Texas News

Texas Christian University agreed to join the Big East Conference for all sports, becoming its ninth football program and 17th basketball school.

The Fort Worth, Texas, university will become a Big East member on July 1, 2012. The Horned Frogs will participate in 20 league sports beginning with the 2012-13 season, the Big East said at a news conference held on TCU’s campus.

A Texas man has been convicted of charges that he participated in an $80 million Ponzi scheme by convincing people they were investing in automated teller machines that were never purchased.

Walter Netschi, of McKinney, Texas was convicted Friday in federal court in Manhattan.

Prosecutors say he carried out the scheme with a coconspirator between 2005 and January 2008. They say he convinced investors that the ATMs would be put in convenience stores, gas stations, malls and hotels nationwide.

Markelle Martin is having an All-Big 12 type season at strong safety and could probably be helping a University of Texas team that has lost three games in a row for the first time in Mack Brown’s 13 years as head coach. But the Oklahoma State standout never received a scholarship offer from the Longhorns. Neither did Kendall Hunter, nor Brodrick Brown. How about you, Lane Taylor?

Texas is ranked among the top states in the nation for business climate, according to Site Selection magazine.

The Lone Star State ranked third overall based on work-force skills, state and local tax schemes and transportation infrastructure.

The top five states in the rankings were North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and South Carolina.

Read more: Texas ranks No. 3 in business climate survey | San Antonio Business Journal

In baseball, the San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers will meet in the World Series beginning Wednesday. In politics, California and the Lone Star State have been battling for a while.

At stake are both old-fashioned bragging rights and the fate of more specific issues, like California’s landmark 2006 law that set limits on greenhouse gas emissions. A ballot measure next week would effectively suspend the law, if passed.

The governing body for Texas public school sports has approved new rules for concussions that will require athletes to sit out a least a day after sustaining a head injury beginning next year.

The University Interscholastic League on Monday unanimously adopted the recommendation of its medical committee. New guidelines will be in place Aug. 1, 2011.

Gov. Rick Perry said Monday that he may appeal a decision by the federal government to deny his request for emergency aid to help Texas recover from damage caused by Tropical Storm Hermine.

President Barack Obama’s administration rejected Perry’s Sept. 20 request for a major disaster declaration and about $6.8 million in aid for 13 counties. Last month’s storm killed eight people, including seven in Texas, and destroyed nearly 200 homes statewide, according to the governor’s request letter.

But Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, wrote in a letter to the governor Friday that the storm’s “severity and magnitude” did not exceed the capabilities of state and local government.

Nolan Ryan went to the Texas Rangers planning to pitch one more year to end his Hall of Fame career. It turned into five seasons on the mound, and so much more.

When Ryan retired in 1993 after two more no-hitters, his 300th victory and 5,000th strikeout, the Rangers no longer were a faceless franchise.

Longtime team broadcaster Eric Nadel says the Rangers gained legitimacy the day they signed Ryan.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced Monday a plan to make all repeat sex offenders eligible to be sentenced to life without parole and to attach electronic monitoring to those released after completing other sentences.

Perry’s announcement in Houston came hours after a Dallas judge overturned the 1993 conviction of a deaf man sent to prison for the rape of a 5-year-old girl. The fingerprints of a convicted sexual predator were later found at the crime scene.

Texas isn’t the only state where the Republican Party’s platform calls for making homosexuality illegal. The Associated Press reported this weekend that in Montana — More >