Texas

In Texas, where Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are in an intense battle to win Tuesday's primary, the Clinton camp is going the extra mile to appeal to voters. During Bill Clinton's two-day swing through the state this week to campaign for his wife, nearly every rally featured a mariachi band. The Clinton campaign has been criticized for its spending, but the mariachi bands weren't complaining.

More than a third of the Democratic voters in the Texas primary on Tuesday will probably be Latinos. And as they choose between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, many of them -- like the established Latino families in this Central Texas town -- will have one issue paramount on their mind: the economy.

In winning New Hampshire a few weeks ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton declared, "I found my own voice." But it was a much different voice in the closing days before Tuesday's voting that carried her to victory in Ohio and Texas -- and which now lets her make a strong case for extending the Democratic presidential race into the spring and possibly beyond. Gone was the misty-eyed Clinton who scored points showing her human side.

In Sen. Barack Obama's parallel universe, also known as election night in the Alamo City, you'd never know that the television networks had just declared his rival the winner of the Ohio primary. You wouldn't know that Hillary Rodham Clinton had squeaked a few percentage points ahead of Obama in Texas. You wouldn't, in fact, know much of anything. At 10 p.m.

James Brian Sliter had every legal right to run for mayor of this gritty little city. But as a registered sex offender, Sliter learned, reality is sometimes different. A week after declaring that he was running for mayor of Wilmer because he was fed up by a local government he claims is sullied by nepotism and corruption, Sliter announced Friday that he was dropping out of the race.

Less than a month ago, Texas Democrats turned out in huge numbers for the presidential nominating contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, confident that, no matter who won, the party would have a popular, well-financed candidate. But that exuberance is gone now.

Texas child welfare officials said Saturday that they had removed 183 people -- including 137 children -- from an isolated polygamist compound in southwestern Texas after allegations that a 16-year-old girl there had been sexually abused.

Texas was forced by federal law to end its poll tax on voters four decades ago, and now another levy has put the Lone Star State in constitutionally murky waters: the "pole tax." Texas lawmakers last year imposed a $5-per-patron fee on strip joints to raise more than $40 million annually for anti-sexual-assault programs and healthcare for the uninsured. The fee, which took effect Jan.

Texas officials said Monday that they had taken more than 400 children into temporary state custody while they continued investigating allegations that girls at a remote polygamist compound were being sexually abused by men. "This is the biggest single removal in the history of this agency," Child Protective Services spokesman Darrell Azar said Monday evening. "No one can remember anything quite like it.

Child welfare investigators who entered a polygamist compound in West Texas this weekend found many pregnant teenagers and underage girls who said they were forced to marry, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday. The documents detailed the evidence that Texas officials presented to a judge to justify taking temporary state custody of more than 400 children from the YFZ Ranch, near the tiny town of Eldorado, built by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.