The Monitor

Early voting is underway in several municipal elections across Hidalgo County. Residents are being asked to choose new leaders, amending the rules that govern their city, or taking on decades’ worth of debt to finance public infrastructure.

At a budget workshop meeting on Monday, Edinburg CISD gave an update to the collegiate high school with UTRGV which is now projecting completion by late May or early June, later than originally planned.

A Rio Grande Valley couple who were arrested late last year for smuggling exotic animals have been sentenced, court records show.

The Museum of South Texas History will host the Sunday Speaker Series presentation, “Rebecca Flores and the Struggle for Field Sanitation in the Lower Rio Grande Valley,” featuring Brent Campney at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 28, in the Courtyard Gallery.

Hidalgo County is celebrating the success of its generator program amid wide-ranging power outages over the weekend.

A 21-year-old San Juan man told police he felt “alive” when he choked his neighbor’s pug to death after stealing it from her residence on April 13, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Remember when the federal government reclassified ketchup as a vegetable to make school lunch offerings comply with nutritional guidelines? The Reagan-era move enabled schools to use the condiment as a larger element when preparing students’ meals, for example.

When Garth Stevenson, a nature musician and composer, carried his 6-foot-tall double bass instrument with him to Antarctica, he had a life-changing experience when he imitated whale calls on his instrument. He ended up drawing 12 sei whales to the edge of the icebreaker where he stood making music. Having grown up in the mountains of Western Canada, Stevenson has always connected his music to nature, but this experience in Antarctica revealed the two-way connection between humans and our natural world.

WESLACO — Wanting to try something new and different, I came to Lê Phở House — a Vietnamese kitchen in Weslaco — with an open mind and I left with a stomach full of delicious noodles, broth, beef and a curiosity into a new cuisine.

MISSION — “We’re not the sleepy little cities we used to be, especially the McAllen area, Pharr (and) Mission. We keep growing. It’s amazing what’s going on,” McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos said amidst a gaggle of local officials on Monday.