April 2, 2026: All Newsclips

Lead Stories

Trump makes his case for Iran war, saying it will end 'shortly' but more strikes are ahead

President Donald Trump hailed the U.S. military’s “unstoppable” prowess in the war with Iran, telling Americans in a prime-time address Wednesday night that the conflict, now entering its second month, will end “shortly” without offering a definite timeline. Delivered on Day 32 and framed as an operational update, Trump’s speech offered the clearest public case yet for the conflict, arguing it is necessary for the security of the free world and laying out a framework that he said would measure American success. “Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track and the country has been eviscerated and essentially is really no longer a threat,” Trump said. “This is a true investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future. The whole world is watching."

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Still, he said the conflict would continue until the military objectives were "fully achieved." “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” he said. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.” He also said that if Iran does not make a deal with the U.S., “we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” Trump, who launched the war with a recorded video from his Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida, has frequently spoken to the media throughout the conflict. While light on new details, this address may reach a broader audience: an American public who may have been watching the finale of “The Masked Singer," which was interrupted for his first speech to the nation about the war. Trump sought to explain why the U.S. entered the war in the first place, accusing Iran’s theocratic regime of having destabilized the global order for decades and claiming Iran was building its nuclear program at a new location, “making clear they had no intention of abandoning their effort to obtain nuclear weapons.”

State Rep. Erin Zwiener: Silence enables county judge’s ‘bad behavior’

When I was 21, a man punched me in the face. It was at the holiday party of the Forestry Club at the University of Montana. His name was Mike, and he had been flirting with me but also forceful. I told him I wasn’t interested and went back to chatting with my friend. A few minutes later, a fist came out of nowhere and knocked me to the ground. I couldn’t let him hurt me like that without consequences, so after giving the other party attendees a heads up, I called the police. They came, interviewed me, and arrested Mike. He pled guilty to assault and did probation. I was satisfied.But the Forestry Club and that group of friends? Most of them began avoiding me, and I no longer felt welcome at their events. Over the next few months, I floated away from that community entirely. I didn’t realize I’d broken a secret, unspoken rule: Speaking up against a problem often gets you labeled the problem. But we can’t live that way. People do bad things, and we must have the courage to talk about it. Cultures of silence and punishing those who speak up only protect bad actors, those who lie and who treat others with disrespect.

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We’ve come a long way from college but not far enough. Recently, an odd game that Judge Ruben Becerra has been playing came to a head. He, in his eighth year in public office, decided to engage on water issues. He brought a proposal to the Commissioners Court on water and data centers that had not been posted publicly or had legal review. Unfortunately, his proposal came with unintended consequences–it would have allowed industrial water users to sidestep the county development process entirely. When the legal team, other commissioners, and I (through a letter to the Court) pointed this out, the judge tabled his own proposal. Then the judge announced a water summit and pointedly said he expected attendance from every Hays County state legislator…except me. The omission stood out to many Hays County residents, because I have been working on water issues consistently and fighting to bring more resources to our groundwater districts. When constituents asked why I was left off, he lied and said I declined to attend. I corrected the record and said I was not invited. Then he publicly invited me, and I said my office would try to participate. My staff RSVPed via an email to both the judge and one of his staffers. But when my staff and I showed up, we were told we weren’t on the list and that the venue was at capacity despite folks inside saying there were several empty seats. The judge’s story for why has continued to change.

ERCOT: Data centers cause Texas' large load queue to balloon

The size of ERCOT’s large load interconnection requests – majority of which are data centers wanting to connect to the grid – soared by nearly 150 gigawatts to 410 gigawatts in just two weeks, a symptom of Texas becoming a hub for data centers and other high-tech industries. On Tuesday, ERCOT officials discussed the massive uptick in requests, the agency’s recently published “state of the grid” report and more at its third annual Innovation Summit at Kalahari Resorts’ convention center in Round Rock. Large loads are customers requesting a new or expanded interconnection, where its total peak demand at a single site would be at least 75 megawatts. Hundreds of people in various roles tied to the energy industry were in attendance for panels, attended by industry executives and experts from across the globe.

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The first session included a discussion between ERCOT President and CEO Pablo Vegas and National Energy System Operator CEO Fintan Slye on “powering progress.” Vegas, who has led ERCOT since 2022, reflected on the evolving grid and energy market in Texas. “The ERCOT grid today is vastly different from the ERCOT grid of even 5 years ago and certainly more than 20 years ago,” he said. “I think that’s one of the characteristics of the conversation today about the grid itself is just how rapidly evolving and changing it has become.” Vegas called ERCOT an “energy island,” which can afford both benefits like the ability to change and move quickly in response to needs. The needs are noticeably increasing — and fast, according to the last data from ERCOT. The agency said peak demand could reach 145 GW by 2030, and it currently has about 453 GW of requests to connect to the grid. ERCOT’s all-time peak demand was 85 GW in August 2023. Notably, ERCOT reported its large load interconnection queue now sits at 410 GW, about 87% of which are data centers. That’s a spike from closer to 300 GW just two weeks ago.

State Stories

As first anniversary of Trump tariffs approaches, Texas small businesses say they’re suffering

Thursday will mark one year since President Donald Trump proclaimed "Liberation Day," imposing tariffs by executive order on virtually all U.S. trading partners. While the Supreme Court has ruled those tariffs illegal, the administration has yet to refund them, and new tariffs are on the way. Small businesses in Texas and beyond say they're feeling the pain. Over the 11-month period ending in January, Texas companies paid $13 billion in tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Even that understates the damage, according to the small business coalition We Pay the Tariffs.

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The advocacy organization found Texas businesses paid a total of $26 billion in tariffs imposed directly by the White House without the approval of Congress between March 2025 and this January. New trade numbers, due out from the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday, are expected to drive that total still higher. "One year after Liberation Day, the damage to America’s small businesses goes far beyond what any tariff data can capture," said Dan Anthony, executive director of We Pay the Tariffs. "These businesses have spent the last 12 months not growing, not hiring, not innovating, but surviving. They’ve drained savings, taken on debt, laid off employees and cut product lines just to keep their doors open." All of that is taking a toll on the Texas economy, according to a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas late last year. Houghton Horns, a musical instrument store in Keller, near Fort Worth, is one such small business. Kacie Wright, the store's business manager, said that even if the administration refunded the emergency tariffs today, it would not make up for the damage done. "Online sales are down about 40%. So, even if we get refunded, because we’ve had to raise our prices so high to cover these tariffs, that refund won’t cover the lost revenue," Wright said.

Without scientific studies, Brownsville is a test lab for CBP river buoys

If the federal government took the time to study in advance what could happen if a floating wall of huge, cylindrical buoys were installed in the middle of the Rio Grande for 536 miles, they haven’t told the public, nor have any technical details been made publicly available. Which leaves the possibility that the government is just going for it, in which case Brownsville is serving as a test lab of sorts, since it’s here that the first 17 miles of buoys are being installed. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired in March, came to Brownsville on Jan. 7 to announce the plan’s launch. DHS waived more than two dozen federal environmental regulations to allow the experiment to proceed.

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Hydrologist Jude Benavides told The Brownsville Herald that the lack of information about the so-called buoy barrier system makes it virtually impossible for scientists to model possible scenarios. Normally, for such a massive project, the National Environmental Policy Act would require that environmental and cost/benefit considerations be carefully and methodically weighed, everything proceeding at a snail’s pace, he said. Frustrating? Definitely. But well worth it “99 times out of 100, unless you have an urgent, pressing need … that requires circumventing this kind of stuff,” said Benavides, who teaches for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley but emphasized he was speaking for himself and not the university. Meanwhile, Rio Bravo, Latin America’s name for the Rio Grande, is a more fitting moniker given the river’s extreme nature under certain conditions, he said. “Bravo” in Spanish means valiant or brave, but also wild, savage or fierce. Despite dams upriver, the Rio Grande can “wake up” and quickly rise to artificial levee height given enough rain in parts of the watershed, Benavides noted.

Mark Cuban tells D-FW businesses to get on board with AI

Roughly three years after the transformational artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT first commanded the world’s attention, one of Dallas’ most famous — and famously opinionated — entrepreneurs has some blunt advice for North Texas’ business community. At an event in Irving on Tuesday, Mark Cuban warned that “if you’re not using one of the large language models … you’re falling way behind.” Cuban went on to draw an analogy between AI and other recent tech innovations, including personal computers and the internet, which also initially drew skepticism before becoming widely adopted. The billionaire investor even recounted being called “an idiot” after founding Broadcast.com, the internet radio streaming he took over in the late 1990s and went on to sell to Yahoo for more than $5 billion.

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“There was always a group of people that were first, and always a group of people that were naysayers,” he continued. “And the people that were first typically ended up getting further ahead. I think it’s the same with AI today.” The wealthy Shark Tank star and former Dallas Mavericks majority owner made the comments during Convergence AI Dallas, a two-day AI and business conference hosted by the Dallas Regional Chamber at the Irving Convention Center. The event sold out, with around 1,200 registered guests, Dana Jennings, a DRC executive, told The Dallas Morning News. The high-energy confab included multiple panels and talks — topics included AI and Y’all Street, AI’s impact on the workforce and federal government regulation — as well as promotional booths and technical demonstrations, with sponsors that ranged from Accenture and Aecom to the T.D. Jakes Foundation and SMU’s new Spears Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Now in its third year, the event’s high attendance also hinted at the growing popularity of AI. A couple years ago, recalled Dave Evans, a managing partner at Sentiero Advisors, a Dallas-based AI-focused venture capital fund, it felt impossible to walk a few feet at the event without bumping into someone he already knew. But this year, Evans told The News, he felt like every face was new. “It’s surprising, but it’s also awesome,” he said. “We’ve grown beyond being that more kind of cottage group of ‘AI people,’ if you will, and it’s kind of expanded out.”

Copyright April 02, 2026, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved