My son turned 24 today, and for the first time in a long time, I did not celebrate his birthday without him. I need you to understand what a strange sentence that is for me to type. There was a time when Vicente came to his own birthday parties. SpongeBob cake, a piñata, a kid who hadn't yet been handed the keys to his own life and didn't know he could refuse. Vicente showed up because showing up was still someone else's decision. He didn't know he had a choice. Then he got o

The theological effect was immediate and durable. A woman with a claim to independent religious authority became instead a symbol of redeemed sin, forgiven rather than empowered. Historian Susan Haskins called the matter "settled" for nearly fourteen hundred years, and the settlement held remarkably well for something built on a mistake.

Patrick Byrne built a reputation on claiming inside knowledge of conspiracies few people ever verified. On Friday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled his biggest claim yet, an $800 million bribery scheme between Hunter Biden and Iran, never happened. The ruling cost Byrne $1.7 million. U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson, a Reagan appointee, entered a default judgment against Byrne after years of litigation. The case traces back to a 2023 interview in which Byrne claimed Hun

I was looking for a book and found a newspaper article by R. Daniel Cavazos, editor of The Monitor, called "Starr: diamond in the rough," written sometime around 1994, mas o menos. A Rio Grande City businessman, Lauro Lopez, gets quoted in it, joking that the new Wal-Mart and H-E-B "SOO-PER" centers were coming because of trade with Mexico, not drugs. Decades later, Rio Grande City still has its Walmart and HEB, along with a Marshalls, a Ross, a Chick-fil-A and three differen