Most Recent Posts

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic shifts that could shake up Texas politics in the coming years — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

Within a decade, Hispanics are bound to become the largest ethnic group in Texas. These often Democratic-leaning Texans could reshape the state's GOP-dominated political landscape.

The immigration bill that the Senate approved last week is seen by some Republicans as a chance for their party to win support among Latino voters. But there's scant backing for the bill among Texas Republicans in Washington.

Republican John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas, is seeking re-election next year, but he does not seem to be seeking the votes of many Hispanic Texans who want an immigration bill passed this year.

"I would love to support an immigration reform bill," Cornyn said last week on the Senate floor. "Unfortunately, the way this bill is shaping up, I cannot and will not."

The junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, is the son of a Cuban immigrant, but he strongly opposes the path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the Senate bill, which he voted against.

"I think we need to treat legal immigrants fairly, and I think granting a path to citizenship is not fair to legal immigrants," he said.

More 'Texas 2020'

It's All Politics

Big Growth Could Shake Up Texas' Old Political Equation

With 40 people still missing after massive explosions Saturday in the center of their town, the people of Lac-Mgantic, Quebec, begin the week "with fears that the death toll from a weekend rail disaster could surge," CBC News writes.

The people there, the news network adds, are devastated by the accident that left the center of the town looking like a war zone. According to The Montreal Gazette, "the city's downtown core was almost completely destroyed by the blast. It housed a mix of commercial and residential units in historic buildings."

When Monday dawned, it was known that at least five people had been killed when freight tankers loaded with crude oil derailed and exploded in the small town near the Maine border. "The search for victims in the charred debris has been hampered by the fact two of the train's cars continued to burn Sunday morning, creating concerns of other potentially fatal explosions," the CBC says.

It's hoped that some of those now counted as missing were away from their homes when the tanks exploded and haven't yet gotten in contact with relatives or authorities.

As for how more than 70 tank cars detached from a locomotive after they were parked several miles from Lac-Mgantic — and then rolled into the town on their own — the investigation continues. There's word of a fire aboard the locomotive before the tank cars separated and began rolling. The Gazette writes in an editorial that:

"Early reports that the conductor had left the freight train parked unattended — with brakes supposed locked in place — in the nearby town of Nantes, with another conductor expected to take over several hours later, are troubling. Preferable would be more simultaneous transfer of responsibility. As it turns out, five minutes after the conductor left, a fire broke out in one of the locomotives. But while firefighters in Nantes put out the flames and reports last night suggested someone representing the company arrived to inspect the train and found no damage, it still remains to be seen whether proper regulatory procedures were followed — and if they were, whether the inspection failed to detect brake damage possibly caused by the fire."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A study published in the scholarly journal Neurology [subscription only] says that, although there is no cure for dementia, "reading, writing, and playing games" can slow the disease's progress. The scientists, led by Robert S. Wilson, asked 294 patients about their reading habits over the course of about 6 years, and then tested their brains for dementia after their deaths. The study showed that mentally active patients — ones who read and wrote regularly — declined at a significantly slower rate than those who had an average amount of activity. (Related news on Morning Edition: "Finding Simple Tests For Brain Disorders Turns Out To Be Complex.")

The MI5 file on George Orwell holds some amusingly incriminating evidence: "He dresses in bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours." (As quoted in Alex Danchev's review of British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930-1960, by James Smith.)

Physician and best-selling author Oliver Sacks writes about why he's looking forward to turning 80 in an essay for The New York Times: "At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together."

Buzzfeed's "27 Broiest Books That Bros Like To Read" matrix is shockingly apt.

The novelist Joyce Carol Oates inspired an impassioned debate on Friday with a series of tweets that implicitly linked Islam and sexual harassment in Egypt. She wrote: "Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic — Egypt — [it's] natural to inquire: what's the predominant religion?" The response was immediate and angry, with writers such as Teju Cole taking offense. Oates later qualified her statement, writing that "Blaming religion(s) for cruel behavior of believers may be a way of not wishing to acknowledge they'd be just as cruel if secular." (Related news on Weekend Edition Sunday: "Sexual Assaults Reportedly Rampant During Egypt Protests.")

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Howard Norman's I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place is a lovely, moody series of autobiographical essays that seeks to explain, "How does someone with a confused soul, as I consider mine to be, try to gain some clarity and keep some emotional balance and find some joy, especially after a number of incidents of arresting strangeness have happened in life?"

Mark Kurlansky's Ready For a Brand New Beat: How "Dancing in the Street" Became the Anthem for a Changing America is a brisk, compelling social history that shows how the Motown dance hit turned into an symbol for social change.

“ He was just so nice, one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. It was kind of hard to resist, especially when you've kissed a lot of frogs in your life, you meet a man who's just as caring and sweet as he is.