Texas Omicron, formerly the Omicron Chapter of the Kappa Alpha Order, seems to have quite the rap sheet of bad behavior. The group is now facing a lawsuit from the national administrative office of its former parent organization. The charges? Hazing, hiring exotic dancers, and staging live sex acts. more ›

Upon the death of actress and former UT student Farrah Fawcett, she willed all of her artwork to the University of Texas. Included in the art bequeathed is a 1979 portrait by Andy Warhol, missing since Fawcett's death in 2009 and valued at $30 million, that the school has been trying to find. more ›

UT-Austin and its five sister campuses hope to institute a new program that will shorten the amount of time for prospective undergraduates to earn their bachelor's degree and guarantee high-performing college entrants a spot in one of UT's medical schools.The hope is to link a medical education more closely with the medical field, as well as produce more Texas doctors. more ›

Rick O'Donnell, a special assistant to the University of Texas System, was removed from his position Tuesday. This is the latest development in the O'Donnell saga, which began with his hiring in February and led to an outcry from various parties including state Senator Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) and the president of the Texas Exes. more ›

A UT student was woken by an unwanted guest in her bed early Sunday morning. The recently renovated Moore-Hill dorm, where the incident occurred, has security measures in place. ID cards and dorm keys, however, aren't exactly ironclad. The intruder was described as an Asian male with short black hair, white t-shirt and black basketball shorts. It was reported that he tried to get on top of her, but left when she resisted. [KXAN] more ›

The Texas Advanced Computing Center has announced the unveiling of the Lonestar 4, UT's newest super computer. The $12 million machine replaces its old version, which was one of the most productive platforms of the NSF TeraGrid network. "With Lonestar 4, we're able to do 3-D runs now in much less time, and we can compare results between 2-D and 3-D to see how much 3-D effects matter," said Clint Dawson, head of the Computational Hydraulics Group. "It's important for two reasons — evacuation as storms approach land and for studying new hurricane protection systems." The computer has 302 teraflops peak performance, 44.3 terabytes total memory, 1.2 petabytes raw disk and runs on 1,888 Dell M610 PowerEdge blade servers, each with two six-core Intel Xeon 5600 "Westmere" processors. DataDirect Networks provides the high-speed disk storage and a Mellanox 40Gb/s InfiniBand network integrates the components to enable very high-performance computing on a wide range of applications. Lonestar 4 will provide almost 200 million processor core hours per year to the national scientific community. Read more at utexas.edu. more ›

• If you have a funeral like this when you are 97—just after you’ve won a Grammy—then you’ve managed to go out in style.
• Did you miss Big Boi at SXSW? Then you can catch him at the 40 Acres Fest this weekend!
• Insert your own joke about the crappy economy. Here’s an article on how to eat the weeds in your yard.

• Ta-ta UK, Hallå Sweden: Assange to be extradited
• Qaddafi loyalists mass at Tripoli, rebellion pushing west
• No plan B for Apple quite yet

• After reading this, you’ll always write PLEASE on your Alamo Drafthouse order slip!
• Hey, you got your knitting in my podcast: an Etsy guide to SXSWi
• Can Shipley doughnuts cure a hangover? Maybe…

• Charges filed against Haiti's 'Baby Doc'
• Hu's human rights talk downplayed back home
• Bar set high on insanity defense for AZ shooter

Poverty can suppress a child's genetic potential, according to a study released Monday by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin. The results of the study showed cognitive disparities among socioeconomic groups beginning at age two, while at ten months they were generally equal. Higher socioeconomic groups scored "significantly higher," the study found. more ›

• No go for Seoul on talks with North Korea
• A China stealth fighter? We'll believe when we see it.
• Staff moves, and departures, at the White House.

• Lee Harvey Oswald’s original coffin sold for $90,000 in mid-December. Could someone possibly have bought it as a tasteless holiday gift?
• Part of the reason the character of Mattie Ross in the movie True Grit is so impressive is the Texan social worker who played the grown-up Mattie.
• A UT grad is behind the The Man Your Man Could Smell Like Old Spice ads.

Earlier today, a power outage threw a portion of the UT campus into darkness and KUT and KLRU off the air. The outage was caused by a small animal who got into a switch gear at the UT power plant. During the outage, one unfortunate person had to be rescued from an elevator at the ATT Conference Center. Power was restored after 1.25 hours and KUT (as well as KLRU) was back on the air at 8:30am. [KUT] more ›

• New York puts the smacking on the fracking. Did anyone see the CSI about this?
• The nation's job numbers for November weren't as optimistic as had been forecast.
• There has been a second death in Disney Town!

Boxing, like puppetry, is getting quite a bit of attention in theaters as of late. Sucker Punch garnered rave reviews in England, and Cutman: A Boxing Musical just closed a successful stint at the New York Musical Theater Festival. Boxing is basically theater boiled down; you've got exposition, narrators, characters with adopted personas and pretenses, periodic dialogue (though usually it's comprised of heavy breathing), and stakes. Stakes like getting punched in the head a lot, not sleeping, and sacrificing personal relationships out of passionate need. more ›

• Nukes non-negotiable, says Iran's Ahmadinejad
• Aussie Airlines A380's stay down
• It was a plane, a plane, says Pentagon on "missile"

I have here, in the past, mulled the notion that the definition of insanity hinges on repeating particularly stupid actions in hopes of achieving different results that never come. Now I’m bringing it up again, which—yes, yes, I know-- since I’m repeating myself, might itself qualify me as certifiable. But there are other clues that I might be totally nuts. Witness, for example, that yet again I recently attempted to find a legal parking spot at UT. As if my forays into this futile endeavor two weeks ago weren’t maddening enough. My latest attempt scored me a parking ticket when my meter ran out before I returned to my car. My fault? Oh yes. But am I still going to bitch about it? Do you know me? more ›

• Texas to Federal Gov: We don't need your sex ed money.
• The Flagship Hotel on Galveston’s Seawall will likely be torn down for an amusement park
• Lacharlesla Edwards, girlfriend of Baylor University basketball player LaceDarius Dunn (and mother of his 3 year-old son), wants assault charges dropped. Edwards claims Dunn didn’t hit her, and her jaw isn’t broken.

It was announced yesterday afternoon that there was no second suspect in yesterday's shooting on the UT campus and the only victim was the shooter himself, 19-year-old student Colton Tooley. He reportedly didn't aim any shots at others, but fired multiple times outside near Littlefield Fountain before campus police chased him into the Perry Casteneda Library (PCL) where he later shot himself. more ›

A gunman has shot himself on the sixth floor of the Perry Castaneda Library (PCL) at UT campus.

MegBohac

• Among the films playing Fantastic Fest is the fantastic stop-motion/ animation mash-up In the Attic about a bunch of Czech toys. The film screens at 6:55 today!
• Texas’ students need protecting’ from a pro-Islam, Anti-Christian version of history…at least according to a guy from the Odessa school board.
• That recent massacre in Tamaulipas might indicate that the drug-gangs in Mexico are expanding their reach into people smuggling. This is not good news.

• Warren Buffett wants rich people to 'Shut the F*** Up' about taxes.
• Mr. Colbert goes to Washington with images of his colonoscopy in hand.
• France presents Nudist v. Swingers!

• The October issue of Men’s Health magazine declared Austin to be the most sexually active city in America. You might care that part of the data they used to determine this ranking was the rate of STD’s!
• Barton Springs Pool might be open again by this weekend!
• We had no clue that Townes van Zandt ever loved a goat who didn’t love him back!

If you look good wearing burnt orange, UT's Darrell K Royal - Texas Memorial Stadium was the place to be on Saturday night. The Longhorns (you've probably heard of them) played the first home game of this season against the Wyoming Cowboys, winning 34-7. While the 101,339 football fans crowding the stadium -- which is more than its legal capacity -- got stuck buying overpriced beer and crappy food, the Austinist caught a few photos of the tailgating action in the parking lots, in between drinking gallons of free beer and plates of BBQ. more ›

• Jimmy Carter still delivers. It's hard to imagine Bush being able to pull this off. Ever.
• A visit to execution chambers in Japan.
• If you feed a chicken bad feed you get bad eggs. Who knew?

• Our prayers have been answered: there’s now fried beer at the State Fair of Texas!
• We’re shocked! A BP exec is "astonished" at a mistake in the failsafe device for the oil well that caused that oil spill in the Gulf. Next, will they reveal that they were expecting unicorns to come in and clean up the mess?
• If you aren’t ready to pile in the car and go to this Houston sushi joint immediately after reading this review, you might be suffering from a defective sense of yummy.

Yesterday, new information on President Obama's Austin visit this Monday was announced. After headlining a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at the Four Seasons, the President will be speaking at the University of Texas -- in Gregory Gym at 2PM. Attendance at the venue will be invite only and the speech will focus on education. A limited number of tickets to the speech are open to UT students with valid ID, and will be available for pickup at 8am tomorrow at the Union main lobby. If you want to try for a ticket, you can start lining up at 10pm tonight. [UT] more ›

• Diamonds from Sierra Leone: Supermodel Campbell testifies at the Hague
• Overruled: California Prop. 8 ban on same-sex marriage
• Cement kill: BP cleared to fill well

For every UT fan there comes a day when we look up at the sky, shake our fists and say, “I wear burnt orange, I bleed burnt orange, but why, oh, why can’t I drink burnt orange?” Well, don’t despair, Longhorn, your days of frustration are over. The University of Texas at Austin announced yesterday a new partnership with GSD&M Idea City to launch H2Orange: purified water sold in a plastic bottle shaped like UT’s iconic clock tower. more ›