Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Texas is a fine state populated with many great people who do interesting and important things, most visibly in science, technology, energy and agriculture. Texans traditionally place a high value on individual autonomy and liberty. The Republican Party gave us Abraham Lincoln, and he and the party saved the union from slavery and dissolution. You might expect that together, Texas and the Republican Party would promote a society in which people live their own lives, make their own choices and mind their own business. So how i...
LOS ANGELES - Spring practices have delivered the first glimpse of how college football rosters altered by high-profile transfers and coaching changes could shape the upcoming college football season. Here are some top storylines to watch as teams prepare for the 2022-23 season: The transfer portal should affect programs like never before Lincoln Riley's 13 transfers into the USC program is a number that he has said will grow in the coming months, and all college football rost...
Doesn’t the light in the sky at 7 p.m. feel great? How nice it would be to stay in daylight saving time year-round and not have to adjust the clocks to “fall back” or “spring forward.” Perhaps U.S. senators were thinking the same thing when they voted swiftly and unanimously on Tuesday, two days after we sprang forward an hour, to make daylight saving time year-round, beginning in November 2023. Sunlight, at least, appears to be something on which the nation can agree. The twice-annual changing of the clocks is...
The most conspicuous victims of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine are the people who will lose their lives in defending their country against a brutal (and nuclear-armed) neighbor. But Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a many-pronged attack — an audacious operation the United States predicted but was unable to prevent — is also a devastating assault on international norms and potentially a harbinger of a wider war in Europe. Last week’s attack fully justifies the significant sanctions the U.S. and its...
John Madden was so much more than a Super Bowl-winning coach, legendary broadcaster and someone who built a video-game empire. He was a regular guy. "What made him so popular was that he was so genuine and so accessible," said Al Michaels, who worked in the ABC and NBC broadcast booths with Madden for seven years. "In traveling around the country, John had a great connection with city folk, rural folk, with farmers, with people out there doing the grunt work. He just had this...
MULESHOE -- Deep on the dusty Plains of West Texas, where grain silos line the sparse landscape and a dry breeze blows loose tufts of cotton across U.S. Route 84, a stretch of railroad runs along a lonely highway. The Pecos and Northern Texas Railway companies laid the track here in 1913, cutting through this swath of Bailey County ranchland to connect the growing town of Lubbock to the border of New Mexico. A farming community sprouted alongside the track soon after - some 70...
The identity of the person most shocked by the shocking USC hire of Lincoln Riley has officially been revealed. It's, well, Lincoln Riley. "This a surreal moment, to be honest," he said. The Trojans rolled out the cardinal-and-gold carpet for their newest football coach on a scenic seventh-floor patio at the Coliseum on Monday afternoon, and the young fella from the rural Texas Panhandle town of Muleshoe was as wide-eyed as a tourist who suddenly stops talking to stare...
From his new gilded perch atop the Coliseum, with the city of Los Angeles suddenly at his fingertips, Lincoln Riley surveyed the scene he now presided over in stunned disbelief. Over one shoulder, the Hollywood sign stretched across the distant Santa Monica Mountains. Over the other, downtown skyscrapers sprouted from the sprawling landscape. Close by, trumpets sounded and Song Girls swayed. It was a surreal picture for a coach who'd spent the vast majority of his life in West...
Ahmaud Arbery’s killing in February 2020 sounded at first like a horrific flashback to an earlier era in which white men killed Black men for appearing in places they were neither expected nor welcome, and then were coddled instead of arrested and prosecuted by the local police. It brought to mind the distant memory of Emmett Till and more recent one of Trayvon Martin. It seemed a bit more modern when finally, more than two months later, amid mounting public outrage and state pressure, Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael...
One of the top coaches in college football is on his way to L.A., the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. USC is closing its three-month search for a new head football coach with a bombshell hire, landing Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley to turn around the Trojans program. Riley, a former Texas Tech quarterback, posted a 55-10 record while leading the Sooners during four seasons. He has won four Big 12 championships, seamlessly replacing Bob Stoops following his retirement. Riley previously was Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator a...
COVID-19 is a plague on humanity, but it hasn’t been that kind to the planet either. Our efforts to avoid infection led to an unavoidable increase in single-use plastic. Just how much more we are only now starting to grasp. This month a team of researchers from Nanjing University’s School of Atmospheric Sciences in China and UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography published an estimate based on scientific modeling, that 8 million tons of pandemic-related plastic was produced globally as of August....
WASHINGTON — For the first time since 1973, a state law banning most abortions has taken effect. A Texas law that would drastically limit the availability of abortions in defiance of Roe vs. Wade took effect early Wednesday, as the Supreme Court took no action on pending appeals. The so-called Texas Heartbeat Act would make it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion after about the sixth week of pregnancy, and it would authorize anyone to sue the physician for violating...
LOS ANGELES - The U.S. Marines dispatched Zak Lara to Afghanistan a decade ago, stationing him in Helmand province, where he guarded against Taliban advances and trained Afghan soldiers in Sangin, a community of 20,000. He left seven months later at age 20, proud of having helped build wells and housing and thankful to have dodged death. Seventeen Marines from his unit were killed in action. Dozens survived with lost limbs. More later died by suicide. He got an honorable...
Sometimes the Supreme Court protects constitutional rights best when it doesn’t establish what lawyers call a bright-line rule applicable to every possible future situation. That was the case last Wednesday when the court ruled in favor of a high school cheerleader who had been disciplined for a vulgar outburst on social media. In Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the justices ruled 8-1 that a Pennsylvania school district violated the free speech rights of Brandi Levy when it suspended her from her school’s junior...
It long has been clear that Capitol Police were woefully unprepared for the Jan. 6 assault on Congress by rampaging supporters of then-President Donald Trump, who were bent on overturning the results of the 2020 election. But a new report by the agency's inspector general documents in depressing detail lapses in training, readiness and intelligence assessment. Inspector General Michael Bolton also reported that the police were ordered not to employ “heavier, less-lethal weapons” that might have dispersed the rioters. And...
LOS ANGELES — Golf star Tiger Woods was “lucky to be alive” Tuesday after being seriously injured in a rollover crash near Rancho Palos Verdes, the Los Angeles County sheriff said. Woods was the sole occupant of a 2021 Genesis GV80 SUV that was traveling north on Hawthorne Boulevard at Blackhorse Road when he crashed just after 7 a.m. local time, authorities said. The vehicle sustained major damage, and Woods had to be extricated from the wreckage by personnel from the L...
Failure to wear masks can do more than spread COVID-19, as some of the intruders who stormed the U.S. Capitol last week are finding. It also reveals faces to security cameras, government investigators and online private eyes, who’ve used those bare visages and other telling clues to identify many of the miscreants. As a result, not only have many of them been hit with criminal charges, but several were summarily fired from their jobs. As a group, the mob inside the Capitol certainly was breaking the law in the most serious...
Dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists in Hong Kong were rounded up around dawn last Wednesday as the U.S. Congress was preparing for a contentious fight over the Electoral College vote — a fight that would soon prompt a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters to storm the United States Capitol. The timing of the arrests was not coincidental. While our nation has been mired in political gridlock and dysfunction, authoritarians around the world have gleefully exploited the absence of American leadership as an...
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In images posted on social media and beamed around the world Wednesday, small clusters of U.S. Capitol Police officers retreated, fell away from violent assaults or simply moved aside as a large mob descended on the seat of American legislative power. Officers at a U.S. Capitol perimeter fence tried to hold their line but failed as intruders overturned the barrier. Officers at another gate, seemingly overwhelmed, appeared to walk off as the intruders passed by. Another lone officer tried to hold back an...
WASHINGTON - Supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, pounding on the door of the House chamber, as lawmakers huddled inside, and strolling across the Senate floor carrying signs to object to the election of Joe Biden. The invasion of the Capitol building forced the House and Senate to abruptly stop their debate over the formal counting and announcement of electoral votes for Biden, a constitutionally mandated process. CNN reported one woman died...
More than 5,000 years ago, the warriors of Babylonia painted their fingernails with kohl to go to battle. More recently, A-list actor Brad Pitt wore nail polish, apparently just for the heck of it. Yet for some reason, it’s a showstopper when a 17-year-old male in Texas wears nail polish to school? Granted, women have been practically the only ones decorating their nails for the last few centuries. But custom and convention are no reason for nail polish to be an exclusively female style — witness how earrings have become...
The prescription opioid crisis that has taken well over 100,000 American lives and ruined hundreds of thousands more wasn’t just an accident of time or the byproduct of a dysfunctional society. It was in good part the deliberate result of unethical and occasionally illegal machinations by the pharmaceutical industry, particularly by Purdue Pharma, which paid kickbacks and willfully misled physicians and the public to boost sales of its addictive signature drug, OxyContin. The company has agreed to plead guilty to criminal...
For years the Supreme Court has resisted calls to let the public outside the courtroom listen in on its oral arguments. But live audio streams finally became a reality in May when the coronavirus pandemic forced the justices to hold two weeks’ worth of arguments in telephone conference calls. The justices’ decision to livestream those arguments was a dramatic departure from their usual practice of posting the recordings on the court’s website at the end of the week, when public interest and news coverage have ebbed....
Let’s get out of here. Who hasn’t thought that at some point in the past four months, as we hunkered down in our homes, brooding and restless but with no place to go? The pandemic shuttered our offices and made the idea of venturing anywhere more ambitious than a grocery store seem like a perilous journey. Any trip that required a flight or a stroll among the masses — even masked — seemed an unreasonable risk. So is it any wonder, in our longing to get away from this virus-riddled existence, that we have found an...
Joe Biden is approaching the most important decision of his presidential campaign — choosing the woman who will be his running mate — on political terrain that has changed dramatically since he began the search, and amid intense lobbying that has showered uncommon attention on the contenders. With the former vice president enjoying a strong polling lead over President Donald Trump, some supporters say Biden is under less pressure to make a game-changing pick to galvanize voters than when he was first struggling to unify t...