Nathan Bernier, KUT News

Celebrity chefs will descend on the city this weekend for the second annual Austin Food and Wine Festival. People will shell out at least $250 for the opportunity to taste the food of famous cooks such as Marcus Samuelson, Jonathan Waxman and Graham Elliot. 

But if the ticket price is too high for your budget, you can still enjoy some of the featured food without having to buy a badge. That's because many of the chefs have restaurants right here in Austin. Austin American-Statesman restaurant critic Matthew Odam stopped by KUT to tell us about some of the local chefs at the Austin Food and Wine Fest. Listen to our conversation by clicking the player above. 

Negotiations with the federal government to expand Medicaid in Texas are at a standstill, according to the head of the state’s health agency, because he’s waiting on the Legislature to give him direction.

“If I were to go up and say, ‘Oh what if we try this or try that,’ only to come back and find that that very day the Legislature had passed legislation saying, ‘You may not talk about that,’” Health and Human Services Commissioner Kyle Janek said at a TribLive event held by our political reporting partner the Texas Tribune, “it would be a waste of my time to start negotiating pieces.”

The Austin Fire Department’s hiring practices are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice. In a letter to the city, the DOJ says the fire department may be discriminating against Hispanics and African Americans. The letter does not say what prompted the investigation.

A statement from Assistant City Manager Mike McDonald says the fire department is committed to equal opportunity and diversity. 

Austin’s Moontower Comedy Festival starts today and runs through Saturday, bringing some big names to town, including Bill Hader, Dana Carvey, Michael Ian Black, Judah Friedlander. But there are a lot of lesser-known standup comedians as well, and they have to work even harder to build an audience and make you laugh. We spoke about it with local comic Matt Bearden. Click the player above to listen. 

They’re trying to bring a festival like, say, the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal back to the states; there used to be the festival in Aspen that HBO ran, and there are a lot of other comedy festivals, but I think they’re trying to bring one that’s a real premier marquee-style festival.

The blast damage from an explosion in West was more extensive than authorities first thought.

Initial estimates pegged the number of homes destroyed at about 50, but a report from the Texas Department of Public Safety now says 142 homes were destroyed.

Some residents in the town of West are still waiting to return home as building inspectors go house to house, making sure the residences are safe to re-occupy after last week’s explosion at a fertilizer plant. The blast killed 14 people, 12 of them first responders. 

The Mayor Pro-Tem of West, Steve Vanek, is asking people to be patient.   

“It is not safe," Vanek said at an afternoon news conference. "We do have engineers and building inspectors on the ground determining which houses are safe and which are not.”

As Austin ISD and other school districts across Texas hunker down and power through another round of state standardized tests this week, lawmakers are making moves that suggest they think the testing regime has gone too far.

House Bill 5, for example, would reduce the number of tests students need to pass to graduate from 15 to 5. This is happening in a state that gave birth to the "academic accountability" movement. 

Texas Monthly senior editor Nate Blakeslee examines the issue in the May edition of the magazine, on news stands now. Listen to our interview with him above and read his article at TexasMonthly.com.

Juvenile offenders in Texas were placed in solitary confinement 36,820 times last year. That’s according to state records obtained by the civil rights group called the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. 

“There’s been a lot of research about it, and the consensus seems to be that it’s pretty harmful for kids, especially kids with traumatic experience, or a kid who has a mental health concern," said Benet Magnuson, a lawyer with the coalition. "That’s actually most of the kids that we are talking about."

Austin’s restaurant scene is constantly growing and evolving, and Jessica Dupuy, food editor at CultureMap.com, has her eye on five openings expected between now and the summer. Click the player above to hear our conversation and read her article at CultureMap.

Update: The Texas Education Agency reports the State Board of Education approved a resolution today supporting a review of CSCOPE material. Thirteen SBOE members voted in favor of the measure. Two abstained.

Some conservatives have argued  CSCOPE has an anti-American bias.

According to the TEA's website:

CSCOPE is a curriculum management system created by Texas Education Service Centers with assistance from content experts. It is now used in 875 public school districts, charter schools and private schools in Texas, which educate 34 percent of the state's total student population.

The City of Austin says it has cleared a major backlog of residential permit reviews.

The Planning and Development Review Department’s director Greg Guernsey says they processed more than 650 applications in the last month. The backlog had resulted in people waiting weeks to get city approval for renovations or new home construction. 

Gov. Rick Perry is trying to convince more businesses to move to Texas. Now he’s targeting Illinois with aggressive print ads comparing the business climate in that state to a “burning building on the verge of collapse.”

Today, Perry also launched a 30-second radio ad on four stations in Chicago.

Reducing penalties for prostitution and investing in diversion programs could save the state millions of dollars, according to a new report by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a policy research group.

Right now, state law says a third offense for prostitution is a felony with a sentence of 180 days to two years behind bars. A report from the state's Legislative Budget Board says the average cost per day, per person for state correctional facilities was slightly over $50, or about $18,250 per person annually.

Update (9:14 p.m.): Close to 200 people from Central Texas are in Boston for Monday's marathon, according to the marathon's athlete tracker. Explosions near the finish line, which claimed at least three lives and reverberated across the nation, sent Austinites scrambling to check on the status of family and friends participating in the race.

“We were texting people, emailing them," said Michael Madison, a business manager with the local running group Gilbert’s Gazelles, who was back here in Austin.  "We were just keeping tabs on who had said they were okay or who they were with, because we had a couple people staying at the hotel where the first blast came out of.” 

It was perhaps the most well-known food trailer park in Austin, but now the mobile food vendors on the 1600 block of South Congress have been given a date by when they’ll have to leave: May 25.

SOCO ATX Development notified vendors last week. The company plans to build a three-story hotel on the lot, according to documents filed with the city. The building will include space for retail and a two-story underground parking garage.