Sonia Smith

Federal inspectors cited a sawmill run by members of the insular Church of Wells with multiple safety violations.

The late afternoon of March 25, 2012, a voice crackled over the police scanners that perch on the coffee tables or hang on the belts of many residents in San Saba: an ambulance was headed out to Harkey Pecan Farms. Scanner chatter is a rich source of gossip in this tiny Central Texas city of 3,099, and ears perked up that Sunday as paramedics and law enforcement officers rushed four miles west of town to Harkeyville, where a 1927 red-brick house sat among three hundred acres of pecan orchards. T…

Austin Tice has been held in Syria since 2012. His family in Houston hasn’t given up on seeing him come home.

Almost 25 percent of severe injuries at mills in Texas since 2017 have occurred at a single facility, owned by Church of Wells members.

The city’s new police chief explains how she plans to apply the lessons she learned in Detroit to a troubled department.

In 2012 Austin Tice answered a calling: to become a war photographer and tell the world what was happening in Syria. But then he went missing.

When Given Kachepa first arrived from Zambia as a young boy, he expected to sing in a choir and gain an education. Instead he was forced into servitude.

At first, Russell Bonner Bentley III wasn’t sure he would survive the winter. It was January 2015 in Donetsk, a war-torn city in eastern Ukraine, and the 54-year-old Texan was sequestered inside an abandoned three-story brick monastery, exchanging fire with Ukrainian troops. He and the dozen men fighting with him had been braving freezing temperatures for weeks. From the second floor, Bentley trained his rocket-propelled grenade launcher and his Kalashnikov rifle out of a tiny slit in the side o…

During the last several years, the solar industry in Texas has grown at a rapid pace. Large-scale solar farms have popped up across the state, and just last week, a South Korean energy company broke ground in Pecos County on what will become the largest solar project in Texas. But beginning next month, imported solar panels and energy cells---the building blocks of such projects---will be subject to high tariffs. Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced the new tariff, which will st…

Transportation edged out electricity as the biggest source of carbon emissions last year in the United States.