Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott is resigning on July 2 after five years in that post. Scott, a former aide to Gov. Rick Perry, raised eyebrows  with a January speech in which he said student testing in Texas had become "a perversion of its original intent." Asked about budget cuts during the last legislative session and which parts of his agency should bear the burden, he said it was like asking "a guy on the operating table whether wants his heart or his lungs back." Perry didn't immediately name a replacement commissioner. 

Al Armendariz, the lightning-rod regional chief for the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned in the wake of comments that poured gasoline to an already raging battle between his agency and some of the Texas industries it regulates. His comments, taped in 2010, likened EPA's enforcement actions to the Roman Empire's tactics against the Turks. Their release started a week of viral video, especially among the agency's opponents. "It is kind of like how the Romans used to conquer villages in the Mediterranean," Armendariz said on the video. "They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. Then that little town was really easy to manage for the next few years." No replacement has been named. 

Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling that would have blocked the state from removing Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid Women's Health Program. The state's Health and Human Services Commission said the state would "fully enforce state law today and exclude abortion providers from the Women's Health Program." Attorneys for the Planned Parenthood affiliates have asked Smith to repeal the stay in that back-and-forth case. For now, the organization is out of the program.

Amazon.com and the state of Texas cut a deal that will have the online retailing giant collecting sales taxes from customers on July 1. The company also agreed to spend $200 million on new Texas facilities that will employ 2,500 within the next four years. In return, Comptroller Susan Combs released a $269 million tax lien against the company, which had been based on her agency's estimate that the company had failed to collect and remit about $70 million annually in sales taxes over a four-year period. 

Oil and gas extraction equipment is subject to the sales tax after all, state district Judge John Dietz of Austin ruled this week. That reversed his own bench ruling; he initially indicated his ruling would go against the state and in favor of Southwest Royalties, the company that didn't think it should be paying the tax. Good numbers are hard to come by, but some estimated a ruling against the state would have cut $2 billion in refunds and about $500 million a year in the future. After his bench ruling, Dietz told lawyers he was reading the paper about a judge who undid decades of case law on sales taxes. "What fool did that?," he wondered out loud. "I'll be damned; it's me."

Add the Texas Association of Business to the list of litigants against the state's public school finance system. The business group wants the judges to look at the efficiency of the current system. They contend too few students graduate, that those who do aren't well-educated, and that increases in spending haven't produced increases in test scores or performance. The school finance lawsuits — there are several — are expected to go to trial in October.

A Texas prosecutor who sent Kerry Max Cook to death row kept the blood-soaked murder weapon as a "souvenir" of the case, according to legal briefs filed by the former inmate's lawyers. The prosecutor, now with the Texas attorney general's office, denied the allegations "in every respect." Cook's lawyers said those and other actions destroyed evidence that might have proved his innocence.

Geoffrey Orsak, dean of the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has been appointed the 18th president of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. He will assume his new position on July 1.

Chuck DeVore, a former state legislator from California, is joining the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where he'll work on fiscal policy.

Jason Embry, the Austin American-Statesman’s Capitol bureau chief, has left his post to join the communications team of Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio. Embry will lead communication efforts jointly with another new hire: Erin Daly, who most recently served as communications director for U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

Houston-based Strategic Public Affairs adds Marilee Covey, who'd been at a Fortune 1000 company; she will work on government affairs and political action committee management for clients of the firm.

Arrested for alleged barratry: State Rep. Ron Reynolds, D-Missouri City. Harris County prosecutors accused Reynolds and two others of steering clients from a chiropractor to Reynolds' law firm. He denied the charges, saying he'd been "personally and politically ambushed."