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• In a primary where an extraordinary number of statewide positions were up for grabs following Gov. Rick Perry's decision not to seek another term, some incumbent candidates successfully fought to beat back tea party challengers Tuesday. But several candidates who forced runoffs in May were either praised by the outspoken freshman senator, Cruz, or who ran with his no-compromising swagger.
• "In Texas, we will show the rest of the country what it means to be conservative," said GOP state Sen. Dan Patrick, who forced longtime Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst into a runoff, less than two years after Cruz beat Dewhurst in the Senate primary.
• The primary was the first since Cruz barreled into the U.S. Senate in 2012 and yanked Republicans nationwide further right, and many watched results within Texas to see how strong his influence would be on the state's next generation of Republican leaders. Amid the Republican contests, however, is Wendy Davis, a rising Democratic star who has energized the state's Democratic base and making a run for the governor's seat in November.
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• PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) -- The chief defense lawyer in Oscar Pistorius' murder trial sought on Wednesday to undermine the prosecution testimony of a couple who say they heard a woman's screams and gunfire the night the athlete fatally shot his girlfriend.
• Lawyer Barry Roux said telephone records will show that the banging sounds the neighbors heard were instead a distressed Pistorius hitting a toilet door with a cricket bat to get to fatally wounded girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
• Charl Johnson and his wife Michelle Burger have testified to hearing a sequence of events in the pre-dawn hours of Valentine's Day last year that involved a woman screaming, a man shouting for help and then the sound of gunshots. Cross-examining Johnson on the third day of the blockbuster trial, Roux says call records will show Pistorius called an estate manager at around 3:19 a.m. and soon after he bashed in the door with the bat.
• In Johnson and Burger's testimony, they say they heard what they described as shots straight after making a call to security at 3.16 a.m. The similar times show the sounds were the bat on the door, Roux argued.
• "There is only one thing you could have heard, because it coincides precisely," Roux said to Johnson. "That was the time that he (Pistorius) broke down the door

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