever assessed, agency officials said. The Wolfcamp Shale geologic formation in the Midland area also contains an estimated 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, the agency said in a release. The discovery is nearly three times larger than the shale oil found in 2013 in the Bakken and Three Forks formations in the Dakotas and Montana, said Chris Schenk, a Denver-based research...