Texas

A newly ordained youth minister decided he could no longer keep his secret, confessing to authorities in Houston that he fatally stabbed a convenience store clerk in 1994 when he was 16. For his forthrightness, Calvin Wayne Inman, 29, found himself jailed and charged with capital murder. He was being held without bail. The lead pastor of the 800-member Elim Church said he persuaded Inman to surrender to police after learning about the case several weeks ago. "It was a situation that was on his conscience," said Ron Nissen, pastor of the Pentecostal church.

As they race back and forth between Ohio and Texas in advance of their March 4 primary showdown, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are squaring off over who has the answer to the nation's spiraling foreclosure crisis. Neither presidential rival offers a comprehensive solution, economists say, but that has not inhibited them from touting their populist credentials and tugging at voters' heartstrings.

In the land of the Texas Longhorns, where men are men and football is a sacrament, there are lessons to be learned about the intersection of politics and sport. On Thursday, during a pre-debate tour of the sacred Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin, Sen. Barack Obama taught some and learned some, compliments of Mack Brown, University of Texas head coach. Obama stood in the locker-room gloom, nursing a cold but patiently posing for pictures with anyone who breathed.

A police officer in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade was killed in a motorcycle accident Friday morning on the way to a campaign rally, authorities said. The officer was identified as Senior Cpl. Victor Lozada-Tirado, who died after apparently crashing into a concrete barrier, Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle said in a televised news conference. "Officer Lozada was very, very well respected. He had been here a long time and had touched a lot of people," Kunkle said.

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.