Lead Stories

After a 9-hour House hearing about Robert Roberson, panel set to resume testimony Tuesday

A House committee hearing about Robert Roberson III ended Monday without his highly anticipated testimony, but lawmakers are expected to resume hearing comments Tuesday following a marathon session that lasted well into the night. It was not immediately clear from whom lawmakers would hear from during a second day of deliberations. Committee members on Monday vowed to hear from the death row inmate himself at a later date — even if they have to travel to prison to see him. The state House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee intended for Roberson, an East Texas man convicted in 2003 of killing his 2-year-old daughter, to appear in person at the Texas Capitol, but objections from the attorney general’s office derailed the lawmakers’ plans.

“We’re in the process of working out in-person testimony, collaboratively, perhaps by the committee going to Robert instead of him coming to us, which is something we’re fleshing out right now,” Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said at the conclusion of the hearing. “Under the authority granted to and exercised by this committee under state law and house rules, our expectation is still that we’re going to hear Robert and that’s going to be the next step for this committee.” Roberson, 57, was scheduled to be executed last Thursday by lethal injection in Huntsville until a novel move by the committee spared his life. Members of the committee voted 7-0 Wednesday to subpoena Roberson and ordered him to testify four days after his execution date. That set off a series of appeals and rulings in state courts, with the Texas Supreme Court ultimately ruling Thursday night to halt the execution and bar state corrections officials from impeding Roberson’s ability to comply with the subpoena. The hearing was set to explore the state’s 2013 “junk science” law allowing people to challenge convictions with new science. Roberson’s testimony is needed to gauge how the law was applied in his case, state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican and one of the architects of the subpoena, has said.

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Harris County's elected voter registrar hasn’t swiped into work in four years

The elected official in charge of Harris County’s voter registration and tax collection appears to have been absent from her office for years, last swiping her ID to enter the county building in late 2020, county records show. First sworn into office in 2017, Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett is tasked with a wide array of duties that affect nearly every Harris County resident, from collecting billions of dollars in property taxes to processing millions of vehicle registrations and title transfers every year. As the county’s voter registrar, she also oversees voter registration and maintains records for over 2.5 million voters. In October 2023, Bennett announced that she would not seek a third term, citing a desire to focus on her family and health. The retiring official, however, still needs to lead her office in fulfilling its election duties through this year’s high-stakes presidential election cycle, including assisting voters with any registration issues that may arise.

Her prolonged absence from public view raises questions about what she has done since she was reelected in 2020, when she appears to have stopped showing up at the office. She has also hardly corresponded via email and missed a string of key public appearances last year while state Republican leaders targeted Harris County’s election process. Bennett’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on her badge swipe history, email records, absence from public meetings and events, or criticisms regarding her lack of public engagement. Records obtained through public information requests reveal Bennett has not used her employee badge to access any county facility since October 2020. She swiped her badge 92 times in 2019, seven times in 2020 and not once since then. Additionally, she has sent only 18 emails from her work account since the start of this year, aside from those approving employee time-off requests. Some of these emails were forwarded messages sent to her chief deputy, Wendy Caesar, while the rest dealt with topics such as software access and the office website, according to county records.

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With Election Day 2 weeks away, 15 million voters have already cast a ballot

With two weeks until Election Day, more than 15 million people have already cast their ballots, the clearest sign yet that voting habits were forever changed by the coronavirus pandemic and that early voting has become a permanent feature of the American democratic process. While many people cast a mail-in ballot or voted early in the 2020 election out of necessity amid a dangerous pandemic, a lot of voters are choosing to vote early in this election, too. Some are taking advantage of new laws that expanded early voting options; others simply favor the process that exploded in popularity four years ago. Many states have set records for the first day of early voting. On Thursday, more than 353,000 ballots were cast in North Carolina, a record for the swing state still reeling from Hurricane Helene. On Friday, nearly 177,000 voters cast a ballot in Louisiana, a record for the deep-red state.

The shift has been starkest in Georgia, where voters have set a daily record for in-person early voting nearly every day since polls opened last Tuesday. More than 1.5 million voters have already cast an early ballot in the critical battleground state. The persistent preference of many Americans to vote early — both by mail and in person — comes after the 2020 election prompted a sea change in voting habits for the country. With many fearful of voting in person during the pandemic, 65.6 million people voted by mail that year, and another 35.8 million voted early in person in an attempt to avoid large crowds. Yet as people flood early voting centers this time around, distilling a partisan advantage or what the early vote presages for overall turnout is difficult. The key to parsing early voting trends rests in comparing current turnout with historical trends to try to glean enthusiasm or other advantages for Democrats or Republicans.

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Candidates step up their attacks after Trump erases Harris’s lead

Democrat Kamala Harris is courting a narrow slice of undecided, GOP-leaning voters while trying to turn out her party’s base in the final stretch of the presidential campaign, as Republican Donald Trump doubles down on his strongest supporters with off-script moments that have threatened to overshadow his closing arguments. People close to the campaigns believe the race is still too close to call a clear leader, with early voting under way. Across the seven most watched battleground states, more than 4.8 million people have already cast ballots, according to a University of Florida database. Polls show a neck-and-neck race just over two weeks until Election Day, after Trump clawed back a polling advantage Harris enjoyed in the wake of their only debate. Trump’s strategy has been to use a series of events that can be unconventional, often mixing humor and tough, sometimes crude, talk that plays to his most ardent backers, particularly men. Vice President Harris’s tack, meanwhile, seeks to peel away Republicans and independents from Trump by alleging he is unfit to serve while also corralling a fractious Democratic coalition that has spent much of the year torn apart over Israel.

Harris, who sharpened her criticisms of Trump over the weekend, is expected to hold events on Monday with former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney in suburbs in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that have been shifting away from the Republican Party. She is also hosting separate get-out-the-vote rallies later in the week with former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama in Georgia and Michigan—swing states where Harris needs to run up large margins in the urban centers and suburbs. Her objective is rooted in the campaign’s analysis that has found a chunk of remaining undecided voters to be soft GOP-leaning voters and moderate independents, according to a person familiar with the data. Those include voters who backed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley over Trump in the GOP primaries. Harris’s advisers believe drawing a sharper contrast with Trump—including warning against the dangers of giving him a second term—can pull in those undecided voters while also exciting liberals. This continues Harris’s tactic in recent days to try to court GOP-leaning voters and independents, which is one reason she sat for a Fox News interview that featured a heated back-and-forth on immigration.

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State Stories

Oil patch jobs are on the rise in Texas. Here's why

The number of Texans directly employed by the upstream sector of the state’s oil and gas industry increased in September for the fourth consecutive month, according to an industry association for Texas oil and natural gas producers. There were 195,400 people employed in the state in jobs related to identifying, drilling for and extracting oil and gas in September, an increase of 800 from August, according to a monthly analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. The sector has added 2,800 jobs since January, a 1.5% increase. The monthly increase comes as a loss of 900 jobs in the extraction segment was offset by gains in the services sector, which added 1,700 jobs last month, according to TIPRO’s analysis. That’s in line with trends within the industry to spend less on exploration and development, even as domestic oil production hits record highs.

TIPRO’s analysis also cited recently released forecasts from the Department of Energy that projected U.S. crude oil production could rise to 13.5 million barrels per day in 2025, which the industry association said would be a record high. “Rising upstream employment and a record production forecast mean one thing, the world needs more oil and natural gas to meet growing energy demand and Texans are more than willing to accommodate,” TIPRO President Ed Longanecker said in the organization’s statement last week. When demand for fossil fuels will peak is a controversial question, though at least one leading energy authority suggests it could be as soon as this decade as countries try to reduce climate-warming emissions. Nearly 970,000 Texans are employed in the energy industry, the most of any state, according to an August DOE report. More than 471,000 of those jobs are in the oil and gas industry, according to TIPRO’s annual state of energy report released in March. Clean energy jobs are growing fast in Texas too. Nearly 262,000 Texans have jobs related to clean energy technologies, second only behind California, according to the DOE’s August report.

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How the Find Out PAC, Democrats seek to break GOP's lock on Texas Supreme Court

In a widely shared video posted by Beto O'Rourke, a former U.S. representative and gubernatorial candidate, in December, Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine is seen telling a spirited crowd of supporters that he was arrested 37 times for "rescuing at abortion clinics." "Ladies and gentlemen, I want to submit to you that before I ever got into politics, my convictions were forged in the crucible of the pro-life movement," Devine says in the video, taken in 2012, before describing the arrests. "Now, isn't it an irony that today I stand before you as one who could very well win the Texas Supreme Court?" Devine went on to win his first term on the high court in November 2012 and is seeking reelection to a third term in November. O'Rourke shared the video on X, formerly Twitter, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled against Kate Cox, a Dallas mom of two who was seeking a legal abortion of a fetus with a fatal diagnosis of trisomy 18.

Her doctor had asserted with "good faith judgment" that carrying the pregnancy to term would put Cox's fertility at risk and could hurt her chances of having a healthy child in the future, according to court filings. Adhering closely to the language of Texas' 2021 and 2022 laws against abortion, the court ruled that Cox had not proved that she met the criteria for an exception to the ban, which requires a doctor to assert with "reasonable medical judgment" that a woman faces a life-threatening condition that puts her at risk of death or "at serious risk of substantial loss of a major bodily function." The justices wrote, however, that their ruling would not preclude a legal abortion if Cox's doctor asserted with "reasonable medical judgment" that she met the exception conditions. The decision captured the nation's attention and highlighted Texas' strict laws against abortions, which make no exceptions for rape, incest or fatal fetal diagnoses. It also trained unusual attention on the election process for justices on the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, which is the state's avenue of last resort for civil matters. After 30 years without a Democratic justice on the bench and with three incumbents facing reelection, O'Rourke is among those hoping that the Cox decision and the court's May ruling against 20 women who sued over the state's abortion bans will give Democrats their best chance yet at flipping a seat. All three justices up for reelection — Devine, Jimmie Blacklock and Jane Bland — are being targeted by a new political action committee exclusively centered on the issue of abortion rights called the Find Out PAC.

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UT Southwestern Med School to pay $900K over claims that Black applicants were denied jobs

Federal labor regulators said Monday that the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has agreed to pay $900,000 to resolve complaints that the school systemically discriminated against 6,100 Black applicants over a two-year period. According to a written statement by the U.S. Department of Labor, a routine review of the research hospital’s hiring practices by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance found that African-American applicants who applied from Aug. 24, 2016 to Aug. 24, 2018 were unfairly discriminated against, violating federal hiring rules. The university, which is a federal contractor, has agreed to extend job offers to 132 applicants along with paying back wages and interest to those covered by the terms of the settlement agreement, the written news release said. The school must also provide training to all managers, supervisors and other company officials involved in the hiring process, officials said.

“Federal contractors must ensure they are not engaging in discriminatory employment practices,” said Ronald W. Sullivan II, a regional director for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance. “Employers must ensure equal employment opportunities and nondiscrimination in hiring for all applicants.”

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City reps pull out of conference after Houston mayor accuses controller of pay-to-play

City representatives slated to speak at this year’s City of Houston Investor Conference will no longer participate after Mayor John Whitmire called for an ethics investigation into “pay to play” sponsorships. The conference – an all-day meeting of financial institutions and representatives from the city, county and other agencies – is typically held every year. This year is the first the controller’s office has solicited sponsorships, Whitmire said in a Thursday news conference, and what ultimately led the mayor to call for an ethics probe. Sponsorships range from $10,000 to $100,000, and each monetary donation allots the sponsor specific benefits. On the original pamphlet, those who gave $50,000 as a “platinum” sponsor or $100,000 as a “title” sponsor were offered a private dinner with Controller Chris Hollins. The private dinner is now only listed as a perk for “title” sponsors. Controller’s office spokesperson Ashley Johnson said Thursday the initial private dinner inclusion under the “platinum” sponsors was a typo.

While Hollins has maintained the dinner offering was just a nice thing to do and that any financial institution that had asked for a meeting had gotten one with his office in the past, Whitmire said banks were calling him asking for advice and saying it was the “appearance of pay to play.” Whitmire also said it was not clear where money solicited through sponsorships was going and who would oversee it. He asked the Office of the Inspector General to look into the matter. "It really doesn't need much explanation," Whitmire said Thursday, "other than it needs to stop. It needs to be exposed.” Whitmire on Thursday said he directed all city employees to not attend the conference and even called for its cancellation. Originally, representatives from Houston Public Works, Houston Airports Systems, Houston First Corporation, Houston Police Pension System and Houston Municipal Employees Pension System were all slated to speak at the conference’s panels. They have all since been removed, according to an updated schedule provided by the Mayor’s Office.

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El Paso prepares for possible arrival of migrant caravans

El Paso city officials are tracking migrant caravans making their way to the border from southern Mexico and stand ready to deploy resources if they come here. “We are monitoring the situation so we can prepare for any potential contingencies,” said Enrique Dueñas, spokesman for the El Paso Fire Department and the Office of Emergency Management. “We don’t know what part of the border they’re going. They might as well go to El Paso or they can end up in McAllen, Texas.” Several Mexican news media outlets have been following caravans that left Chiapas state near the border with Guatemala earlier this month and report that more groups are getting ready to depart in the next few days.

Activists like Luis Garcia Villagran of the Center for Human Dignity in Chiapas say thousands of migrants around the city of Tapachula have run out of resources, can’t get jobs and fear that asylum in the U.S. might be curtailed if Donald Trump wins the presidency next month. The activist also said many have given up on waiting for online appointments in the U.S. through the CBP One app. The vanguard of a caravan that left Chiapas on Oct. 5 was in the outskirts of Mexico City on Thursday while others advanced along the neighboring state of Oaxaca. Some media reported Friday that Mexican authorities detained 118 caravan members and returned them to Chiapas. Dueñas said El Paso officials are in contact for updates from Mexican authorities, with whom they developed a working relationship during past migrant surges in El Paso.

Read this article at Border Report - Subscribers Only

City of Dallas committee proposes funding pause for Dallas Black Dance Theatre

A Dallas City Council committee has recommended a temporary pause on funding to Dallas Black Dance Theatre due to concerns about the company’s firing of dancers. The recommendation came during a meeting of the Dallas City Council’s Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee on Monday. The committee voted 5-2 to approve allocations to 55 Dallas-based nonprofit arts groups, but decided to temporarily withhold roughly $248,000 to the dance company for 2024-25. Dallas City Council will vote on whether to withhold funds for the dance company on Wednesday, when they also vote on allocations for the other arts groups. Earlier this year, ten main-company dancers were fired and have been replaced. The company cites a social media video as the reason for the firings. But the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the fired dancers, says the firings happened because of union efforts. The dancers had unanimously voted to unionize in May to demand better working conditions.

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Dallas’ largest police association says 3 charter proposals spell ‘doomsday’ for city

Dallas’ largest police association urged voters Monday to reject a trio of charter amendment propositions — including one supporters say will significantly boost officers’ numbers, pay and benefits — saying it fears the proposals would cause more harm than good. Dallas Police Association president Jaime Castro said his organization wasn’t consulted about Dallas Hero’s S, T and U propositions, and after reviewing them, its board felt they would negatively impact the police department and residents. A proposal to force the city to make officers’ starting pay and benefits among the top in North Texas ignores tenured officers and could further hamper recruitment, he said. Mandating an increase of around 900 officers to keep a minimum of at least 4,000 would likely strain the city’s budget, force the department to relax its standards to meet the mandate and force cuts to basic services to maintain them, Castro added.

“Budgeting for this level of hiring would not make the city safer, and it would spell doomsday for the city budget,” said Castro from the Dallas Police Association’s headquarters near City Hall. “Parks, streets, libraries and other city services improve our quality of life and contribute to a safer city.” Calls to reject the propositions also came from Black activists and clergymen. They were part of another news conference outside the Dallas Police Department headquarters Monday afternoon. Proposition S would require the city to waive its governmental immunity to allow any resident to file a lawsuit alleging the municipal government isn’t complying with the charter, local ordinances or state law. Proposition T would require Dallas to conduct an annual survey of at least 1,400 residents, rating the city manager’s performance on addressing crime, homelessness, litter, panhandling and the condition of streets. The consequences of the results would range from the City Council approving a financial bonus equal to the city manager’s base salary to termination. Proposition U would require the City Council to approve setting aside at least 50% of any excess yearly revenue for the police and fire pension system, increase the police force by 900 and mandate the city maintain a minimum of 4,000 officers while increasing police starting pay and other benefits to among the highest in North Texas.

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Rapper Travis Scott, Live Nation settle scores of injury lawsuits from Astroworld tragedy

Rapper Travis Scott and venue operator Live Nation have settled lawsuits with nearly 100 plaintiffs who mounted personal injury claims related to the deadly 2021 Astroworld music festival days before a trial was set to begin in Houston. Scott, Live Nation and venue operator SMG, a division of ASM Global Parent Inc., faced a trial Tuesday involving three bellwether plaintiffs whose injuries range from a collapsed lung to emotional distress. The so-called bellwether plaintiffs were chosen to proceed to trial first out of hundreds of plaintiffs who are bringing personal injury claims. The settlement came after the Texas Supreme Court denied a petition from Live Nation trying to prevent the deposition of its CEO, Michael Rapino. Rapino’s deposition was scheduled to take place Monday in Los Angeles.

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Josh T. Smith: How Texas can show the path to energy abundance

(Josh T. Smith is the energy policy lead for the Abundance Institute, a nonprofit focused on growing technologies. He writes at Powering Spaceship Earth.) The recent announcement that Microsoft was helping restart nuclear generation at Three Mile Island has been rightfully celebrated. It signals the importance of nuclear energy for our future. The era of pessimism and unscientific fears of nuclear power are fading. Not all of what it suggests is positive, however. The major downside is its revelation that it remains easier to reopen a plant than to build a new one from scratch. In this light, the move is more about fixing past mistakes than setting up an energy-abundant future. We should aspire to more. And that means attacking the red tape strangling every energy source. Microsoft’s atomic move here represents an effort to meet the challenge of rising demand. The electricity world has been in the doldrums of slow to no growth until only a few years ago. Today, the sector’s companies are worried about meeting demands from artificial intelligence and data centers. “Load growth” to use the industry term, is on every utility executive’s mind.

It’s unfortunate that this emphasis on the coming demands for the grid has been one-sided. It has sparked fear without giving a direction for action and response. This is because it has focused on demand projections without considering latent supply. The AI projections that made waves at the beginning of the year predicted about 35 GW of additional peak demand by 2028. It turns out that the line of would-be generators is even larger — much larger. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s most recent estimates suggest that 2,600 GW of capacity is mired in red tape. Little of this, however, makes it through the interconnection process and onto the grid. If the past is prelude, then just a bit more than a tenth of that capacity will make it through. That’s still 260 GW and about seven times the 35 GW projected AI demand additions. This implies that there is no shortage of methods and opportunities to generate power. Instead, we are short on commonsense connection processes. We need to make it easy and quick to connect and sell power. Here, only Texas shines. The state’s emphasis on an energy-only marketplace simplifies the interconnection process. Because of this, interconnection timelines are growing by years everywhere but the Lone Star state. In fact, timelines have grown to the point where Texas’ grid operators are done in around half the time that others require.

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Democrats target the last 2 Dallas County Republicans serving in the Texas House

Democrats came within a whisker of defeating Angie Chen Button and Morgan Meyer in the 2020 election, and they’re back this November hoping to take out the last two Dallas County Republicans in the Texas House. Republicans in the Legislature came to Button’s and Meyer’s rescue in 2021, redrawing their districts to add more Republican voters. It worked; Meyer won by 12 points and Button by 10 points in the 2022 midterms. Even so, Democrats are sensing an opportunity to flip two seats in a county where Republicans are heavily outnumbered. Button, a 70-year-old certified public accountant and eight-term incumbent from Richardson, is up against Averie Bishop, a 28-year-old former Miss Texas and law school graduate who would become the first Filipino American to serve in the Legislature.

Meyer, a lawyer and five-term incumbent from University Park, faces Elizabeth Ginsberg, an attorney and small business owner who lost to Meyer in 2022. Democrats are motivated by the incumbents’ support for Gov. Greg Abbott’s “school choice” priority to earmark public money for some private school students. Button and Meyer voted last year to create school voucher-like education savings accounts, but the attempt was narrowly defeated by a coalition of Democrats and 21 mostly rural Republicans in the House. The task for Democrats is complicated by more than the new Republican-friendly districts for Button and Meyer. Both lawmakers serve on influential committees, have authored marquee bills and are well-known to voters. “The key thing that supports incumbents like these two is the decade and more that they’ve spent putting down roots in their district,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. Connections with business leaders, neighborhood associations and chambers of commerce offer “support they can draw on to squeak out the next election,” Jillson said. Button was first elected in 2008 and was ranked among the top lawmakers of the past two sessions by Texas Monthly, which in 2023 praised her for avoiding “schoolyard antics” and playing well with others.

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Long wait times during Tarrant County early voting

A woman hustled down Camp Bowie Boulevard toward the UNT Health Science Center’s interdisciplinary research center just after noon on Monday. The school’s polling station had moved to a building further down the street since the last election cycle, her husband had told her. The line was long — a bit to her surprise — but she was unbothered. “This is pretty unusual,” the Fort Worth resident said cheerfully, not breaking her stride. “Or I should say in this neighborhood.” Inside the lounge, a line of dozens of soon-to-be voters snaked around a stairwell and glass-paneled rooms. HSC’s voting site was one of at least a dozen across Tarrant County to clock wait times longer than 45 minutes over the course of the morning and late afternoon on Monday, Oct. 21, the first day of early voting in Texas.

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Voter fraud video was staged, former Tarrant candidate says

Fort Worth police are investigating a video shared during the 2022 race for Tarrant County Judge, in which a man appears to admit to committing voter fraud. The video was staged, according to the Democrat in that contest Deborah Peoples. In September 2022, former Tarrant County Republican Chairman Rick Barnes shared a video in which a man experiencing homelessness told a Fort Worth police officer that he had been paid by Peoples to harvest ballots for the 2020 election. In the video, the man told the officer that he was fooling people into signing filled-out ballots by making them think they were just confirming information. The video was posted on Gateway Pundit, a website with more false than true claims, according to Poynter’s Politifact.

Peoples was county Democratic chair in 2020. In 2022, she ran against County Judge Tim O’Hare for that seat. Barnes is running for county tax assessor-collector. Speaking at a press conference outside Fort Worth’s New City Hall on Monday, Oct. 21, Peoples said she had submitted to the police department’s Internal Affairs Office a video of the man saying he had actually been paid by the police officer who recorded the body cam footage to say what he said in 2020. The video proves that those who shared the video participated in “election interference,” “voter suppression” and “potential collusion” between the police and Republican election officials, Peoples said. “What I am most sad about is the coercion of an unhoused individual, a very vulnerable person in society,” she said. Peoples declined to show the video, citing the investigation by the police department’s Internal Affairs Office.

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AVX Aircraft Co. moves headquarters to Fort Worth’s Alliance

AVX Aircraft Company, which designs vertical lift aerospace technology, is moving to north Fort Worth. The company plans to establish its headquarters and prototype shop at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, a cornerstone of north Fort Worth’s massive AllianceTexas development. The relocation was announced Oct. 18 by AllianceTexas developer Hillwood. Founded in 2005, AVX specializes in advanced vertical lift technology for commercial and military purposes. The move is expected to create dozens of new jobs; AVX expects to double its 40-person workforce within the next year, according to a news release. The company is already hiring engineers to work in Fort Worth.

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Rural North Texas residents shocked by high water bills

When Jana McGuire moved into a new development near Springtown four years ago, she never imagined paying water bills of over $500 a month. McGuire and her husband, Kendall, who are nearing retirement age, routinely have bills in that range, and they are gone around two weeks a month to work in the Permian Basin in the oil and gas industry. “I don’t know how I would live in my house full-time ...” Jana McGuire said. “When I bought my house, I was single. I almost sold it because I couldn’t afford it. Don’t flush the toilet every time. Don’t take a bath every day. My water bill was just as much as my vehicle payment.” The McGuires’ situation illustrates what people often find when they move to rural areas with fewer people, where water rates are higher than in bigger cities as utilities add new lines to keep up with the growth. Bills can skyrocket when homeowners water their big yards.

The McGuires’ home sits on 1 acre in the Spring Creek Farms development in Wise County, a stone’s throw from the Parker County line. They get their water from the Walnut Creek Special Utility District, which serves a 500-square-mile area with around 33,000 customers in Wise and Parker counties. James Blackwood, general manager of the Walnut Creek SUD, said newcomers often don’t take into account that their water bills will be higher when they move from a quarter-acre lot to one that’s 2 acres. Rhome Mayor Kenny Crenshaw said he gets calls from residents about high water bills. Rhome purchases its water from Walnut Creek. Crenshaw had his own experience with high bills when he moved to the city in 2009. After getting a $400 bill, Crenshaw said he stopped watering his grass, and now, his bills are around $100 a month. He said Rhome is considering a rate increase to keep pace with maintenance and other costs, and the city is looking at ways to increase rates without too much of an impact on senior citizens and others on fixed incomes, he said. “I think every community in North Texas is facing this situation,” he said. Walnut Creek increased its rates on Oct. 1, the first time in seven years. A study by the Texas Rural Water Association determined that Walnut Creek was “falling behind,” Blackwood said.

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West Texas A&M professor leaves amid student assault charges

AWest Texas A&M University professor has left the institution amid allegations that he groped two students. Nabarun Ghosh faces misdemeanor charges of indecent assault and is currently barred by Randall County Court from going within 200 feet of campus, court documents show. A Texas ABC news station reported Friday that the university “terminated” Ghosh, a biology professor, about a week after he was charged on Sept. 25. Jesse Quackenbush, Ghosh’s attorney, told Inside Higher Ed that the professor actually “retired for health reasons.” The two students who accused Ghosh also filed internal Title IX and ethics complaints through the university, Quackenbush said, adding that Ghosh learned those complaints were dropped after he retired. Quackenbush said Ghosh might not have retired had he known those internal complaints would be dropped. But the criminal case against Ghosh continues.

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One of the largest solar projects in the US opens in Texas, backed by Google

One of the largest solar projects in the U.S. opened in Texas on Friday, backed by what Google said is the largest solar electricity purchase it has ever made. Google executive Ben Sloss said at the ribbon cutting, about two hours south of Dallas, that the corporation has a responsibility to bring renewable, carbon-free electricity online at the same time it opens operations that will use that power. Google expects to spend $16 billion through 2040 globally to purchase clean energy, he said. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who attended, said the solar project is a posterchild for the administration’s efforts to incentivize manufacturers and developers to locate energy projects in the U.S.

“Sometimes when you are in the middle of history, it’s hard to tell, because you are in the middle of it,” she said. “But I’m telling you right now that we are in the middle of history being made.” SB Energy built three solar farms side by side, the “Orion Solar Belt,” in Buckholts, Texas. Combined, they will be able to provide 875 megawatts of clean energy. That is nearly the size of a typical nuclear facility. In total, Google has contracted with clean energy developers to bring more than 2,800 megawatts of new wind and solar projects to the state, which it says exceeds the amount of power required for its operations there. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all recently announced investments in nuclear energy to power data centers, too, as the tech giants seek new sources of carbon-free electricity to meet surging demand from data centers and artificial intelligence. Google has a commitment to get all of its electricity without contributing to climate change, regardless of time of day or whether the sun is up, but neither it nor other large companies are meeting those commitments with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Read this article at Associated Press - Subscribers Only

National Stories

Musk offers voters $1 million a day to sign PAC petition backing the Constitution. Is that legal?

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and Space X and owner of X who’s gone all-in on Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy for the White House, has already committed at least $70 million to help the former president. Now he’s pledging to give away $1 million a day to voters for signing his political action committee’s petition backing the Constitution. The giveaway is raising questions and alarms among some election experts who say it is a violation of the law to link a cash handout to signing a petition that also requires a person to be registered to vote. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, the state’s former attorney general, expressed concern about the plan on Sunday. “I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race, how the dark money is flowing, not just into Pennsylvania, but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians. That is deeply concerning,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Musk promised on Saturday that he would give away $1 million a day, until the Nov. 5 election, for people signing his PAC’s petition supporting the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment, with its right “to keep and bear arms.” He awarded a check during an event Saturday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to a man identified as John Dreher. A message left with a number listed for Dreher was not returned Sunday. Musk gave out another check Sunday. What’s the broader context here? Musk’s America PAC has launched a tour of Pennsylvania, a critical election battleground. He’s aiming to register voters in support of Trump, whom Musk has endorsed. The PAC is also pushing to persuade voters in other key states. It’s not the first offer of cash the organization has made. Musk has posted on X, the platform he purchased as Twitter before renaming it, that he would offer people $47 — and then $100 — for referring others to register and signing the petition. Trump, who was campaigning Sunday in Pennsylvania, was asked about Musk’s giveaway, and said, “I haven’t followed that.” Trump said he “speaks to Elon a lot. He’s a friend of mine” and called him great for the country. What’s the issue with that? Some election law experts are raising red flags about the giveaway. Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer, said the latest iteration of Musk’s giveaway approaches a legal boundary. That’s because the PAC is requiring registration as a prerequisite to become eligible for the $1 million check. “There would be few doubts about the legality if every Pennsylvania-based petition signer were eligible, but conditioning the payments on registration arguably violates the law,” Fischer said in an email.

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Olivia Nuzzi and New York part ways after review finds no bias or error

New York magazine and Olivia Nuzzi, its Washington correspondent, have agreed to “part ways,” the magazine announced Monday, a month after she went on leave while admitting to having a “personal” relationship with the subject of an article, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the wake of the admission, New York conducted an initial review of Nuzzi’s published work during the 2024 campaign and found no inaccuracies or evidence of bias. It then contracted the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine to lead a more thorough review, and the firm reached the same conclusion, New York said in a statement. “Nevertheless, the magazine and Nuzzi agreed that the best course forward is to part ways,” New York said in the statement. “Nuzzi is a uniquely talented writer and we have been proud to publish her work over her nearly eight years as our Washington Correspondent. We wish her the best.”

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Why are ABC viewers being forced to see a graphic anti-abortion ad?

Over the past weeks, ABC viewers across the country have been shown a graphic advertisement featuring images of aborted fetuses, as part of a campaign by antiabortion rights advocate and long-shot presidential candidate Randall Terry. The ad, which has appeared on network shows such as “The View,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “ABC World News Tonight,” has shocked viewers, who have taken to social media demanding to know why ABC would run it. Some local ABC stations report they have received many calls from upset viewers. But the network said it has no say in the matter. Because Terry is a political candidate on the ballots in about a dozen states, ABC said that it is bound by Federal Communications Commission rules to air the ad, unedited. In addition to the graphic imagery, the ad includes photos of major media personalities and compares them to Nazi leaders and supporters.

The ad has run 795 times this month, costing Terry nearly $200,000, according to data provided to The Washington Post by AdImpact, an ad-tracking platform. It’s a small fraction of the more than $2.7 billion spent on ads during the presidential race. He’s also run eight other ads as part of his presidential campaign. But his graphic ads that aired on national television have attracted the most attention Terry has received in this race. After Republicans have for decades staunchly supported restricting abortions, polling has shown that most Americans opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and voters have consistently sided with protecting abortion rights. Terry told The Washington Post that he chose to advertise on ABC because he specifically wanted to reach the audience of “The View,” a show he said is particularly disliked by some of the people who donated to help fund his advertising campaign. “When we showed that we could, in fact, run ads speaking the truth there, it helped us raise the money to run more and more television ads,” he said.

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Florida official says DeSantis’s office ordered him to threaten TV stations over abortion ads

John Wilson, general counsel for the Florida Department of Health, wrote in a sworn affidavit that officials from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) office pushed him to threaten television stations with criminal prosecutions if they did not take down ads in support of a Florida abortion rights measure. Wilson, who resigned from his position on Oct. 10, wrote in the affidavit that he received prewritten letters directing him to send the threatening letters under his name on behalf of the Florida Department of Health. He said he received the letters on Oct. 3 from Sam Elliot, assistant general counsel for the executive office of the governor. Wilson said he was also directed to send the letters by Ryan Newman and Jed Jody, two other officials in DeSantis’s office. Wilson did send the letters, which pressured the TV stations to take down political advertisements in support of Amendment 4, a ballot measure that, if approved, would broaden access to abortion in the state of Florida. The measure, which needs the support of 60 percent of voters to pass, would effectively reverse a six-week ban on abortion.

“A man is nothing without his conscience,” Wilson wrote in his resignation letter reported by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times. “It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency.” The Hill has reached out to the DeSantis office for comment. Wilson is now being sued, along with Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general and head of the Department of Health, by Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group sponsoring Amendment 4. It claims the threatening letters sent to the television stations violated their First Amendment rights. The “Yes on 4” advertisement features a woman named Caroline Williams, who was diagnosed with brain cancer while pregnant and made the decision to have an abortion so she could receive life-extending cancer treatment. The ad said the current ban would have prevented her from having the procedure. Florida’s Department of Health previously said the description of the law in the television ad is false and warned TV stations across the state it contained false information that violated the state’s “sanitary nuisance laws.” The ballot initiative’s campaign director, Lauren Brenzel, said in a statement that the department’s letters were “unconstitutional government interference.”

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Conservatives seek to build on recent court wins on education

Conservatives have had an aggressive and largely successful campaign in recent years taking education issues to the court system, a combination of decades of ground work, a better political climate and a friendlier Supreme Court. In the past few years, Republicans have snatched high-profile wins at the high court, including blocking student debt relief and getting rid of affirmative action in college applications, as well as making significant strides in school choice policies. Those on the right are trying to capitalize on that momentum, but experts emphasize that the issues haven’t changed just because former President Trump was able to appoint three Supreme Court justices. “I can’t conceive of anybody who would launch an effort saying, ‘Let’s try to get this school approved now because there’s a 6-3 conservative majority.’ I don’t think it works that way,” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“I mean, clearly it seems like the legal environment is obviously more congenial to things that conservatives have always wanted, but it’s not like they want those things because there’s a conservative majority,” Pondiscio added. “You might be more likely to pursue legal remedies, you know, to get things done, but it’s a question of carts and horses, you know, like the education cart is not pulling the legal horse, so to speak — it’s the other way around.” The right-leaning Supreme Court was a saving grace for the right in two of arguably its biggest education legal wins in the past few years, stopping universal student loan relief and ending affirmative action in the college application process. And now conservatives are in court defending efforts that include a push to see more Christian teachings in the classrooms. In Louisiana, the governor is fighting to get the Ten Commandments hung in every public school classroom. In Oklahoma, the state superintendent wants a Bible in every classroom and more lessons about the Bible’s impact on American history and culture; meanwhile, a Catholic diocese in the state is refusing to back down in its attempt to create the nation’s first openly religious charter school. All those moves have been been met with lawsuits, with the proponents of the religious charter school asking the Supreme Court to take up the case. Last week, a group of Oklahomans sued the government over the Bible mandate, arguing the lessons and the state’s intention to use taxpayer money to buy the Bibles violate the separation of church and state.

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Inside the Republican drama over Mitch McConnell’s successor

Even as Republican senators prepare to elect Mitch McConnell’s successor as leader, there’s a debate raging among them over how much power to give the winner. On one side are conservatives like Utah’s Mike Lee, who wants candidates for GOP leader to endorse diffusing their own authority by requiring high numbers of Republican senators to endorse critical tactical decisions. On the other side of the divide are senators like North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who says any Republican agreeing to Lee’s demands would lose his vote for leader. It’s more than a picayune disagreement — Lee and Tillis’ diametrically opposed viewpoints illustrate the stark divisions within the GOP as Republicans careen toward a hotly anticipated election to replace McConnell. The dozen or so conservatives who are tired of feeling sidelined in big decisions want a more prominent seat at the table, and their votes could swing the leadership race between Senate Minority Whip John Thune, former whip John Cornyn and dark horse candidate Rick Scott.

“There’s a significant prize to be won internally. I think a number of members, myself included, will be favorably disposed to support whoever is offering the clearest vision,” Lee told Semafor. Still, plenty of Republican senators see the leader’s job as requiring unpopular decisions, and they note that some of the changes Lee’s group is pushing would dramatically shift how the GOP operates as the party is — according to most polls -— favored to take back Senate control next month. Lee laid down a marker to his colleagues earlier this month, proposing that 75% of Senate Republicans must agree before their leader can shut down amendment discussions and that GOP leaders should only whip support for bills that already count majority backing within the party. In Lee’s view, his group’s requests would increase the next leader’s power by giving his decisions full conference backing and cut back the “concentrated power” in the leader’s office. Tillis was incensed enough by those proposals to fire off his own response to colleagues, warning that Lee’s ideas would handcuff the leader and help Senate Democrats who seek to divide Republicans. Tillis argued that Republican senators would have evicted McConnell as leader long ago if they disliked the way he used his power.

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Republican lawsuits over overseas and military voting hit setbacks in 2 swing states

Two Republican legal challenges to the legitimacy of ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including U.S. military members, hit setbacks Monday. A Michigan state judge dismissed one of three lawsuits that GOP groups filed in swing states in recent weeks, while in a North Carolina-based case, a state judge rejected the Republican National Committee’s request for the court to order that returned ballots of some overseas voters be set aside and not counted until the voters’ eligibility can be confirmed. In the Michigan case, Judge Sima Patel of the state’s Court of Claims issued an opinion that underscored the fact that the RNC brought its case weeks before the last day of voting in this fall’s election. Patel called the lawsuit an “11th hour attempt to disenfranchise these electors in the November 5, 2024 general election.”

For years, Michigan has allowed eligible uniformed service members and other citizens living outside the U.S. to vote in federal elections, as required by a federal law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Guidance issued by Michigan’s secretary of state says: “A United States citizen who has never resided in the United States but who has a parent, legal guardian, or spouse who was last domiciled in Michigan is eligible to vote in Michigan as long as the citizen has not registered or voted in another state.” But in court, the Republican National Committee argued against the eligibility of that category of overseas voters, who, the RNC contended, do not meet requirements under Michigan’s constitution for voters to be state residents. Patel, however, concluded that the guidance language in the secretary of state’s manual for election officials is “consistent with federal and state law, and the Michigan Constitution.”

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Border arrests in September fall to lowest level since 2020, DHS says

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says the deportation of migrants from the United States has tripled since June. Luis Miranda, a DHS spokesman, reported that since May 2022, 740,000 people have been returned to their home countries, mostly Mexico. “The majority of deportations are people from Mexico; it’s one of the countries where most of the migrants come from,” Miranda said. According to Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior, 136,439 Mexican nationals were deported between January and August of this year, including 19,433 minors. Of those deportations, almost 32,000 migrants were returned to Mexico via the state of Baja California, primarily the city of Tijuana. But most of the people sent south of the border arrived in the Mexican border states of Tamaulipas and Sonora.

Miranda said since June, when President Biden issued restrictions on asylum, unlawful border crossings are down 54%. “According to numbers that we have, less than 54,000 unlawful crossings took place during the month of September, it’s the lowest figure since 2020.” The president’s executive order has also made it easier to deport people, according to Miranda. “We’ve been able to triple the percentage of people who are going through expedited processing each month,” said Miranda. “We have sent back migrants to 180 countries using repatriation flights as far away as Africa, Europe and Asia.” According to CBP data, the number of migrant encounters at U.S. ports of entry along the Southwest border have hovered around 50,000 a month since June of 2023. Under the

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Lead Stories

Texas Supreme Court declines AG’s request to reverse delaying Roberson execution

The Texas Supreme Court declined a request Sunday from the state attorney general to reconsider its unprecedented order staying the execution of Robert Roberson III, ensuring the man on death row will testify before a House Committee on Monday. The Thursday stay, which was issued hours after Roberson was scheduled to be executed, came after the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena calling Roberson to testify about how the state’s 2013 “junk science” law allowing people to challenge convictions with new science was applied in his case. In the Sunday order, the state Supreme Court did not rule on a dispute between the attorney general’s office and lawmakers: whether Roberson will testify in person or via teleconference. Roberson’s attorneys argue that testifying virtually would “profoundly” limit the committee’s ability to assess his credibility, while the attorneys general’s office says bringing him to the Capitol in Austin presents “myriad security and logistical concerns.”

In a 24-page petition filed on behalf of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the attorney general’s office had said the House committee’s subpoena was “defective on its face” and that the state Supreme Court — which handles civil matters — lacks jurisdiction in the case. The high court’s Thursday order “flouts” the separation of powers and pushed Texas to the “brink of a constitutional crisis,” an attorney with the attorney general’s office said in the filing. State Reps. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and Joe Moody, D-El Paso, responded Sunday night on behalf of the House of Representatives. They argued the attorney general’s office already conceded the legitimacy of the subpoena in an earlier hearing and that this case highlights the “interdependence” of the branches of government, but does not breach their separate powers. During the Travis County hearing Thursday, Assistant Attorney General Ed Marshall said the case was not a “shaken baby” case and argued the Court of Criminal Appeals had exclusive jurisdiction.

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Split-ticket voters buoy Democrats in key Senate races

On matters of substance and style, there is little distance between former President Donald J. Trump and Kari Lake, the bombastic former news anchor running for Senate in Arizona. Both rose to fame on television. Both have refused to concede their last election. And both favor the incendiary rhetoric that delights supporters in the base of the Republican Party. But there is a vast distance between them in the polls in the Grand Canyon state. Mr. Trump has consistently put up competitive polling numbers, while Ms. Lake has routinely lagged behind her Democratic opponent, Representative Ruben Gallego. A similar phenomenon is playing out in at least two other battleground states where polling shows that despite Mr. Trump’s competitive standing, Republican challengers in pivotal Senate races are trailing the Democratic incumbents. In Nevada, Sam Brown, an Army veteran whom Mr. Trump helped elevate out of a crowded primary race, is trailing Senator Jacky Rosen, the mild-mannered, low-profile freshman Democrat. In Pennsylvania, David McCormick, a businessman, has begun to close what polling showed last month was a nine-point deficit with Senator Bob Casey.

Ticket-splitting, in which voters choose candidates of different parties for different offices up and down the ballot, has for years been on the wane in the United States, as partisan polarization has consumed American politics. But polling this year, which suggests that some conservative-leaning voters in critical states are rejecting Republican candidates for Senate even as they support the party’s presidential nominee, seems to indicate important pockets of the country where it is very much alive and could boost Democrats’ uphill battle to hold their majority in the Senate. It also underscores what has emerged as a recurring theme: Even candidates who closely mirror Mr. Trump rarely are able to duplicate his political success. “Many are trying to emulate Donald Trump; the problem is none of them are Donald Trump, and as a result they’re underperforming in races that categorically should be competitive,” said Mike Noble, an Arizona-based independent pollster. “And it’s hamstringing the G.O.P. on the Senate map this cycle.” Republicans are still heavily favored to win the Senate, with polls showing their candidates ahead in states they must hold, including Florida and Texas, as well as in the critical state of Montana, where Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, is lagging. And the G.O.P. candidates who have consistently trailed Mr. Trump argue that their races are closer than polling shows, giving them a path to victory.

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Harris and Trump locked in dead heat in seven-state poll, with some voters still deciding

With two weeks of campaigning left in the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are running nearly evenly across the seven battleground states among a critical portion of the electorate whose votes likely will determine who becomes the next president. A Washington Post-Schar School poll of more than 5,000 registered voters, conducted in the first half of October, finds 47 percent who say they will definitely or probably support Harris while 47 percent say they will definitely or probably support Trump. Among likely voters, 49 percent support Harris and 48 percent back Trump. Trump’s support is little changed from the 48 percent he received in a spring survey of six key states using the same methodology, but Harris’s standing is six percentage points higher than the 41-percent support registered for President Joe Biden, who was then a candidate.

In addition to swing-state voters overall, the Post-Schar School survey focuses on a sizable group of registered voters who have not been firmly committed to any candidate and whose voting record leaves open whether they will cast ballots this fall. With another part of the electorate locked down for a candidate for many months, this group of “Deciders” could make the difference in an election where the battleground states could be won or lost by the narrowest of margins. The new results show changes among this group of voters compared with the first survey conducted last spring. About three-quarters of battleground-state voters say they will definitely vote for Harris or Trump (74 percent). That’s up from 58 percent who were committed to Biden or Trump this spring. The percentage who are uncommitted has dropped from 42 percent to 26 percent over the past five months. Among likely voters, the latest poll finds that a smaller 21 percent say they are not fully committed to Harris or Trump. Younger registered voters are more likely to be uncommitted: 43 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds are uncommitted, a larger share than any other age group. Non-White voters are more likely to be uncommitted than White voters, 34 percent vs. 23 percent. Trump is strongest in Arizona, where he holds a lead of six percentage points among registered voters. That shrinks to three points among likely voters. His four-point edge in North Carolina among registered voters ticks down to three points among likely voters. That echoes a Post poll conducted last month but contrasts with a Quinnipiac poll suggesting Harris may have a slight edge. Those advantages are within the margin of error.

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Texas officials say they’ve taken steps to ensure ballot secrecy. Here’s what you need to know

Texas officials have taken steps to ensure voters’ choices in the upcoming election will remain secret after a scandal earlier this year stoked fears that ballot confidentiality may be compromised. In May, a conservative news site released what it claimed was a copy of then-GOP party chair Matt Rinaldi’s ballot showing whom he picked in the Republican presidential primary. Rinaldi never confirmed or denied it was his ballot. But the story sparked a firestorm in Texas, especially after The Texas Tribune and Votebeat were able to reproduce the process that led to the identification of Rinaldi’s ballot using public records released by election administrators. In recent years, state lawmakers have made it easier for the public to review voting records, such as ballot images, cast-vote records and ballot reports, and shortened the window of time elections officials have to release them from 22 months after an election to 61 days.

How likely is it that a voter's ballot will be identified? Not very. Election experts say it’s usually only possible in very limited circumstances when a small number of voters within a precinct cast a ballot. That’s because the fewer the voters in a precinct, the easier it is to try and match them to a cast vote record or ballot image. Nearly 100 Texas counties now use countywide polling places that allow voters to cast a ballot at any site in their county, rather than assigning them a certain precinct polling location depending on where they live. It’s even less likely to affect a high-turnout election like November’s presidential race, when millions of Texans are expected to go to the polls. Again, that’s because the more voters and types of ballots there are per polling place, the harder it is to cross-reference that information and identify voters. How have officials responded to or addressed the issue? In June, Secretary of State Jane Nelson and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued emergency guidance urging election officials to be careful about what type of information they release to the public and redact any “personally identifiable information” from the records. “Please note that there isn’t any one piece of information on a ballot that could be redacted that would provide full protections to voters across the board,” Nelson’s guidance read. “In many circumstances, it is a combination of data points that may allow for an individual’s ballot to be located through process of elimination.” Paxton separately issued a legal ruling that month saying that election records officials have an obligation to redact any “personally identifiable information” when answering records requests.

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State Stories

Texas mobile clinic brings long-acting birth control, other services to rural Rio Grande Valley

Twice a month, a 40-foot-long truck transformed into a mobile clinic travels the Rio Grande Valley to provide rural Texans with women’s health care, including birth control. The clinic, called the UniMóvil, is part of the Healthy Mujeres program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. The U.S. has about 3,000 mobile health programs. But Saul Rivas, an OB-GYN, said he wasn’t aware of any that shared the specific mission of Healthy Mujeres when he helped launch the initiative in 2017. “Mujeres” means “women” in Spanish. It’s now part of a small but growing number of mobile programs aimed at increasing rural access to women’s health services, including long-acting reversible contraception.

There are two kinds of these highly effective methods: intrauterine devices, known as IUDs, and hormonal implants inserted into the upper arm. These birth control options can be especially difficult to obtain — or have removed — in rural areas. “Women who want to prevent an unintended pregnancy should have whatever works best for them,” said Kelly Conroy, senior director of mobile and maternal health programs at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. The school is launching a mobile women’s health and contraception program in rural parts of the state this month. Rural areas have disproportionately fewer doctors, including OB-GYNs, than urban areas. And rural providers may not be able to afford to stock long-acting birth control devices or may not be trained in administering them, program leaders say.

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San Antonio ranked last for its lack of home improvement spending

San Antonians are content with their homes just the way they are. Construction Coverage released its Home Improvement Spending Report this month, and out of 54 large U.S. metros, San Antonio came in last. Last year, homeowners in the San Antonio metro area took out 1,433 home improvement loans for a median of $75,000 and a median interest rate of 7.5 percent, according to the report. The median home price in San Antonio was $288,945. There were only 2.4 loans per 1,000 homeowners in San Antonio, compared to the 6.9 average in the U.S. Salt Lake City spent the most on home upgrades with 15.3 loans per 1,000 homeowners. It was a down year overall for home improvement spending as a result of high interest rates and elevated home prices. However, spending levels should trend up through the first half of 2025, according to recent data from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

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All former living Amarillo Mayors warn against Prop B

Five former Amarillo mayors told the Amarillo Tribune they are against the adoption of Proposition B, many citing the possibility of it opening the City of Amarillo up to lawsuits that could force the city to adopt a new electoral system like single-member districts or a cumulative voting system. If passed, Proposition B would change the Amarillo City Charter to require the City Council to expand from its current five-member structure (four council members and the mayor) to seven members (six council members and the mayor). “It’s very simple. You never make government better by making it bigger, and that’s what it does,” Kel Seliger, Amarillo’s mayor from 1993 to 2001, said. “And I don’t believe what has been asserted that it has no implications as far as implementation of single-member districts. It’s not a sure thing that it does, but I think it makes it more probable.”

Debra McCartt Montgomery, Amarillo mayor from 2005 to 2011, echoed Seliger’s sentiments. “I don’t think adding additional lawmakers to our community makes what we’re doing in Amarillo, Texas, better.” Ginger Nelson, mayor from 2017 to 2023, said she opposes the proposition because she doesn’t think expanding the council is something Amarillo should focus on. Instead, she thinks the city should focus more on expanding business opportunities. “I think we do that best under the current city council structure, where every city council person represents the entire city,” Nelson said. “And so when we expand the size of the council, very simply, it makes us more susceptible to moving to single-member districts, and I don’t think that moving to single-member districts brings the unity that we need to capture those economic opportunities.” Trent Sisemore, who served two terms as Amarillo’s mayor from 2001 to 2005, said he doesn’t feel that adopting Proposition B would be in the best interest of our city. “I believe the current five-member council has served our city well throughout the years,” Sisemore said.

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El Paso officials agree with federal recommendation to ban cargo traffic on Bridge of the Americas

As part of a $700 million modernization project, federal officials have recommended a ban of all cargo traffic at the Bridge of the Americas in El Paso. U.S. General Services Administration conducted an environmental impact study of the project, which recommends three options: accommodating pedestrian, non-commercial vehicle and commercial cargo traffic with the option of eliminating cargo traffic in the future; accommodating pedestrian and non-commercial vehicle traffic and eliminating commercial cargo traffic; or no modernization of the bridge. Local officials support the GSA's recommendation to eliminate commercial cargo traffic from the bridge, citing environmental and health concerns.

El Paso County Commissioner David Stout told KFOX14/CBS4 eliminating cargo traffic would reduce emissions by close to 35%, which would benefit people living in the area. El Paso Representative Josh Acevedo called the bridge a “public health issue” and cited health and safety concerns caused by commercial cargo traffic in a City Council agenda item on Oct. 8 that he drafted, according to a report by KFOX14/CBS4. But closing the bridge to cargo would have major impacts on business. “It would definitely be catastrophic if they were to limit cargo through the Bridge of the Americas,” Manuel Sotelo, vice president of the Juarez chapter of Mexico’s National Chamber of Freight Transport (Canacar), told supply chain information network FreightWaves in an email.

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AI in Austin: How Central Texas officials are using it, and how they want to regulate it

When the Texas legislature returns to Austin in January, one bipartisan priority a number of lawmakers have pointed to is regulating artificial intelligence. A number of Texas agencies are already using it. Austin has been put at the forefront of much of the conversation: the University of Texas at Austin is one of the leading AI research institutes; as a hub for technological development, several organizations in Austin are developing or implementing AI; and as the Capital City of one of the largest economies in the world, how government agencies, both local and statewide, regulate artificial intelligence is critical.

No two artificial intelligence programs are identical, although virtually all applications of AI involve a level of coding, algorithms, and a massive input of information. Though artificial intelligence has largely been bolstered in the public consciousness over the last year, its research origins stretch back to the mid-twentieth century. Since then, its popularity as a concept has waxed and waned. "We call them sort of 'AI winters'," Peter Stone, an artificial intelligence researcher at UT Austin, told CBS Austin. "There's sort of been a cyclical nature of this field over the last 75 years, where sometimes there's a lot of hype, and the general public is paying a lot of attention to it, thinks it's going to solve all the world's problems. And then there are times when the people have found that the expectations were overblown: it didn't live up to the promises, and then sort of all the attention goes away for some time."

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Austin's previously secret 'G-files' on police misconduct are now public. Here's what that means.

More than a year after Austin voters OK'd a measure to make them public, the so-called "G-files" of police officers accused of misconduct are now available to the public. Disclosure of these disciplinary files was a sticking point in discussions around the voter-approved Austin Police Oversight Act and the city's tentative labor agreement with the Austin Police Department. The police union argued disclosing them violated state law. Criminal justice advocates argued for transparency and pointed out other departments in Texas already disclose the files. A judge ruled last month the city didn't need to keep the files secret.

Law enforcement is legally required to divulge files related to complaints against police officers if any disciplinary action is taken. That could be anything from an indefinite suspension – which is akin to firing an officer, though they can appeal the punishment – to a couple days' suspension. G-files are records related to complaints that don't result in discipline. APD didn't allow those to be made public. The APOA, which passed by a 4-to-1 margin, gave the city's civilian-led police monitor "unfettered" access to these files and allowed them to potentially be made available to Austinites through a public records request. Austin slow-walked implementing the provision, and Equity Action, the group that got APOA on the ballot, sued. Files related to either complaints or incidents in which an officer was not reprimanded are now available from the citizen-led Office of Police Oversight. The files can be on anything from an officer coming into work when he wasn't scheduled to a fatal shooting by an off-duty officer. In that case, a memo disclosed on the Office of the Police Oversight website shows the city's police monitor called for Gabriel Gutierrez, an officer who fatally shot Alex Gonzales Jr. in 2022, to be fired. He wasn't. So, the releases from the Office of Police Oversight allow for a bit more transparency into APD's decision-making. The city is also allowing residents to submit public information requests through the Texas Public Information Act for officer-related information tied to G-files. Looming over this is the city's tentative labor contract with the police union. The union had been pushing back against the disclosures, but has since said it will follow the judge's ruling. The issue had been a point of contention in the yearslong negotiations.

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Houston Chronicle Editorial: School vouchers are awful. Vote for Charles Cunningham anyway.

His wife was a public school teacher. His four kids attended public schools. He ran four times for the board of his local public school district, Humble ISD, until he won. He then went on to serve the district for 12 years and became board president. State Rep. Charles Cunningham is as committed to public education as anyone can be. That makes him a fitting successor to District 127’s previous representative, Dan Huberty, who dedicated much of his legislative career to public education until he retired in 2022. Yet Cunningham, 67, supports using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school tuition. He voted for last session’s failed $7 billion omnibus bill that tied a broad boost in funding for public education with a voucher program that would have given about 40,000 students $10,500 annually to cover private school expenses.

His Democratic opponent’s sole reason for running is to criticize Cunningham’s support of vouchers. “I know I’m gonna lose, but I’m getting the word out that school vouchers are stupid,” said John Lehr, a 35-year-old pest control specialist. Cunningham said critics need to look at the details of the bill he supported. Had it passed, the schools in his district — including public, charter and virtual — would have gotten an additional $158 million of much-needed cash, he said. More money would have also gone to teaching special needs students, including his grandson, who’s on the autism spectrum. “You take what you can get,” he said. We’ve argued in editorial after editorial there is no such thing as a good voucher bill — even when it’s sweetened with more money for teachers or an increase to the basic allotment for school districts. But for a freshman Republican, that’d be a tough position to take. Many of the rural Republicans who teamed up with Democrats to block vouchers lost to primary challengers backed by Gov. Greg Abbott. Lehr, 35, wasn’t impressed by Cunningham’s justifications. He simply stared at the mud dauber nest outside our office window. “That’s more interesting than what he’s saying right now,” Lehr said flatly.

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Georgia AD drops scathing rant on controversial penalty against Texas

The Georgia-Texas showdown ended in a 30-15 Bulldogs victory on Saturday night in Austin. Kirby Smart's team got a statement win and the Longhorns suffered the first loss of the season. However, the highly-anticipated showdown was sparked by a controversial call. In the third quarter, Georgia quarterback Carson Beck threw an interception which would end up being negated due to a defensive pass interference penalty. That call resulted in much anger from the Texas fans as they littered the field with bottles and trash. Smart also called out the officials after the game in an interview with ESPN. It was quite the scene in Austin, and the SEC responded with a lengthy statement regarding the events that unfolded.

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A win is a win, but now TCU football must build off of it to reach a bowl game

When the clock finally struck 0:00 in TCU’s 13-7 win at Utah on Saturday night, there was a collective sigh of relief unleashed across the Horned Frogs fandom. It was an ugly and frustrating game, but with their season hanging in the balance, the Horned Frogs came through when it mattered most and finally found themselves on the right end of one of these types of games. Going back to last season, this was a game TCU has usually lost. The Horned Frogs went up 13-0 in the second half against a wounded Utah team that was without their leader and starting quarterback Cam Rising. All TCU needed to do to shut the door was score one more touchdown, but the offense couldn’t come through and forced the defense to step up time after time. Even with Utah’s limitations offensively with a freshman quarterback, TCU’s defense deserves a ton of credit for limiting the Utes to just seven points.

Any time you can hold a team from a power conference program below 10 points, it’s something to be proud of, regardless of the circumstances. Considering that the last time TCU’s defense took the field they were pushed around by one of the worst offenses in the country against Houston, it was an encouraging sign that the defense didn’t fold in the face of adversity again. Devean Deal, who had two sacks starting in place of Cooper McDonald, said the defense had a gut-check moment during the bye week after the Houston defeat. “We had to take a look in the mirror to be honest,” Deal said. “We knew we put out a performance that isn’t us, at the end of the day we got back down to the fundamentals and Coach (Andy) Avalos really emphasized winning your 1-on-1s and your brothers will have your back.” In the second half the defense resembled what the media saw during the preseason with the Horned Frogs generating pressure from all over the field, whether it was from players like Deal or safety Abe Camara or edge rusher Marcel Brooks.

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Multiple people killed as helicopter crashes into East End radio tower

A helicopter crashed into a radio tower Sunday night in east Houston, killing several people — including a child — as it caught fire and plunged to the ground, authorities said. The crash happened around 7:45 p.m. near Engelke Street and Ennis Street, off Navigation Boulevard. Some witnesses had watched the helicopter burst into a fireball as it crashed into the tower, which Federal Communications Commissions records show stood about 1,000 feet high. Firefighters at the nearby Station 17 on Navigation heard the crash and were among the first to respond, Mayor John Whitmire said during a news conference at the scene. Police and fire officials made a grim request urging nearby residents to look for fallen helicopter parts but also human remains in their yards in the morning. If found, residents should call 911, officials said. They urged people in the neighborhood not to touch any debris they might find in the morning.

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Space Center Houston opens Skylab training locker after 50 years, numerous artifacts found

Visitors to Space Center Houston have walked past a Skylab training model storage locker during trips to the museum for years. Little did they know there were still items in it that hadn't seen the light of day in decades. Not anymore, and even Space Center Houston employees were surprised at the number of artifacts found inside. "We didn't know the extent of what was in there," said Paul Spana, the director of collections and curator at Space Center Houston. "I always say that every artifact has a story, and now we've we have dozens of more stories to tell."

Skylab was the first U.S. space station, flying above the Earth's surface from 1973 to 1979. Three crewed Skylab missions flew to the station between May 1973 and February 1974. The space station's training module, Skylab 1-G, is located in the Starship Gallery section of Space Center Houston. "All three crews had to train inside the trainer to be prepared for when they went into space so this trainer had to be exactly the same as the Skylab that was in space," Spana said. "I didn't realize that that meant that all of these little items would be in there as well."

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SEC fines University of Texas after fans cause game interruption vs. Georgia

The University of Texas has been penalized after Saturday’s game vs. Georgia was disrupted by fans throwing bottles and other debris onto the playing field. The disruption occurred after a controversial pass interference call which, after the delay caused by the debris allowed the game’s officiating crew to discuss the call, was reversed in favor of the Longhorns. On Sunday the Southeastern Conference announced that Texas has been assessed a financial penalty of $250,000 and that the university will be “required to use all available resources, including security, stadium and television video, to identify individuals who threw objects onto the playing field or at the opposing team.”

Any individuals found to have been involved in disrupting the game will be prohibited from attending Texas athletic events for the remainder of the academic and athletic year, the statement from the SEC says. The conference also says that the Texas Athletic Department must review and update game management procedures and alcohol availability policies to prevent a recurrence of Saturday night’s disruption, though at this time the conference is not suspending alcohol sales at Texas games. The Longhorns wound up benefitting from the reversed call and even scored two plays later, but ultimately fell short against Kirby Smart and the Bulldogs. Texas’ next home football game is Nov. 9 against Florida.

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Bob Tomes, McKinney auto dealer and local philanthropist, dies at 79

Robert Burdette “Bob” Tomes, an auto dealership owner and philanthropist known as “Mr. McKinney,” a nickname derived from his car commercials, died Oct. 11 in Dallas, of cancer. He was 79. Born in San Antonio in 1945, he was raised in Nebraska, graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1968 with a degree in education. He would go on to enlist in the U.S. Army after graduating and rose to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. Tomes served 18 months in Vietnam, returning to the United States in 1972 with a Bronze Star for Meritorious Service. Upon returning home, Tomes began working for the Ford Motor Company in Omaha, Nebraska. He was promoted to Houston in 1978, where he met his wife, Barbara, who also worked in the Houston office. They married in 1981 in Denton and had a son, Brandon, in 1984.

Barbara said she and Bob worked in different departments at the Houston office, and dated for two years in secret, as coworkers were not allowed to date. Barbara said they moved to North Texas, where she was from, and got engaged. With his experience selling to car dealerships while working for Ford and with her father working in the car dealership business, Barbara said it was an easy pivot for Bob to start his own car dealership. Since McKinney didn’t have a Ford dealership at the time, Bob seized the opportunity and opened Bob Tomes Ford in 1983. His son would later open a Subaru and a Volkswagen dealership under the Tomes name, and all three stores would become award-winning auto dealerships. Brandon said due to growing up around the car business, he always had an interest in taking after his father. When he was in the third grade, Brandon said that someone was interested in buying the dealership from his dad. So Bob sat him down and asked, “with no pressure,” if he would ever be interested in becoming involved in the dealership. When Brandon said he would be, Bob decided not to sell the dealership so he could keep it for his son. During his life, Tomes was a supporter of many North Texas organizations. He was the past chairman of the McKinney United Way, and the former board chairman of the McKinney Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, he was involved with the Volunteer McKinney Center, the McKinney Rotary Club and the McKinney Police and Firefighter Support.

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Coalition of elected officials goes door-knocking against Dallas HERO propositions S, T, U

Peyton Bryant was out and about with his family in the Lower Greenville neighborhood when he was offered a flyer from an unexpected but familiar face. “Hi, I’m Mike. I used to be the mayor of the city,” said former Mayor Mike Rawlings, who, on a balmy Saturday morning, was part of the eleventh-hour effort of past and present elected officials urging voters to reject a trio of ballot items pushed by a nonprofit group, Dallas HERO. Bryant, a likely voter, studied the flyer as Rawlings spoke. “At the bottom of the ballot are city charter amendments,” the former mayor said. “It’s kind of the constitution for the city, and you ought to look at them.”

In a white T-shirt that read “vote no on STU” — the first half of “stupid,” Rawlings joked — he and other former mayors such as Laura Miller and Tom Leppert were joined by dozens of past and present City Council members as well as Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price and others, who fanned out across the city and spent hours knocking on doors Saturday. Former council members Pauline Medrano and Maxine Thornton-Reese went to Buckner Terrace. Price knocked on doors in Oak Cliff. Council member Jesse Moreno passed out flyers in Old East Dallas. Council members Omar Narvaez, in West Dallas, and Gay Donnell Willis, in North Dallas, did the same. Just like at the press conference that announced the coalition three weeks ago, officials with a history of being on opposing sides gathered once again to show that they agreed on at least one thing. Propositions S, T and U mandate the city hire around 900 more officers and spend at least half of any new revenue annually on the police and fire pension system and other public safety-related initiatives. The propositions would also tie the city manager’s bonuses and job status to the results of an annual community survey of at least 1,400 residents and open the city to litigation from anyone who believes the city isn’t following the city charter, city ordinances or state law. “Everybody wants more accountability, more police officers,” Rawlings said. “This would just be really damning to the city.” “Sounds tough to manage,” Bryant said, finally looking up. “It really is, yeah,” Rawlings said.

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Huston-Tillotson seeks to expand to California, open first undergraduate HBCU in West Coast

Huston-Tillotson University, a private historically Black college in Austin, is expanding to California in an effort to make HBCU education accessible to students on the West Coast and to further bolster the workforce in Texas. The faith-based university plans to secure approval for a branch campus from the necessary California agencies by August 2025, President Melva Wallace told the American-Statesman, but it has received approval to start offering coursework remotely to California students, which it plans to start doing in January. California has no historically Black undergraduate colleges. Texas has 10 such institutions, and Huston-Tillotson is the closest undergraduate HBCU in the nation to California, Wallace said.

Texas has seen an influx of former California residents, and Melva said she thinks this partnership will help strengthen the workforce pipeline even more. "If it's working for the corporate and workforce, why don't we take the lead on building the pipeline for workforce by training more California students to enter into the workforce here?" Wallace asked. "Being the first undergraduate HBCU in California, it's just an amazing thing." The university is partnering with the San Diego Unified School District and National College Resources Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims to boost higher education completion rates for underrepresented groups, to make this possible. The nonprofit approached Huston-Tillotson to help the group expand HBCU education offerings in California, Wallace said, and they are both still looking for locations in which to put down roots.

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National Stories

Elon Musk says he’ll award $1 million a day to a signer of his petition

Billionaire Elon Musk promised on Saturday to give away $1 million each day until November’s election to someone who signs his online petition supporting the U.S. Constitution. And he wasted no time, awarding a $1 million check to an attendee of his event in Pennsylvania aimed at rallying supporters behind Republican Donald Trump. The winner was a man named John Dreher, according to event staff. “By the way, John had no idea. So anyway, you’re welcome,” the Tesla founder said as he handed Dreher the check.

The money is the latest example of Musk using his extraordinary wealth to influence the tightly-contested presidential race between Trump and his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris. Musk started America PAC, a political action organization he founded in support of Trump’s presidential campaign. The group is helping mobilize and register voters in battleground states, but there are signs it is having trouble meeting its goals. The Harrisburg event is the third in as many days in Pennsylvania, where Musk is painting November’s election in stark terms and encouraging supporters to vote early and get others to do the same. The petition Musk is asking people to sign reads: “The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.” Attendees of Saturday’s event had to sign the petition, which allows America PAC to garner contact details for more potential voters that it can work to get to the polls for Trump.

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Israel killed Sinwar by forcing him from the tunnels

In the hunt for Hamas militants in the tunnels beneath southern Gaza, Israel’s 98th commando division found a compound in February with a kitchen, sleeping quarters and a bathroom with a tiled wall depicting a beach sunset. Whoever was staying there had recently fled, one of several times Israeli soldiers came in striking distance of Hamas leaders. For the next nine months, Israel’s number one target, Yahya Sinwar, architect of the Oct. 7 attacks last year, remained elusive, a ghost in the subterranean darkness. “It doesn’t matter how many tunnels there are,” said then-Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus at the time. Israel would get him, he said. The Wall Street Journal found that even before the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel considered killing Sinwar, who was seen as a national-security threat, according to people involved in the plans. Israel at turns failed to find the right moment or pulled their operations when officials disagreed on the mission, the people said. After Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and kidnapped around 250 others in October last year, there was no longer disagreement.

So began one of Israel’s biggest military and intelligence operations, led by Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, and carried out by the Israeli military with help from U.S. intelligence agencies. Sinwar for months blunted the technological and intelligence-gathering prowess of Israel and its allies. He used rudimentary, untraceable communications and trusted only people closest to him. Sinwar also commanded miles and miles of subterranean tunnels. Arab negotiators offered Sinwar an escape in exchange for allowing Egypt to negotiate for the release of the hostages on behalf of Hamas, but he declined. Sinwar clung to the hope that the conflict he ignited might draw in Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, setting off a regional war against Israel—a possibility that remains. “I’m not under siege, I’m on Palestinian soil,” Sinwar told Arab mediators in a defiant message, previously unreported, soon after the war began. The conflict has yielded more than 42,000 deaths in Gaza, according to Gazan health authorities, whose figures don’t say how many were combatants. In the months that followed, Israel’s military closed in on Hamas’s underground labyrinth, destroying strategic tunnel complexes. The Journal found that the tactic forced Sinwar to surface. With ever-fewer places to hide, he spent more time above ground, in the Tel al-Sultan area of Rafah in southern Gaza, according to Israeli officials and Arab mediators communicating with Hamas. Israel didn’t know Sinwar’s exact location but it deployed forces to hunt him there. On Oct. 16, Israel’s strategy to flush Sinwar out of the tunnels led to his killing, enabled by the skills of war and aided by chance.

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Obama on the campaign has one particularly tough crowd: Young Black men

If there’s a prototypical Kamala Harris voter it might seem to be Charles Johnson, a 23-year-old Black college student. Johnson is informed and politically engaged; he went to hear former President Barack Obama speak Friday at a Democratic campaign rally on the University of Arizona campus. Yet he isn’t all that impressed with Obama, the nation’s first Black president, nor Harris, who would be the second. He says he’s leaning toward voting for Donald Trump. “The media says he [Trump] is horrible and he’s racist and he’s going to bring us back, but he’s only gaining support with Black voters,” Johnson said in an interview. “He’s only gaining support with Black men.”

Democrats have been unnerved by recent polls that show Harris’ numbers sagging among Black voters, particularly young Black men. As he campaigns for Harris, one of Obama’s tasks is to persuade Black men like Johnson that voting for Trump would be a grievous mistake. In the remaining days before the election, he’ll be doing interviews with podcasters and various internet personalities who command a large Black following, an Obama aide said. He remains a singular figure in national politics, widely popular to this day. Obama is the only president since Ronald Reagan to win the presidency twice with more than 50% of the vote. An Emerson College survey this month showed that a majority of voters in each of the seven key swing states that will decide the election hold a favorable opinion of the 44th president.

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Harris goes to church, highlighting the absence of religion in the 2024 campaign

Religion is making a rare appearance on the campaign trail in a presidential election that has dwelled less on candidates’ personal faiths than any in recent memory. Vice President Kamala Harris attended services and spoke at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta on Sunday, while her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, visited Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan. Former President Donald Trump on Thursday criticized Harris for skipping the Al Smith dinner in New York City, a high-profile fundraiser for Catholic charities, saying her absence was “very disrespectful to our great Catholic community.” Harris instead sent a video.

While candidates in both parties have traditionally sought to play up their piety to appeal to religious voters and signal their personal integrity, Harris, Trump and their running mates have not centered their faith this year. That’s a marked contrast from President Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic who regularly attends services, quotes hymns and figures like St. Augustine, and can be seen on Ash Wednesday with ash on his forehead. Barack Obama’s religion was a major factor in his 2008 campaign, both for its influence on his oratory and the criticism of his relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, a controversial figure whom Obama ended up rebuking. Obama cut his teeth in Chicago as a community organizer working for a coalition of Catholic churches. And his comfort in religious settings was apparent throughout his presidency, from the five times he invoked God in his first inaugural address to his impromptu singing of “Amazing Grace” at Mother Emanuel AME Church after a white supremacist killed nine people at the historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

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CBS News breaks its silence over editing allegations in '60 Minutes' interview with Harris

CBS News pushed back against former President Trump's claim that "60 Minutes" deceitfully edited its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, dismissing the allegation as "false" in a statement released Sunday. After weeks of staying mum despite mounting backlash over the interview, CBS published a statement Sunday evening addressing the outrage that ensued after airing two different answers to the same question in the "60 Minutes" interview earlier this month with the Democratic nominee. "Former President Donald Trump is accusing 60 Minutes of deceitful editing of our Oct. 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That is false," the statement began. "60 Minutes gave an excerpt of our interview to ‘Face the Nation’ that used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes. Same question. Same answer. But a different portion of the response. When we edit any interview, whether a politician, an athlete, or movie star, we strive to be clear, accurate and on point. The portion of her answer on 60 Minutes was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects in a wide-ranging 21-minute-long segment."

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The hidden NIL economy of college sports

For autographs, $60,000 to an Illinois men’s basketball player. For a Nerf endorsement, $20,000 to a UCLA softball player. For working a camp, $2,000 to a Minnesota volleyball player. For merchandise royalties, $122 to a Colorado women’s soccer player. For a public appearance, $10 to a Maryland gymnast. Yes, college athletes are getting paid. But how? And how much? A Post analysis of $125 million in payments reveals the patterns and disparities of a murky NIL market. It’s been three years since the NCAA started allowing college athletes to make money from their personal brands — their “name, image and likeness,” or NIL. In that time, college athletes, previously limited to scholarship money and under-the-table handouts, have earned payments for brand endorsements, charity work, autograph signings and other services big and small. Many have done so while driving exposure and revenue for massive public universities.

But what this NIL economy actually looks like has remained largely hidden, limited to sporadic anecdotes, unreliable estimates from the NIL industry and anonymous summary data compiled by the NCAA. Colleges and boosters say that secrecy protects student-athletes. But efforts by The Washington Post to obtain NIL records from public schools reveal a lack of transparency that forces many athletes to navigate an unfamiliar economy in the dark, leaving their interests at the whims of the powers holding the purse strings. The Post used public records laws to request NIL records from 56 public universities in major college sports conferences. Though most schools refused to release any information, reporters ultimately obtained and analyzed records encompassing $125 million in deals from 14 Division I public schools. The result is an unprecedented look into the first three years of the NIL economy — a period of financial chaos, legal confusion and secret deals in the fierce competition for top players. The documents, which provide details on roughly 22,000 individual NIL transactions, reveal: Disparities in whether — and how — universities maintain or disclose NIL records, making a comprehensive nationwide analysis impossible. With the bulk of funding shrouded in mystery, athletes have limited information to determine their market value. How booster “collectives,” run mostly by men, distribute the majority of NIL funds to athletes in men’s sports. Including in basketball, where women appear to earn far less money from boosters even amid a historic boom in television ratings and revenue. Dollar bill number 3 How private companies can bankroll publicly funded sports programs with little scrutiny. Including at the University of Colorado, where a production company with close ties to football coach Deion Sanders has provided nearly $600,000 to the team’s players. Dollar bill number 4 That the majority of NIL payments are small-money deals — less than $500, and often much smaller. The lucrative contracts that make headlines, records show, are reserved for a select few athletes. Most earn very little, if anything.

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Some Jewish voters in presidential swing states reconsider their longtime devotion to Democrats

For Rona Kaufman, the signs are everywhere that more Jews feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and may vote for Republican Donald Trump. It’s in her Facebook feed. It’s in the discomfort she observed during a question-and-answer at a recent Democratic Party campaign event in Pittsburgh. It’s in her own family. “The family that is my generation and older generations, I don’t think anybody is voting for Harris, and we’ve never voted Republican, ever,” Kaufman, 49, said, referring to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. “My sister has a Trump sign outside her house, and that is a huge shift.” How big a shift? Surveys continue to find that most Jewish voters still support the Democratic ticket, and Kaufman acknowledges that she’s an exception.

Still, any shift could have enormous implications in Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands of votes decided the past two presidential elections. Many Jewish voters say the 2024 presidential election is like no other in memory, coming amid the growing fallout from Hamas’ brutal attack on Israelis last year. Jews represent a sliver of the voting-age population in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the so-called blue wall of states that Democrats have come to rely on in recent presidential elections. In a close election, they are a big enough constituency that the campaigns of Harris and Trump see the potential for any slippage to swing a close contest. That has forced Harris to walk a line between traditional Democratic constituencies with strong feelings about the war in Gaza, both Jews and Arab Americans — balancing support for Israel with outrage over the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians and destruction in the region. The Biden administration has been pressuring Israel to end its attacks, which continued last week with the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by Israeli troops.

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Lead Stories

Ken Paxton asks Texas Supreme Court to reverse decision delaying Roberson execution

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion in the Supreme Court of Texas asking the court to dismiss its Thursday order delaying the execution of Robert Roberson III. The order, which came late Thursday night, hours after Roberson was scheduled to be executed, granted a subpoena issued by a House Committee calling Roberson to testify Monday about how state’s 2013 “junk science” law allowing people to challenge convictions with new science was applied in his case. In the 24-page petition filed on behalf of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the attorney general’s office says the House committee’s subpoena was “defective on its face.” Paxton’s request said the court does not have jurisdiction in the case, and he also said the order “flouts” the separation of powers and pushes Texas to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

During a Thursday afternoon hearing, a Travis County judge halted the execution of Roberson so the death row inmate could comply with the subpoena. The judge signed a temporary restraining order a half-hour before he was scheduled to be put to death, throwing the execution into question. That order was later shot down by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, before the Supreme Court of Texas stepped in and halted the execution at about 9:40 p.m. Thursday. Spokespeople for TDCJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday evening. Paxton’s petition requested a decision from the court prior to noon Monday, when Roberson is scheduled to testify, and said Roberson will not appear in person to deliver testimony. Roberson, 57, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2003 for the death his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. He has maintained his innocence through more than two decades on death row.

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For a vision of Trump’s second term, look to Texas

Earlier this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott appeared on the radio show of former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch to discuss Operation Lone Star, his $11 billion border crackdown. “We are deploying every tool and strategy that we possibly can,” Abbott boasted. “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” Not everyone shares Abbott’s sense of restraint. National Guard troops participating in Operation Lone Star have shot across the border on at least two occasions, wounding two people. Vigilantes riled up by immigrant bashing have committed mass shootings across the state and country. In 2019, a white supremacist from the Dallas suburb of Allen shot 23 people and wounded 22 more at a Walmart in El Paso, a city that is more than 80 percent Hispanic. In a manifesto, the shooter described himself as a defender of American values against “the Hispanic invasion of Texas”—language similar to that used by Abbott and many other Texas officials to describe illegal immigration. Abbott’s not-so-veiled threat raises an obvious question: What would Texas do to undocumented migrants if the pesky federal government weren’t threatening it with legal action? The matter isn’t hypothetical. Three months from now, Donald Trump could well be back in the White House.

“Texas is an innovator in immigration-based authoritarianism,” said political scientist Jacob Grumbach, author of Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. “In this era, what states like Texas do really presages what the national party will do with power.” Immigration policy is merely the most obvious area in which Texas will likely serve as the model for a second, far more radical Trump administration. For years, the state has been a testing ground for right-wing policies. Like other Republican-led states, such as Florida, it has clamped down on free speech, banned diversity and equity initiatives, imposed a whitewashed view of history on schoolchildren, and forced state contractors to sign a pro-Israel pledge. Additionally, Governor Greg Abbott has centralized power to an unprecedented degree, overturning countless local ordinances and seizing control of the state’s largest school district. Attorney General Ken Paxton has targeted the Democratic Party, Catholic charities, voting-rights groups, and the parents of transgender children. Trump is reportedly considering Paxton to run the Department of Justice.

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U.S. agencies fund, and fight with, Elon Musk. A Trump presidency could give him power over them.

Elon Musk’s influence over the federal government is extraordinary, and extraordinarily lucrative. Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, effectively dictates NASA’s rocket launch schedule. The Defense Department relies on him to get most of its satellites to orbit. His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies. His entanglements with federal regulators are also numerous and adversarial. His companies have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets. Given Mr. Musk’s immense business footprint, he will be a major player no matter who wins the election. But he has thrown his fortune and power behind former President Donald J. Trump and, in return, Mr. Trump has vowed to make Mr. Musk head of a new “government efficiency commission” with the power to recommend wide-ranging cuts at federal agencies and changes to federal rules.

That would essentially give the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest. Through a review of court filings, regulatory dockets and government contracting data, The New York Times has compiled an accounting of Mr. Musk’s multipronged business arrangements with the federal government, as well as the violations, fines, consent decrees and other inquiries federal agencies have ordered against his companies. Together, they show a deep web of relationships: Instead of entering this new role as a neutral observer, Mr. Musk would be passing judgment on his own customers and regulators. Already, Mr. Musk has discussed how he would use the new position to help his own companies. He has questioned a rule that required SpaceX to obtain a permit for discharging large amounts of potentially polluted water from its launchpad in Texas. He also said that limiting this kind of oversight could help SpaceX reach Mars sooner — “so long as it is not smothered by bureaucracy,” he wrote on X, his social-media platform. “The Department of Government Efficiency is the only path to extending life beyond Earth.”

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Texas adds record number of jobs, boosting labor force to a high of 15.5M

Texas’ labor force hit a new high in September with 15.45 million people on the job or looking for work — and the state added a record number of jobs. More than 29,000 jobs were added last month, bringing the total to 327,000 jobs added over the past 12 months. Texas has added jobs at a rate of 2.3%, outpacing national growth by 0.7 percentage points. The state’s seasonally adjusted rate of unemployment held steady at 4.1%, the Texas Workforce Commission said Friday. That matched the national rate. In the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro area, unemployment fell slightly to 3.8% from 4% in August. The region’s job count grew by 0.5% to nearly 1.2 million jobs, led by growth in the government and construction sectors.

“The record-setting 15.4 million Texans who make up our civilian labor force are strengthening and innovating our state’s economy,” Workforce Commissioner Alberto Treviño III said in a statement. The state’s civilian labor force has added 318,500 people so far this year, including the 51,500 who joined in September. That was up from 44,800 people the month prior. Statewide, job growth was led by the professional and business services sector with its 10,500 new jobs. Private education and health services, a combined sector, added 10,400 jobs; and construction added 8,100 jobs. Construction has consistently led the state’s job growth, with a 5.1% growth rate over the year. In the San Antonio area, the construction sector — which is combined with mining and logging job categories for the report — has grown 4.2% over the past 12 months, adding 76,500 jobs. The San Antonio area wasn’t the only one to record a lower unemployment rate last month — all 25 major metro areas saw rates drop. The Midland metro had the state’s lowest unemployment rate with a rate of 2.6%, followed by the Amarillo at 3% and College Station-Bryan at 3.2%. Beaumont-Port Arthur had the highest rate on unemployment at 6%, followed by McAllen-Edinburg-Mission at 5.9% and Killeen-Temple at 4.7%. While the statewide unemployment rate is seasonally adjusted, rates for metro areas are not.

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New housing construction slowed as campaigns focus on affordability

Building a new house takes awhile, and now the pace is slowing down even more, underscoring challenges for Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump as they pitch voters on their plans to make housing more affordable. Data released Friday on housing construction showed that new building permits issued nationwide fell 2.9 percent in September compared with August, and were down 5.7 percent compared with the year before. Housing starts — marking when construction begins — dipped 0.5 percent, though there was more progress for single-family units, specifically, compared with August. Housing completions, the final step of the process, were down almost 6 percent. And since a house might not be completed for a long time after it gets permitted, experts say finished projects are on track to slow even more in the months and years ahead.

“Everything is now moving downward,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. He noted that the country is short more than 3 million homes and is building only about 1.35 million at an annualized pace. “That is simply not sufficient to meet basic demand,” he said. Zoomed out, the latest figures from the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development highlight how federal and local policies alike can influence housing — and how people experience the economy in their daily lives. In Washington, high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve in 2022 and 2023 slowed new construction, since steep borrowing costs make it harder for developers to finance new projects, and also sent mortgage costs up, cooling buyer demand. More recently, housing has dominated as a major campaign issue in the run-up to the November presidential election: Harris has shaped her proposals around building millions of new homes, while Trump argues that mass deportations of undocumented immigrants will free up supply. But the journey from a permit to a new home also overwhelmingly depends on state and local laws around zoning and construction.

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State Stories

How does Texas’ ‘junk science’ law apply to the Robert Roberson death row case?

On Monday, Robert Roberson is set to testify before a committee of the Texas Legislature — the first time a person on death row has had such an opportunity. Roberson was set to be executed Thursday, but the evening before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee voted 7-0 to subpoena him to appear before the panel. They want him to discuss how the state’s “junk science” law allowing people to challenge convictions with new science was applied in his case. Roberson, 57, was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for reportedly shaking his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, to death. He has maintained his innocence in his two decades on death row, and doubt has been cast on his conviction due to the “shaken baby syndrome” theory partially used to convict him being later disputed.

“Although our focus is Robert Roberson, we’re here because his case has shined a light on our new science writ law,” Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said at the hearing Wednesday. “Every member of this committee has been surprised by how it has been applied in this particular case.” The law, passed in 2013, allows people to challenge their convictions based on new scientific evidence that was not available at the time of the trial. Roberson’s original execution date in 2016 was stayed to allow him to receive a hearing under the “junk science” law. That hearing was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and took place in 2022, the Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell testified Wednesday. Experts for the state maintained blunt force trauma as the cause of Nikki’s death, Mitchell recalled, and experts for Roberson testified Nikki died from complications related to severe pneumonia. The Anderson County district court determined Roberson did not meet the criteria for relief with the evidence presented, a decision the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld.

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Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security strategy Operation Lone Star has cost over $10 billion

Frustrated with President Joe Biden’s policies related to immigration enforcement, Gov. Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March 2021, deploying National Guard soldiers and state troopers to the border with Mexico. The goal was to make border crossings more difficult by installing razor wire and other physical barriers along the Rio Grande and, further inland, to arrest suspected undocumented migrants for trespassing and other state criminal charges. That first year, Abbott shifted almost $1 billion from several state agencies, including the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to support the operation. With later allocations from the Texas Legislature, a total of $11 billion in state money has been spent on Operation Lone Star — and Abbott recently asked lawmakers for another $2.9 billion to run the program through 2027.

The money has paid for more than 100 miles of razor wire, more than 45 miles of a state-built border wall, and a 1,000-foot-long buoy barrier on the Rio Grande. The operation also has bused more than 119,400 migrants from Texas to six Democratic-run cities across the country and built a military base near Eagle Pass to house Texas National Guard soldiers. More than 522,800 migrants had been apprehended under Operation Lone Star as of Oct. 3, including 47,640 criminal arrests — 11,890 for trespassing. Abbott, a Republican who has been governor since 2015, has raised his national profile with aggressive border policies, including taking over an Eagle Pass park in January that had been a popular spot for border crossings. In February, Abbott hosted a border visit by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who praised the governor’s response and called him a possible running mate.

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We need to talk about Proposition U

Every 10 years, cities are required to review their charters—the rules that govern how they operate—and then ask voters to approve any changes. You’ll see 18 proposed charter amendments on your November ballot. The last three of that slate are causing heartburn for city officials and other local leaders. All three, S, T, and U, are on the ballot because the nonprofit Dallas HERO collected enough signatures on petitions to get them there. Proposition S would require the city to waive its governmental immunity and would allow residents to sue the city if they felt it was not following the city charter, ordinances, or state law. Proposition T would require the city manager’s pay and continued employment to be based on the outcomes of a residential satisfaction survey. Both would tangle the city up in litigation and hamstring its search for a new city manager.

Proposition U has two elements. One would earmark at least 50 percent of new revenue each year for the police and fire pension system. It would also require that the additional funds go to increasing starting salaries for police officers. The other element requires that the city maintain a police force of at least 4,000 officers. As of this summer, Dallas has just shy of 3,100 officers. Police Chief Eddie García estimates that at current recruitment trends, it would take almost 15 years to hit the 4,000 mark. At its peak, in the mid-2010s, the department had around 3,600 officers. Just for the officers alone, the city estimates it would cost at least $175 million to hire, train, and outfit 900 additional cops. And the list of new revenue sources touches nearly every aspect of city operations—including asset forfeiture revenue, property taxes, hotel occupancy taxes, court fees, open records fees, and public improvement district taxes. But Proposition U has the potential to do the most harm to the city, thanks to two bills signed into law in 2021, in reaction to requests nationwide to reallocate police budgets to social services that were often referred to as “defunding” the police. House Bill 1900 levies a penalty on cities if they reduce their police spending unless there has also been a commensurate drop in revenue. Cities that reduce spending could see the state take part of its sales taxes (it would go to the Texas Department of Public Safety), and they would be banned from increasing property tax rates or utility rates. Senate Bill 23 requires cities to put any proposed decrease in police spending to a referendum. If Proposition U were to pass, the earliest the city could amend the charter again is two years. This leads to an interesting hypothetical: what if residents voted to repeal the proposition in two years? Could the city reallocate those funds for city services, or would it then find itself punished by the state?

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The billionaire behind the bid to break Dallas City government

At the August 21, 2024, meeting of the Dallas City Council, Joseph Porter stood at the podium and admonished the council members for allegedly “spreading misinformation” about three proposed city charter amendments, which one member has described as “draconian” and the mayor and all council members have publicly opposed. “Your outward disdain for the citizens of Dallas will not go unnoticed,” said Porter, who was identified only by name. “Because that’s what this is. Any person spreading misinformation about these [charter amendments], trying to subvert the will of the people, it’s totally shameful.” What Porter did not disclose in his public comment is that he’s the executive director of Keep Dallas Safe, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit—a type of organization sometimes known as “dark money” groups due to the laws that allow them to conceal their donors—that pushes fever-pitched rhetoric about crime in Dallas.

Per inside sources and documents reviewed by the Texas Observer, Keep Dallas Safe was created and operated by a California-based publicity firm that orchestrates campaigns and protests, and, according to a former contractor and internal documents, the nonprofit’s creation was financially backed by Monty Bennett—a politically active, yet little-known outside of Dallas, right-wing hotelier and billionaire megadonor—and logistically supported by one of Bennett’s top executives. The three city charter amendments, collectively branded by backers as the Dallas HERO Initiative, will be on the ballot for Dallasites in the November 5 election. If passed, they would do three things. The first, Proposition S, would allow residents to sue the city over any perceived violations of local or state law and force the city to waive its governmental immunity to such lawsuits—part of a broader trend of Texas Republicans promoting civil litigation to enforce policy. The second, Proposition T, would require an annual survey of residents that could cause the city manager to be fired. The third, Proposition U, would commit future city revenues to the fire and police pension system, which faces a $3.4 billion shortfall, and to increasing the police force to 4,000 officers (which the current police chief says would take 15 years to achieve).

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Who’s left to Blame for Austin FC’s disappointing season?

When Austin FC lost to the LA Galaxy two Saturdays ago, the club found itself near the end of a second consecutive losing season. With a dismal record of ten wins, nine draws, and fourteen losses, another defeat wasn’t surprising. For some, the only surprise was that what happened next hadn’t happened earlier. Just a few hours after flying back from Los Angeles, head coach Josh Wolff was summoned to an early-morning meeting with Austin FC’s sporting director, Rodolfo Borrell, and majority owner, Anthony Precourt. A few minutes later, the franchise started searching for a new head coach. This Saturday will mark the club’s first game without Wolff, who had been on the payroll since Austin’s Major League Soccer debut. It will also be the final game of a dreadful 2024 season.

Davy Arnaud, Wolff’s longtime assistant, will replace him on an interim basis for the match against the Colorado Rapids. The Verde and Black are in lowly tenth place, out of the playoffs, and were eliminated from the Copa Tejas—an unofficial in-season competition to crown the best Texas team (congratulations, FC Dallas fans, wherever you are). To add insult to injury, the normally raucous Q2 Stadium will likely be quieter Saturday, with the Texas-Georgia football game kicking off at about the same time. Festivities from the Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix will also steal some of the spotlight. Austin FC has hit rock bottom so hard that the bounce might be the best thing to happen to the club in ages. It’s hard to believe this is the same team that reached the 2022 Western Conference Final in its second season. But whose fault is it? Will everything turn around now that Wolff is gone? Did a Barton Springs salamander curse the club? Does Minister of Culture Matthew McConaughey (yes, that’s his real title) need to minister harder? Can we pin the blame on someone else? Let’s go through the prime suspects.

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Storied magazine Texas Monthly gets new chief with Dallas roots

After six years at the editorial helm of Texas Monthly, Dan Goodgame will leave his post as editor-in-chief of the state’s national magazine. Next in line is Texas Monthly’s deputy editor, Ross McCammon, a Dallas native and former top editor at national magazines Esquire, GQ and Men’s Health. He’ll takeover as the magazine’s editor-in-chief come January. The decision to bring McCammon to the head of the magazine’s editorial leadership happened organically. In both a deputy editor and a successor, Goodgame was looking for someone who was both good at coaching editors and writers and clearly enjoyed doing it.

The 51-year-old magazine is known for its rich features on the Lone Star State and the people here, along with its annual “Bum Steer Awards” that take stabs at politicians, celebrities and even sports franchises. “Ross is just invigorated by coaching people and working with them on how to get better,” Goodgame said. “The staff is really responding to that.” Goodgame had hoped he could step down when he reached 70 after a seasoned journalism career. He wants to spend more time with his first grandchild and to be able to say yes to more invitations he’s had to pass on over the years. “I look in the mirror and I still see a young person but the calendar says otherwise,” he said. With his birthday coming up in January and with the speed at which McCammon integrated into Texas Monthly, the time was right, he said. In the Texas Monthly office, one hallway displays every cover of every issue published. President of Texas Monthly Scott Brown said he enjoys seeing the distinct differences between the different eras of editors. “The Dan era has been fantastic, and I know the Ross one will be, too,” Brown said.

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Bexar County's last Republican commissioner fights to hang on in a presidential battleground

Republicans have long had one sure seat on the Bexar County Commissioners Court. Now even that looks fragile, in the final weeks of a presidential contest that’s sucking the oxygen away from local candidates’ campaigns. Precinct 3 on the county’s Northside — represented by Republican Grant Moody — encompasses some of Bexar County’s reddest territory and has sent a long line of Republicans to the county’s five-member commissioners court. Despite that track record, the precinct’s support for Republicans at the statewide and federal level has plummeted in recent years, at the same time its population has exploded with growth.

“There’s clearly been, over the last decade, some shifts in voter support at the presidential level,” said Moody, a Marine fighter pilot who won the seat in a 2022 special election. “It’s hard to determine whether those are anomalies, or whether the district still has a red foundation.” Last election cycle Moody carried the precinct by 7 percentage points, while Republican Gov. Greg Abbott carried it by just over 2 percentage points. Races have been even tighter in presidential elections, when more voters turn out to vote. Former President Donald Trump won Precinct 3 by a comfortable double-digit margin in 2016, but carried it by just 0.7 percentage point victory in 2020 — according to Democrats who crunched the numbers. On a Thursday evening just days out from the start of early voting, Moody was raising money at Big’z Burger Joint near UTSA for the launch of an advertising campaign he said is still forthcoming in his reelection race against Democrat Susan Korbel.

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X's new terms of service push lawsuits to Texas courts, allow third-party AI data-sharing

Elon Musk's X is updating its terms of service to redirect the social media platform's disputes to a conservative Texas court. Another update to its privacy policy could also have serious implications involving AI's access to user data. Here's a breakdown of the changes to X, formerly known as Twitter, as released Oct. 16. The update to X's terms of service, which goes into effect on Nov. 15, will require all lawsuits by users against X to be filed in a Texas court — either in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts in Tarrant County. Judges in this federal court in Texas tend to side with conservative litigants in political disputes, according to Reuters. The choice of venue is notable as X's new headquarters in Bastrop, Texas, falls under the Western District of Texas, which has fewer Republican-appointed judges. The Northern District has become a preferred venue for "conservative activists and business groups" to challenge parts of President Joe Biden’s agenda, Reuters reports.

The new terms of service also include a new privacy policy. Among other changes, the update grants third parties access to user data for the purpose of training artificial intelligence models. This change comes a year after the European Union regulators investigated the platform's spread of mis- and disinformation. Musk showed little interest in cooperating, and X withdrew from the EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation. The latest change to X's privacy policy suggests that, in exchange for sharing data, the platform is looking to AI companies as an additional source of revenue. "If you do not opt out, in some instances the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes in addition to those stated in X’s Privacy Policy, including, for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise," the latest version of X's privacy policy states.

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Texas vs Georgia: Top-ranked Longhorns unable to complete comeback in SEC showdown

On Saturday night, Texas dug itself a hole that it could not get itself out of. After falling behind by 23 points, No. 1 Texas was unable to rally past No. 4 Georgia in a 30-15 loss at Royal-Memorial Stadium. In defeat, Texas (6-1, 2-1) suffered its first loss of the season. The Longhorns will attempt to bounce back at Vanderbilt (5-2, 2-1) next weekend.

Texas entered halftime facing a 23-0 deficit following a disastrous first half that featured a charge at the quarterback position, five sacks and three turnovers. Quinn Ewers directed the first six possessions of the first half before Arch Manning quarterbacked the final two. The two combined for 36 passing yards, and the Longhorns lost 49 yards on the sacks they took. Georgia, meanwhile, was able to overcome the two first-quarter interceptions that were thrown by Carson Beck. Two touchdown runs by Trevor Etienne and Peyton Woodring's three field goals paced the Bulldogs ahead of halftime. Ewers returned to the Texas huddle in the second half, and he quickly led the Longhorns on an eight-play scoring drive that was capped by a 2-yard touchdown pass and two-point conversion that were both caught by Isaiah Bond. Then things got interesting. Three plays after Texas was stopped on a 4th-and-7 at the Georgia 31, Beck was intercepted by Jahdae Barron. The Texas cornerback returned the football to the Georgia 9, but a pass interference penalty negated the play. That penalty set off a sequence in which the game was delayed while Texas students threw trash from the stands, and Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, who was notably apoplectic about the call, had to cross the field to plead for the littering to stop. The officials then surprisingly reversed their decision and awarded the football to Texas. Two plays later, Texas scored again and Georgia's lead was cut down to 23-15 with 2:12 left in the third quarter.

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El Paso ISD proposes closing 10 of its 48 elementary schools

One in every five El Paso Independent School District elementary schools would close if the school board approves a plan unveiled by administrators Thursday night. The plan outlined by Superintendent Diana Sayavedra during a special Board of Trustees meeting would close 10 elementary campuses while adding resources to remaining schools. Currently, the district has 48 elementary and pre-K through fifth-grade schools, meaning about a fifth of them will be closing their doors by the start of the 2025-26 school year if the plan is approved. “We are absolutely committed to people first,” Sayavedra said during the meeting. “Engaging with the community, engaging with families, making sure that our students are taken care of and that our employees are taken care of as well.”

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Jury awards American Airlines $9.4 million against ‘hidden city’ ticketer Skiplagged

A federal jury in Fort Worth awarded American Airlines $9.4 million on Tuesday in the airline’s suit against Skiplagged Inc., a website that promotes bargain fares through “hidden city” ticketing, a practice that saves many fliers money but, American contends, costs airlines millions in uncaptured revenue. Jurors in the court of U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman ordered Skiplagged to pay American $4.7 million in actual damages for copyright infringement; and $4.7 million in disgorgement of “ill-gotten” revenues derived from Skiplagged’s misconduct. That’s about half of what one of American’s attorneys, Paul Yetter of Yetter Coleman in Houston, asked the jury to award the airline in his closing argument last Friday. In addition to its copyright claim, the airline’s suit sought damages for trademark infringement. The jury Tuesday awarded no damages on the trademark claim.

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Dallas Morning News Endorsement: Colin Allred for Senate

In the recent debate between Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, Cruz told us to pay attention not to Allred’s words but to his actions. It is generally good advice, and we have heeded it by carefully examining both men’s records in public office, from their votes to their legislation. But Cruz’s advice can only take us so far. Because words do matter, and they matter especially in the business of leadership. So we looked not only at their actions but also listened to their words, and, after doing so, we recommend voters cast their ballots for Allred in the coming election. The three-term congressman from Dallas has demonstrated over time that both the words and action of bipartisanship matter to him.

There are areas where we disagree with Allred, and there are areas where we are more aligned with Cruz. For example, we think Democrats, including Allred, were far too late in recognizing that our porous southern border represents a destabilizing crisis. And Allred’s description of a proposed border wall as “racist” was a serious error in judgment when physical barriers have long been integral to border security, as Allred now acknowledges. But Cruz had the opportunity to support a step toward a solution with the bipartisan Lankford-Sinema bill that would have provided massive resources for border security. He refused, calling the bill a “steaming pile of crap.” Allred voted in favor of it, recognizing it as an imperfect but necessary step forward. Similarly, Cruz could have supported the bipartisan CHIPs and Science Act to boost onshore microchip production. Building chips here is vital to American security because Taiwan, where most chips are produced, is vulnerable to Chinese aggression. But on this important matter, Cruz voted no. Allred voted yes. Cruz, 53, could have supported the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help rebuild our country. Sixteen Republican senators joined in supporting that act. But Cruz refused. In the House, Allred joined with Republicans and Democrats in voting yes.

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National Stories

Catholic bishops are donating millions less to defeat abortion this year. Here’s why

The Catholic Church has long been one of the most powerful opponents of abortion in the United States. In fact, it’s one of the largest private entities bankrolling campaigns against abortion rights. But Catholic bishops are taking a very different approach this year, according to an analysis by NPR and Religion News Service. As voters in 10 states consider abortion-related ballot questions, Catholic bishops have spent millions less on donations to anti-abortion campaigns than in previous years, according to public financial documents. This year, across all 10 states with abortion rights ballot measures, bishops have donated just over $1 million, according to financial disclosures published by secretaries of state. That’s less than a third of the nearly $3.7 million a single Kansas diocese donated two years ago. In Ohio in 2023, Catholic bishops contributed $1.7 million to a political action committee set up to fight an abortion rights ballot measure.

Bishops in just three states have made donations this year: roughly $30,000 in Missouri; $50,000 in Colorado; and about $900,000 in Florida. In seven states — including Arizona, Montana and South Dakota — NPR and Religion News Service could not find evidence in public records that Catholic bishops have contributed anything to committees opposing abortion rights ballot initiatives. NPR and Religion News Service reached out to bishops and Catholic conferences in all 10 states. Bishops in Arizona and South Dakota did not respond to requests for comment, while the executive director of the Montana Catholic Conference declined to be interviewed. “We have not seen sort of those big money sums coming in yet,” said Jamie Morris, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference. Overall, the campaigns to oppose abortion rights are drawing tens of millions less than the campaigns to enshrine those rights in state constitutions.

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A Mideast shift is underway, without Israel

A year ago, Saudi Arabia was preparing to recognize Israel in a normalization deal that would have fundamentally reshaped the Middle East and further isolated Iran and its allies while barely lifting a finger to advance Palestinian statehood. Now, that deal is further away than ever, even after the killing of the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, which has been widely seized upon as a potential opening for a peace deal. Instead, Saudi Arabia is warming relations with its traditional archenemy, Iran, while insisting that any diplomatic pact now hinges on Israel’s acceptance of a Palestinian state, a remarkable turnaround for the kingdom. A diplomatic détente is underway in the Mideast, but not the one envisioned by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who continues to say that his administration can clinch a deal with Riyadh. This month, the foreign ministers of the Persian Gulf states met for the first time as a group with their Iranian counterpart. It is a shaky, early-stage rapprochement that will only chip away at centuries of sectarian antagonisms, but it represents a sharp shift in a region where the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran has drenched the region in bloodshed for decades.

Tehran’s outreach continued after that, with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, visiting Saudi Arabia before heading to other countries in the region, including Iraq and Oman, in an effort to ease tensions. He also visited Jordan before traveling to Egypt and Turkey. The visit to Egypt was the first by an Iranian foreign minister in 12 years, according to the Iranian news media. “In the region, we now have a common grievance about the threat of the war spreading, and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon and the displaced people,” Mr. Araghchi said on Friday, when he landed in Istanbul. While Mr. Netanyahu continues to reject the creation of a Palestinian state, Saudi officials have taken to newspapers and public speeches to put a two-state solution on the negotiating table. That, the kingdom has said, is the only way at this point for Israel to win favor with Saudi Arabia, largely seen as the leader of the Arab world. What changed? Images started streaming out of Gaza of children buried alive under rubble, mothers grieving over their dead babies and Palestinians starving because Israel had blocked aid from entering the territory — all of which made it impossible for the Saudi leadership to ignore the issue of Palestinian statehood. “What Gaza has done is set back any Israeli integration into the region,” said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi businessman who is close to the monarchy and sits on the advisory board of Neom, a futuristic city that is the pet project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s future ruler. “Saudi Arabia sees that any association with Israel has become more toxic since Gaza, unless the Israelis change their spots and show a real commitment to a Palestinian state, which they have refused to do.”

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Welcome to the era of the $20,000 family car insurance bill

If you’re 16 years old, live in California and just passed your driver’s license test, the first thing you should do is drive your family to In-N-Out Burger for a milkshake and some animal-style fries. The first thing a parent should do is call the insurance company to update the policy. That part, however, will probably give you indigestion. Last month, when Debbie Mukamal called her insurer as she and her daughter rolled away from an In-N-Out drive-through in their 2018 Subaru, the representative casually informed her that her annual premium would triple, from about $1,700 to over $5,000. She has it pretty good, it turns out. There are plenty of families with three or four children whose annual premiums will top $20,000 this year. That can be enough to replace one of the cars that the policy covers.

If you were an insurance company, you would charge a lot more for young drivers, too. Consider the most recent data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on young drivers, which it defines as people between the ages of 15 and 20. Those young people make up 5 percent of licensed drivers but account for 8.1 percent of drivers involved in fatal crashes and 12 percent of those involved in police-reported crashes. At the time of a fatal accident, a higher percentage of young drivers are speeding than drivers in any other age group are. And then there are the young men. The rate of young women involved in fatal crashes per 100,000 licensed drivers is 22.74, but it jumps to 58.73 for young men. Insurance premiums generally reflect that. One Long Island father I spoke to this week had three young men in the mix, expensive cars, an accident on the household ledger and a moving violation, too. The family is paying Geico over $25,000 annually.

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Israeli strikes on Gaza leave at least 87 dead or missing, Palestinian officials say

Israeli strikes on multiple homes in the northern Gaza Strip overnight and into Sunday left at least 87 people dead or missing, the territory’s Health Ministry said. It said another 40 people were wounded in the strikes on the town of Beit Lahiya, which was among the first targets of Israel’s ground invasion nearly a year ago. Israel has been carrying out a large-scale operation in northern Gaza for the last two weeks, saying Hamas has regrouped there. Palestinian officials say hundreds of people have been killed and that the health sector in the north is on the verge of collapse. The United States is meanwhile investigating an unauthorized release of classified documents that assess Israel’s plans to attack Iran, according to three U.S. officials. A fourth U.S. official said the documents appear to be legitimate.

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Will Trump policies cost middle-class families an extra $4K a year?

Kamala Harris says it over and over—Donald Trump is pushing a plan that “has been estimated to cost a typical American family $4,000 per year.” The vice president is referring to her opponent’s plan to increase tariffs, which she says in her 82-page economic plan is “in effect a national sales tax on all products used by everyday families that are imported, from groceries to clothes to gas to prescription drugs.” Economists left, right and center generally agree. The left-leaning Center for American Progress Action fund estimates Trump’s plans would “amount to an annual $2,500 tax increase for a family in the middle of the income distribution.” Among its predictions are a $260 tax on electronics, $160 tax on clothing, a $120 tax on oil, and $110 tax on food.

The more conservative Tax Foundation, using different methods of calculating income and using other economic assumptions, puts the increase at around $6,000. At the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, senior fellows Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely estimated that the tariffs would cost a middle income household $1,700 a year. Trump and his supporters counter that the Biden administration has continued many of the tariffs Trump imposed during his presidency, and there’s little evidence tariffs have been a major reason prices jumped in recent years. “Kamala Harris is trying to fearmonger, and lies about his plan – even though she and Joe Biden kept the Trump era tariffs in place,” said Anna Kelly, Republican Party spokeswoman. The Trump campaign cited the former president’s remarks in Savannah, Georgia, last month as an argument for the tariff proposals. “The word tariff properly used is a beautiful word…A lot of bad people didn’t like that word, but now they’re finding out I was right, and we will take in hundreds of billions of dollars into our treasury and use that money to benefit the American citizens,” Trump said.

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A tattooed union leader is threatening to topple a Republican Senator in a deep-red state

Dan Osborn was campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat last week when he jumped onto the back of a white pickup parked outside a labor hall, a buck knife holstered on his hip and a tattoo sleeve running down his right arm. What began as his long-shot bid to unseat two-term Republican Sen. Deb Fischer has become a tight race in deep-red Nebraska, a state that former President Donald Trump won by 19 percentage points in 2020. Between swigs from a green Gatorade water bottle, the 49-year-old former union leader and political independent reminisced to a crowd north of 150 people about his role running the 2021 strike at Kellogg’s Omaha plant. Standing by his side was United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, who led a historic strike that won auto workers large wage increases last year. “I didn’t see men or women or black or white or Republican or Democrat on the picket line,” Osborn said. “I just saw people that wanted to go to work for a fair wage and some good benefits.”

After polls showed the race narrowing, Republicans’ ad spending surged in September. An Oct. 8 memo from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super political-action committee affiliated with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), said that Nebraska “has emerged as a serious trouble-spot,” and that the group was now polling “to assess whether intervention is necessary to protect the seat.” “It’s, I think, closer than a lot of us thought it was going to be,” said Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), the Senate GOP whip. There isn’t a Democratic candidate on the ballot for the seat. Osborn has said that he has been a registered independent for as long as he has been able to vote and that if he is elected, he won’t caucus with either party. Democrats have a 51-49 majority in the Senate, but Republicans are favored to win control of the chamber in November. Osborn has refused to accept any endorsements from either political party and declined to say if he will vote for Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Trump thrusts McDonald’s into the political arena in final days of campaign

Donald Trump is pulling one of the most iconic American companies – McDonald’s – into the political arena in the final days of his third White House bid. The former president is expected to stop by one of the fast-food chain’s Pennsylvania franchises during his Sunday swing through the Keystone State. There, he plans to work as a fry attendant, CNN reported last week. It’s the same job Vice President Kamala Harris has said she held as a young woman, a biographical detail revealed during her first campaign for president. It has since become a centerpiece of the middle-class origin story she has made key to her pitch to voters as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

Trump, whose deep affection for the Golden Arches and its offerings is well documented, has meanwhile grown fixated on Harris’ employment there. In interviews and on the campaign trail, he regularly accuses Harris – without evidence – of making up the factoid. His visit to the restaurant is his latest attempt to sow doubt about the Democrat’s work history. “I’m going to McDonald’s to work the french fry,” Trump told supporters Saturday at a rally in the Pittsburgh area. “I think I’m doing it tomorrow, and I think it’s in a place in Pennsylvania, and I’m going to stand over that french fry.” Harris has largely ignored Trump, as well as calls from his supporters and inquiries from conservative news outlets to provide proof of her time there. Her campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment about Trump’s accusation and his upcoming visit to McDonald’s.

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Lead Stories

Robert Roberson gets late stay of execution from Texas Supreme Court

Just over two hours before Robert Roberson’s death warrant expired, the Texas Supreme Court granted him a temporary reprieve pending his appearance before the Texas House, state Rep. Jeff Leach said. It’s the final play in an unprecedented legal back-and-forth that raged through Texas’ high courts Thursday evening. The Texas Supreme Court’s intervention came shortly after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a successful motion with the Criminal Court of Appeals to follow through with Roberson’s execution after he was condemned in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in the East Texas city of Palestine. "The judicial process has played out," Justice Evan Young stated in the court's majority opinion. But, he added, "a committee of the Legislature has subpoenaed an inmate subject to a sentence of death to appear as a witness. If the sentence is carried out, the witness obviously cannot appear."

The small group of protesters that remained at 9:45 p.m. whooped in celebration as a news of the stay reached social media. Roberson was “shocked” and “praised God” after learning of his stay, said Amanda Hernandez, the director of communications for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Roberson will be moved back to the Polunsky Unit in Livingston as the court process plays out, she said. Roberson, 57, was in his cell through the night; it was unclear if he knew what was happening with his appeals before he was notified of the stay. “The full and vast team fighting for Mr. Roberson people all across Texas, the country, and the world — are elated tonight that a contingent of brave, bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers chose to dig deep into the facts of his case that no court had yet considered and recognized that his life was worth fighting for,” his attorney Gretchen Sween said. “He lives to fight another day and hopes that his experience can help improve the integrity of our criminal legal system.”

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Whitmire launches ethics investigation into Controller Hollins over potential 'pay to play' sponsorships

Mayor John Whitmire said he has initiated an ethics investigation into Controller Chris Hollins’ decision to solicit sponsorships for a financial conference the controller’s office is hosting next week, questioning whether the practice is an example of “pay to play.” The Houston Annual Investor Conference is now in its ninth year, but Tuesday’s event – Hollins’ first as city controller – is the first for which sponsorships have been sought, Whitmire wrote in a letter, dated Thursday, to conference participants. A pamphlet on the conference website lists sponsorships from $10,000 up to $100,000, with increasing perks for top donors. The conference homepage shows Loop Capital, an investment bank, gave $50,000 to become a “platinum sponsor,” securing the firm a list of promotional opportunities at the conference. A “platinum” sponsorship also secured donors a “private dinner with the controller” in an earlier version of the sponsorship pamphlet Whitmire distributed at his Thursday press conference.

That perk is no longer listed as available for “platinum” sponsors, only for $100,000 “title” sponsors. No firms are listed as contributing at that level. A local representative with Loop Capital directed questions to its corporate office, which could not be reached. Hollins, in a press conference Thursday afternoon, said that he viewed the proposed dinner as a nice gesture that might encourage firms to make a "meaningful" charitable contribution. Any financial institution that has asked for a meeting during his tenure, he added, has gotten one. A spokesman for his office said the change to the sponsorship packet was to fix a typo. Three companies gave $25,000 to become “gold” sponsors, and nine people or firms contributed at the $10,000 “silver” level, including Hollins and his wife. Whitmire said at a Thursday morning press conference he called on the topic that he started getting calls from banks that received the sponsorship packet two weeks ago. “They said it was the appearance of pay to play, and they were seeking advice," he said. "'If we don’t contribute at the level of our competitors, can we still get city business? If we don’t, what are the repercussions for keeping city business?'”

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Treasury yields hold steady as investors digest data indicating economic resilience

U.S. Treasury yields held steady on Friday as investors digested the previous day’s economic data which signaled economic resilience. At 4:47 a.m. ET, the 10-year Treasury yield was up less than one basis point at 4.1045%. The yield on the 2-year Treasury yield ticked lower by one basis point to 3.9758%. One basis point is equal to 0.01%. Yields and prices move in opposite directions. It comes after retail sales, released Thursday, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.4% in September, indicating solid consumer spending. It reflects an increase from the 0.1% gain in August and beat the 0.3% Dow Jones forecast. Meanwhile, weekly initial jobless claims fell to 241,000, below the estimated 260,000, according to a report from the Labor Department. On Friday, investors are awaiting fresh data on building permits and housing starts for September.

Comments are also expected from several Federal Reserve officials including Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic and Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari. Investors will follow the remarks closely for hints about policymakers’ expectations for the economy and monetary policy, especially interest rates. Fed officials earlier in the week indicated that interest rate cuts are set to continue. Elsewhere, the European Central Bank delivered its third interest rate cut of the year on Thursday, reducing the deposit rate by a further 25 basis points to 3.25% as inflation risks ease in the European Union.

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Texas Ag Commissioner allows farmers to tap the Rio Grande for irrigation | Here's how that impacts an 80-year agreement between the U.S. and Mexico

The Texas Department of Agriculture has authorized an executive order allowing farmers to tap the Rio Grande for irrigation. On Thursday, TDOA Commissioner Sid Miller issued the order following heavy rainfall in Mexico. According to a release from the TDOA, that deluge has caused significant runoff causing large amounts of freshwater to flow into the bay—wasting it. Rather than letting that water go to waste, Miller's executive order allows farmers in the Rio Grande Valley to use it for watering their crops. Though Miller deemed the action justified in his statement, it comes in conflict with an 80-year-old agreement between the U.S. and Mexico—the 1944 Water Treaty. The treaty operates on a five-year cycle, where the U.S. delivers water to Mexico in the West via the Colorado River and Mexico delivers the U.S. water in the East via the Rio Grande. We're in the fourth year of that cycle, and Mexico will likely be at a deficit with the water it owes the U.S.

Historically, Mexico has not held up its end of the deal, underdelivering on its annual obligation of 350,000 acre-feet of water. According to the U.S. Section of the IBWC, Mexico has fallen behind on its payments to the tune of 750,000 acre-feet of water. That has put farmers in Texas' Rio Grande Valley operating with a limited water supply. “Enough is enough,” said Commissioner Miller in a release. “We’re done sitting around waiting for someone else to act. There is no reason the water overflow south of the Amistad and Falcon international reservoirs should go down the Rio San Juan to the Rio Grande and be wasted. The water belongs in the hands of those who need it most, not lost to the bay.” Miller's order has no expiration, which could lead to further water disputes between the U.S. and Mexico in the future.

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State Stories

Supreme Court justice unhappy with Texas court’s handling of Roberson’s death row case

When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop Texas from executing death row inmate Robert Roberson III, the Thursday evening ruling included sharp words from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. It was not the first time Sotomayor criticized the way Texas and the courts have handled death penalty cases. Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 after his daughter died of what medical experts believed to be a case of shaken baby syndrome. Defense lawyers, backed by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers, pressed to delay the execution, arguing Roberson’s conviction was based on debunked theories of shaken baby syndrome and that he is likely innocent. When the Supreme Court rejected Roberson’s request for a stay of execution, Sotomayor cited a precedent establishing that the justices have “no power to tell state courts how they must write their opinions.”

“Nevertheless, it is notable that the [Texas Court of Criminal Appeals] decisions in this case do not address the whole of Roberson’s evidence of actual innocence,” she wrote. Sotomayor also criticized the Texas appeals court for inconsistent rulings on cases involving shaken baby syndrome. “The TCCA just this week granted a new trial to Andrew Wayne Roark, a non-capital defendant whose child-abuse conviction rested on the same shaken-baby-syndrome testimony, from the same expert witness, that led to Roberson’s conviction,” she wrote. “When Roberson sought a stay of execution based on the argument the TCCA credited in Roark, the TCCA summarily denied relief.” Roberson filed his fourth post-conviction appeal after the Roark ruling, Sotomayor wrote, “illustrating in detail that the testimony as to shaken-baby syndrome in Roark had been nearly indistinguishable from the testimony in his case.” Even so, she wrote, the Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-4 to deny relief. Sotomayor acknowledged Roberson’s request for a stay lacked a “cognizable federal claim” for the court to act upon but said “few cases more urgently call for such a remedy than one where the accused has made a serious showing of actual innocence, as Roberson has here.”

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‘They did the right thing’: Officials, public react to halt to Robert Roberson execution

All day Thursday, many watched as the fate of Robert Roberson hung in the balance. Roberson, 57, was convicted of the murder of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, in 2003 and sentenced to death. He has maintained his innocence in his two decades on death row, and doubt has been cast on his conviction due to the “shaken baby syndrome” theory partially used to convict him being later disputed. Originally set to die in 2016, Roberson’s execution was delayed due to a 2013 Texas “junk science” law that allows for people convicted using disputed scientific theories to have their cases re-examined. Further appeals failed, leading to Roberson’s execution scheduled for Thursday. However, on Wednesday, members of the Texas House of Representatives’ Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena calling for Roberson to testify next week before the committee in Austin. The subpoena came after lawmakers heard hours of testimony as they sought to understand if Roberson’s case had been dutifully re-examined under the junk science law.

Thursday was full of questions, namely how the subpoena would impact the case. A Travis County judge issued a temporary restraining order Thursday honoring the subpoena, but that TRO was blocked by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals hours later. Late Thursday night, an emergency motion to the Texas Supreme Court to delay Roberson’s execution was granted, allowing him to testify on Monday in Austin and temporarily saving his life. After the news broke late Thursday, many accounts on X celebrated the order to stay Roberson’s execution, with one account saying the stay was an example of Democrats and Republicans working together to achieve a “decent thing.” The committee that issued the subpoena is made up of five Republicans and four Democrats. “A legislative committee now has more power than the governor (limited to a one time 30 day commutation) or highest criminal court (which is bound by a legal standard),” said Matt Rinaldi, the former head of the Republican Party of Texas and a former Dallas-area state lawmaker. “This is the way you destroy the legitimacy of a justice system.”

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A blue Texas? Dems look to U.S. Senate candidate Colin Allred

A blue Texas? That’s long been the question in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in three decades. “If you’re betting in Las Vegas, you probably don’t bet for it, but the things don’t always play exactly to the odds,” said Matt Angle, the founder and director of the Lone Star Project, an organization aimed at electing Democrats in Texas. He and other Democrats across the state and country are hoping to beat those odds on Nov. 5, with a high-profile Senate race on the ticket: Ted Cruz vs. Colin Allred. “Ted Cruz is unpopular, unlikeable, and continually puts his own interests ahead of what is best for Texas,” said Amanda Sherman-Baity, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in a written statement. “Meanwhile, Colin Allred has proven he can take on and win tough fights. In November, Texans are going to fire Cruz and elect a Senator who will put the people of Texas over petty self-serving politics.”

The candidates are in a tight race as Cruz seeks his third term in office. Cruz’s campaign is confident he can win, but the race is getting national attention as Democrats try to keep their narrow hold on the Senate. The contest is playing out in a presidential year, with Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, and former President Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, and in a changing state that has gained 2.15 million registered voters since the 2018 general election. “We’ve understood as Democrats in Texas that coming back in this state is a long-haul process, and we’re still in that, but I think the trends are very positive,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat. Tarrant County Democratic Chair Crystal Gayden is feeling confident that Texas will flip. Ever since Harris was announced as the Democratic nominee, energy at the top of the ticket has funneled down the ballot, she said. “I think our chances flow all the way down to the bottom of the ticket,” she said. That includes the U.S. Senate race, which Gayden believes Allred has a “strong chance” of winning.

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Whistleblowers denounce ‘major cover-ups’ by Tarrant sheriff

Former Tarrant County sheriff’s deputies denounced what they called patterns of misconduct and a culture of failing to act on such complaints in the office during a press conference on Wednesday. Brandon Walker, Phillip Hill and Nyla Coleman said they were terminated from the Sheriff’s Office for filing complaints against fellow employees for conduct including drug use, misuse of official resources, racial discrimination and more. All three have filed lawsuits in federal and state courts in response to the retaliation they say they experienced. The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that it would be “inappropriate to speak about those cases until they have worked their way through the courts,” and accused the organizers of the press conference as having a political agenda.

While assigned to a narcotics team from 2015 to 2017, Walker said he witnessed his partner Jay Rotter use narcotics on duty. Rotter was convicted of fatally shooting his girlfriend in Denton in August 2020. “I believe that if Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office had taken my concerns seriously Leslie Hartman might still be alive today,” Walker told a group of reporters and county residents outside the federal courthouse on 10th Street in Fort Worth. He got visibly emotional as he spoke about Hartman’s murder. After filing his complaint, Walker said he was retaliated against, including being called racial slurs, being transferred and no longer allowed overtime. “The constant cover-ups, retaliation against those who have integrity to stand up for what’s right is unacceptable,” he said. Former Sheriff’s Deputy Phillip Hill also described retaliatory actions taken against him for reporting what he called “a pattern of lawlessly misusing law enforcement resources.” While assigned to the fugitive warrants division, Hill said he witnessed a supervisor favoring bond forfeiture warrants “which is a little bit questionable, because this is the only type of warrant we served that had to do with an issue of money. Somebody is getting paid when these warrants are being served.”

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Iconic Austin restaurant Chuy's moves HQ from Texas to Florida following acquisition

Chuy's, one of Austin's most iconic restaurants, will no longer call the Lone Star State home after Darden Restaurants Inc. announced the beloved eatery will move its headquarters to Orlando, Florida, to be closer to other operations. "For Chuy’s to benefit from Darden’s competitive advantages, we will need to consolidate the support functions at their home office in Austin and transfer them to our Restaurant Support Center in Orlando," said a spokesperson with the company. Darden has not clarified a timeline or any kind of effect the move might have on the current workforce, but the company did say all employees at Chuy’s headquarters will remain in their current roles until at least February 2025.

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As lawmakers consider mask ban at protests, public expresses concerns about health, free speech

Many people expressed concern over potential legislation to ban masks at public protests during a Texas Senate State Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday. The hearing came at the direction of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who released a list of priorities he wanted Senate committees to study before the start of the 89th Legislative Session in January. The charge directs the committee to study the use of face coverings “designed to conceal the identity of those bent on committing crimes at protests” and to recommend legislation to prevent the “chaos and destruction” brought by those who do so.

Lawmakers around the country have proposed these bans, citing masks as a reason for violent activity at protests over the Israel-Hamas war. North Carolina passed a mask ban earlier this year, and several states already have bans on the books. The committee called on Ralph Ohland, a lieutenant in the Texas Department of Public Safety's criminal investigations division, to testify Wednesday. He said masks make it difficult for law enforcement to identify those who commit crimes like assault or vandalism at protests. He also said masks embolden protesters to engage in this activity. He said many of the over 130 people arrested at the pro-Palestinian protests at UT in April wore masks. “A common theme among criminal elements has become ‘no face, no case,’” Ohland said. “This shows us there’s a criminal understanding that covering their faces drastically reduces the ability of law enforcement to identify and bring these persons to justice.” The committee also heard invited testimony from Hannah Meyers, the director of policing and public safety for the Manhattan Institute, who said a mask ban can be an extra tool for law enforcement to apprehend criminals. Texas passed a similar mask ban in 1925 to combat Ku Klux Klan activity that she said was successful. It was repealed in 1974.

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Paxton sues North Texas doctor for ‘violating’ SB 14

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is taking his attack on the state’s transgender residents to new heights, filing a lawsuit against a North Texas doctor for “blatantly violating Texas law by providing prohibited ‘gender transition’ treatments to nearly two dozen minors,” according to a press release today (Thursday, Oct. 17) from Paxton’s office. Paxton is basing his hateful lawsuit on Senate Bill 14, which went into effect in September 2023 and was recently upheld by the GOP-ruled Texas Supreme Court. SB 14 prohibits gender transition healthcare, including “surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones for minors,” according to Paxton’s press release. SB 14 also requires the Texas Medical Board to “revoke the medical license or other authorization to practice medicine of a physician who violates” this law.

He claims that “growing scientific evidence strongly suggests” gender-affirming healthcare for children “in an attempt to anatomically or hormonally alter their biological sex characteristics have damaging, long-term consequences.” And, he claims, “the prohibited treatments are experimental, and no scientific evidence supports their supposed benefits.” In reality though, science shows that gender-affirming care has huge benefits for transgender people, including trans minors. All established medical associations support gender-affirming healthcare. Also, no one is doing gender-transition surgeries on children — despite the demented claims of some Republicans — and the effects of puberty blockers usually prescribed for trans minors are temporary, ending when the individual stops taking the medications. In fact, according to medical professionals and studies not aimed at promoting a right-wing political agenda and using trans people as tools to rile up right-wing voters and get them to the polls, gender-affirming healthcare saves lives. Legislation such as Texas’ SB 14 are, in fact, harmful to transgender youth, medical science says.

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Candidates clash as State Senate District 30 race heats up ahead of November election

Democrat Dale Frey and Republican Brent Hagenbuch will face off in November to fill the spot being vacated by state Sen. Drew Springer, R-Muenster, who did not run for reelection for Texas Senate District 30. Since before the primaries, Hagenbuch has faced allegations that he lives outside the district, but he still managed to win the Republican nomination in the May primary runoff election over Jace Yarbrough. Frey beat out Michael Braxton in the runoff for the Democratic nomination to the state Senate seat. District 30 spans 11 counties, including portions of Denton, Collin, Parker and Wichita counties, and all of Grayson and Cooke counties. In Denton County, that includes the northeastern and eastern parts of the county and most of the city of Denton.

In interviews with the Denton Record-Chronicle, Hagenbuch spoke about keeping conservative values, which include building a border wall, while Frey spoke about progressive goals such as advocating for a better health care system. Hagenbuch is a U.S. Navy veteran who owns and operates a transportation company and was elected chair of the Denton County Republican Party in 2021. During the run-up to the primaries, candidate Carrie de Moor challenged Hagenbuch’s eligibility to run for the seat over claims that he lives outside the district. A judge ruled against Hagenbuch’s attempt to dismiss the suit but let him remain on the Republican primary ballot. Hagenbuch said the lawsuit was a political tactic against him and that he has since then focused on the election. “They tried to go to court and lost,” Hagenbuch said. “I am a resident of District 30, and certainly eligible and plan to be the next senator for this district.” Hagenbuch said Frey supports progressive and far-left Democratic values, while his own are more traditionally conservative.

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At UT Dallas, politics is local ... mostly

Disillusionment, disenfranchisement and despondence are all words one could easily use to describe the current mood at UT Dallas. With the November election quickly approaching, students are not particularly enthusiastic about their choices for the Oval Office; many student activists are more focused on local and state elections because of the immediate and tangible impact they have on the university and North Texas community as a whole. Two main political trends stand out at UTD: the first is student concerns regarding the ongoing war in Palestine and university investments in weapons manufacturers facilitating this conflict; the second is student involvement in local and state politics as a result of the issues they encounter on a daly basis. UTD may have once been a relatively quiet campus, but the past two years have been astoundingly hectic for its students.

In spring 2023, the UTD divestment campaign successfully passed a resolution in the UTD Student Government that called for University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO) and thus the university to divest itself from five weapon manufacturers. UTD President Richard Benson publicly distanced himself from the students in a letter he sent to the Texas Jewish Post. That spring, Texas legislators also approved Senate Bill 17, which prohibited state-funded universities from maintaining diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and banned the programs, activities and trainings those offices had offered. Fall 2023 saw more frequent protests organized by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a back-and-forth spray paint struggle over the political messaging displayed on the campus Spirit Rocks, a public forum for student expression that had been used to display political messages as early as 2009. The Spirit Rocks were abruptly removed in November 2023 as students went home for fall break, a move that sparked weeks of protest. That fall marked the end of the UTD Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The short-lived Office of Campus Resources and Support replaced it for most of the spring semester before it, too, was dissolved. On May 1, 2024, UTD’s first-ever student encampment and first-ever state trooper raid took place. The arrest of 21 students, faculty, alumni and community members has continued to have a profound effect on campus as the university pursued both legal and academic charges against those arrested.

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North Texas sheriff running for reelection faces grief and anger over rising jail deaths

They came to the podium one after another. One woman accused officials of supporting a “deadly culture” inside the Tarrant County jail after her brother, a 31-year-old former Marine with schizophrenia who had been turned away from a mental health facility and arrested the next day, was killed by jail guards. Another woman, whose 23-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose inside the jail six months after he entered the lockup, told officials that it was hard for families to speak about their losses, but that she wasn’t going anywhere. The sister of 35-year old Chasity Bonner, who died suddenly at the jail in May, said her family was still seeking basic information about her death more than four months later and couldn’t understand why they still hadn’t seen a full autopsy report; officials listed Bonner’s cause of death as “natural” due to a kind of heart disease, but her family has said she didn’t have a history of heart problems. Later in the meeting, LaMonica Bratton, the woman’s mother, walked up and placed a red urn with a silver rose on the podium before introducing herself to the Tarrant County commissioners seated in front of her: “I’m Ms. Bratton, Chasity Bonner’s mother.” Then she tapped the urn. “This is Chasity Bonner.” “Because you are failing at your job, this is where my baby is,” she said.

The procession of grief and anger during the commission’s early October meeting speaks to the spike in deaths at the jail under Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, and the rising public pressure and outcry over jail conditions as he faces reelection in November. Since Waybourn took office in January 2017, at least 65 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody, compared to 25 jail deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him. Most of the people held in the jail are pre-trial, meaning they have never been convicted of their alleged crime. As Waybourn faces increased scrutiny from local advocates, his office also appears to be flouting a state law requiring sheriffs to commission outside law enforcement investigations into all deaths in their jails. After Bolts filed a public records request for those investigations with the Fort Worth Police Department, which the sheriff’s office has listed as the agency looking into more than 20 jail deaths over the past three years, a police spokesperson said there were no responsive records. When asked about the discrepancy, the spokesperson wrote in an email, “I’m told that the Tarrant County Sheriff Department investigates those.” Waybourn, who did not respond to requests for an interview or questions for this story, has said his office is working on improvements and blamed the deaths on people entering custody who are already sick or intoxicated, calling his jail the “largest psychiatric hospital in Tarrant County.”

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram Editorial: Endorsement in Southwest Tarrant County seat in Texas House

In six terms representing southwest Tarrant County in the Texas House, Rep. Craig Goldman rose as a leader and is now moving on, almost certainly to Congress. State House District 97 has a candidate ready to step in and continue mainstream conservative, business-friendly policies in Republican John McQueeney. McQueeney won a hotly competitive GOP primary to earn the chance to follow Goldman. The 44-year-old Riverhills resident, who owns a small freight and transportation company, is knowledgeable about what it will take to keep Texas competitive and adding good jobs as it continues to deal with the challenges of sustained growth. McQueeney has the backing of Gov. Greg Abbott and will support the governor’s push for private-school vouchers, but he understands that public schools also need additional funding, especially to hire and retain better teachers.

District 97 includes several fast-growing areas, and they’ll need continued help keeping up with infrastructure and transportation needs. McQueeney is well-prepared to advocate for that support. Democrat Carlos Walker is a solid candidate as well. He’s a Fort Worth ISD administrator who directs an office that offers services for district families, so he’s knowledgeable about needs across the community. Walker, 48, who lives in Fort Worth near Crowley, expressed during an interview an interest in agriculture and farming issues. It’s not an obvious concern for this urban/suburban district, but his passion for healthier food for families is welcome anywhere. Early voting begins Oct. 21 and is available through Nov. 1. Election Day is Nov. 5. Registered voters can cast a ballot at any county polling location. House members serve two-year terms.

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City Stories

Village Bakery, Texas’ 1st kolache shop, to reopen in West

The Village Bakery in West, Texas’ first Czech bakery and the home of the state’s original kolaches, has been sold and will reopen, the new owner said Wednesday. Shelly Miller, owner of the Village Shoppe next door to the bakery at 113 E. Oak St. in the McLennan County town, bought the 75-year-old bake shop. The Village Bakery has been closed five years since owner Mimi Montgomery Irwin died suddenly. A former vice president at Macy’s in New York, she came home in 2003 to run the bakery her family founded in 1951.

In a 1986 interview in the Waco Tribune-Herald, founder W.O. Montgomery was quoted as saying, “I am the kolache king. The other bakeries in town — well, they were just babies when I started. I was the first.” He used recipes similar to those published in an 1879 Czech cookbook, he said. The Village Bakery dominated kolache sales in West for decades along with what is now Gerik’s Ole Czech Bakery, 511 W. Oak St. A now-famous highway convenience store and bakery, the Czech Stop, followed in 1983. Miller said she and her husband, Darrell, had talked about reopening the bakery for a long time and “finally decided to do it.” The building needs remodeling but will reopen with the Village Bakery’s original recipes, she said.

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Dallas will need to find a lot of money to build around I-345

The City Council received its biannual briefing from the Texas Department of Transportation regarding planning for I-345. That’s the 2.8-mile stretch of elevated highway between downtown and Deep Ellum, the concrete tendon that connects Interstates 45 and 30, Central Expressway, and Woodall Rodgers. There wasn’t much news. The price tag to remove and trench the freeway is still $1.65 billion. That remains higher than earlier estimates of about $1 billion, but the cost hasn’t changed since Council was last briefed, in March. TxDOT hasn’t secured any funding and is continuing to work with Michael Morris, the transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, to find state and federal dollars for the project. It will likely need to be environmentally cleared before the Texas Transportation Commission, which allocates funding for enormous highways, adds I-345 to its 10-year funding plan. But considering the commission plans to allocate a record $104 billion for highway expansions across Texas next year, I-345 isn’t likely to face much trouble so long as the city embraces the project. (The transportation commission updates the plan every year, removing completed projects and adding new ones.) Ceason Clemens, TxDOT’s top engineer for the Dallas district, expects to receive environmental clearance next spring. She said the most “optimistic” timeline for the highway’s completion would be 10 years from now. She anticipates construction to take at least five years alone.

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Another audit? Dallas Park Board president wants full analysis of Fair Park’s finances

Dissatisfied with the investigation into Fair Park’s finances, Dallas Park Board President Arun Agarwal urged the city attorney on Thursday to conduct a wholesale forensic audit into Fair Park’s finances. Agarwal, who asked for a more thorough investigation during Thursday’s Park Board meeting, had most in the audience scratching their heads since the city has already contracted Baker Tilly, an advisory and accounting firm, to conduct an independent audit into the park’s finances in more detail. Or at least, that was the expectation. The scope of the audit is now unclear, and board members did not discuss it in open session. John Jenkins, director of the Dallas Park and Recreation Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A day after the City Council grilled Oak View Group and Fair Park First, Park Board members went into an executive session Thursday for a briefing on the contractual relationship between the city and the two entities, according to the agenda posted online. The city contracts with nonprofit Fair Park First to oversee the park, and Fair Park First subcontracts with OVG to handle day-to-day operations. The board went into another extended executive session after Fair Park First Board Chair Veletta Forsythe Lill presented the findings from a report that showed there was a $5.7 million financial hole in the bank account that was supposed to hold restricted donor funds. Last week, when Fair Park First released the report, Agarwal said he was unimpressed. Initially referred to as a forensic audit, the final report was an “agreed-upon procedures engagement,” which is narrower in scope. It does not cover all financial statements and is only focused on a specific area.

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National Stories

Trump says Jan. 6 was a "day of love," glossing over his supporters' assault on officers

Former President Donald Trump insisted that the Jan. 6 attack, when his supporters stormed the Capitol and assaulted scores of law enforcement officers, was not a day of violence, but a "day of love" when "nothing" was "done wrong." The Republican presidential nominee was asked about the assault on the Capitol at a Univision town hall on Wednesday, where a voter who said he used to be a registered Republican but was troubled by Trump's behavior during the riot said the former president could still win his vote.

"I want to give you the opportunity to try to win back my vote. OK?" said the voter. "Your — I'm going to say — action and maybe inaction during your presidency, and the last few years, sort of, was a little disturbing to me. What happened Jan. 6 and the fact that, you know, you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol. ... I'm curious how people so close to you and your administration no longer want to support you, so why would I want to support you? If you would answer these questions for me I would really appreciate it, and give you the opportunity. You know, your own vice president doesn't want to support you now." Trump responded by blasting former Vice President Mike Pence, saying he "totally disagreed with him on what he did," an apparent reference to Pence's refusal to reject the Electoral College votes after the 2020 presidential election. Pence has repeatedly — and accurately — said he had no constitutional authority to do anything but accept the results, withstanding repeated attacks from Trump and Trump's supporters.

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Hamas issues defiant message in first statement after Sinwar's death

In Hamas' first public response to Israel's killing of its leader Yahya Sinwar, a senior member of the organization told NBC News today that the militant group would only become stronger. Israeli forces in Gaza killed Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday. Vice President Kamala Harris said Sinwar's death "gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza." Hostages’ families have called on the Israeli government to use Sinwar's death to negotiate for their relatives' release, while Palestinians are voicing hope that it may bring an end to the war.

A United Nations’ UNIFIL peacekeeping mission spokesperson said today that the 10,000-strong force would remain in Lebanon despite several direct attacks, some of which he described as deliberate, by the Israeli military in recent days. “We need to stay, they asked us to move,” said UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti by video link from Beirut. He added that morale among peacekeepers, several of whom have been injured by the attacks, remained high. Asked about the possibile use of self-defense against Israel, Tenenti said it could be used but it was important to deconflict tensions. “The devastation and destruction of many villages along the Blue Line, and even beyond, is shocking,” he said, referring to a U.N.-mapped demarcation separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Asked about the downing of a drone near its ship off the Lebanese coast on Thursday, he said: “The drone was coming from the south but circling around the ship and getting very, very close, a few meters away from the ship.”

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A historic Black enclave fought for flood controls. It may not survive.

Mary Brown recently opened the door of her home in this historically Black enclave and flicked the light switch on and off hopefully. She was hit with the stench of black mold that in just a few days had crawled up the walls after her home was flooded with almost four feet of water during Hurricane Helene, then flooded again less than two weeks later during Hurricane Milton. “Oh boy, it smells in here,” Brown, 85, said as she moved through her living room, where a tapestry sofa and love seat sat with cushions upended, soggy from the deluge. Brown’s family have lived in Rubonia for generations, and she helped the neighborhood wage a successful years-long campaign to convince Manatee County to build a new drainage system to stem chronic flooding.

But after the back-to-back storms destroyed or damaged most of the 240 buildings in Rubonia, longtime residents like Brown say the new system isn’t working. They fear their community and its important history — as a refuge for the children of enslaved people — will be swept away. Her younger brother, Morris Goff, 77, a retiree and veteran, followed her inside, leaning heavily on his cane. “Mary, did the lights come on?” he called out. “Rubonia is always last,” Goff said. “I would have thought they would at least have the lights on by now.” Florida is dotted with communities like Rubonia, a small coastal area between Tampa and Sarasota, that were founded as segregated neighborhoods in low-lying areas and are now being threatened by increasingly severe weather, experts say. “All along the Gulf Coast, we have these predominantly African American communities that were built in undesirable areas because of basically redlining and segregation,” said Dannie Bolden, who has spent years trying to save North Port St. Joe, Fla. “Now with climate change, these communities are dealing with constant tidal surges that are causing more and more flooding in these places.” Bolden has worked on environmental issues across the country, but he said the problems facing the Gulf Coast’s Black communities are particularly dire. Many local governments are not investing in remediation to help local residents build their homes on safer ground — and survive, he said. “These once vibrant Black communities,” he said, “have a legacy and history that eventually will be totally gone.”

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In Nevada Senate race, Republican Sam Brown struggles to gain traction

Ed Lawson, the longtime mayor of this desert city of about 110,000 just outside Reno, said he has never voted for a Democrat. That will change next month when he plans to vote for Sen. Jacky Rosen over her Republican challenger, Sam Brown. “Sam Brown doesn’t get it,” Lawson said in an interview. “He certainly hasn’t ever come talk to us and ask us what we need in Sparks.” Brown, a military veteran and Purple Heart recipient, is the latest Republican trying to break the party’s dozen-year drought on winning a U.S. Senate race here. His campaign was considered a prime pickup opportunity for the GOP, which needs to win a net of two seats to reclaim the Senate majority.

But Brown has been unable to close the polling gap with Rosen, an incumbent with a well-funded campaign that Brown, who is neither independently wealthy nor a prolific fundraiser, has not matched. He has also failed to generate excitement among conservative voters, even in the more rural parts of the state where Republicans typically win overwhelmingly, with some citing his unfamiliarity with state issues. Brown’s staff recently turned over, a sign of turmoil in the campaign. And he has skipped basic campaign rituals, such as reaching out to local Republican leaders like Lawson. Rosen, who’s still relatively new to politics after Sen. Harry M. Reid (D), who died in 2021, handpicked her to run for Senate in 2018 following a single House term representing parts of Las Vegas, is leading in public polling averages by 8.5 percentage points. Republican internal polling, according to people familiar with the standings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal findings, shows Brown down by about 7 percentage points — a difficult gap to close with less than three weeks before Election Day.

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Harris and Trump target Michigan as both parties try to shore up 'blue wall' votes

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will both be scouring for votes in Michigan on Friday as they try to lock down support in this key political battleground. Harris, the Democratic vice president, is scheduled to begin her day in Grand Rapids before holding events in Lansing and Oakland County, which is northwest of Detroit. Trump, the Republican former president, has his own event in Oakland County in the afternoon before holding a rally in Detroit in the evening. Michigan is one of three “blue wall” states that, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, will help decide the election.

Trump’s event in Detroit will be his first one there since insulting the city last week. While warning what will happen if Harris is elected, he said that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit.” The city spent years hemorrhaging residents and businesses, plunging into deep financial problems, before rebounding in recent years. One challenge for Harris in Michigan has been union support. Although traditionally a Democratic bloc, she’s failed to win some key endorsements. In addition, Arab American voters have been skeptical of Harris because of the White House’s steadfast support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a co-chair of Harris’ campaign, said in an interview Thursday that the expectation was always that “it was going to be a close election.” “People are like, ‘Oh it’s so close.’ And I’m like, have you not been listening for decades?” Whitmer said. “Michigan is a divided state. And that’s why we don’t write off the reddest of areas on a political map. We show up.”

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Sinwar's killing opens up opportunity and much uncertainty for the war in Gaza

Israel’s killing of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ top leader and the mastermind of the group’s Oct. 7 attack, is a dramatic turning point in the brutal yearlong war that it touched off. Sinwar’s killing on Thursday decapitates the Palestinian militant group that has already been reeling from months of assassinations up and down its ranks. And it is a potent symbolic achievement for Israel in its battle to destroy Hamas. The killing, coming just 10 days after Israelis and Palestinians marked a year since the deadliest fighting in their decades-old conflict erupted, could set the stage for how the remainder of the war plays out, or even prompt its conclusion — depending on how Israel and Hamas choose to proceed. Sinwar, who was appointed head of Hamas after its previous leader was killed in a blast in July blamed on Israel, spent years building up Hamas’ military strength and is believed to have devised the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. After that assault, when Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted about 250 others, Israel pledged to destroy Hamas and kill each one of its leaders.

With Sinwar at the top of that wanted list, his death is a major achievement for Israel. Analysts say Sinwar’s killing has presented Israel, which has struggled to articulate an exit strategy from Gaza, with an off-ramp to end the war. “This would really be the cherry on the icing of the cake for Israel,” said Nomi Bar-Yaacov, an associate fellow of the International Security Program at the Chatham House think tank in London. “It should be easier to reach a deal.” With the architect of the Oct. 7 attacks eliminated, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could now tell Israelis that one of the war’s aims has been reached. Politically, that might allow him to be more flexible on a cease-fire deal that ends the war in exchange for hostages — a condition he has so far refused to accept, at least in part, critics say, because it could threaten his rule. Analysts said the achievement was such a gamechanger that it was an opportunity for Israel to signal that it is ready to end the fighting further afield in the region, including in Lebanon where Israel is battling Hezbollah. “The opportunity to end the war entirely, as well as in Lebanon, ... it is entirely in our hands,” Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told Israeli Channel 12 News, saying Israel must use Sinwar’s death to present its conditions for ending the wars on both fronts. The families of hostages in Gaza had a similar message for Netanyahu. A group representing the families welcomed Sinwar’s killing but recognizing the potential opportunity, called on Israel to reconcentrate its efforts toward negotiating a deal.

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Liam Payne's ex-fiancée says she received foreboding message before One Direction singer's death

San Antonio model Maya Henry, daughter of prominent attorney Thomas J. Henry, reportedly issued a cease-and-desist order to her ex-fiance and former One Direction singer Liam Payne before his sudden death Wednesday. Henry's lawyers told DailyMail that she issued Payne a cease-and-desist letter last week for repeatedly contacting her. In a video posted to TikTok Oct. 6, the 23-year-old model accused the popstar of persistent phone calls and messages since they broke up in 2022. "Maya Henry issued a cease and desist last week to Liam Payne following the emergence of new and concerning information," her attorneys said in a statement to DailyMail. "She has retained attorneys Marco Crawford and Daniel Cerna to represent her. At this time, that is her only comment on the matter."

Henry has not responded publicly to news of Payne's death. Local officials said they are investigating and conducting an autopsy. Henry's attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday morning. Payne, who was 31, died unexpectedly Wednesday after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Hotel staff called police about an "aggressive man" possibly under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and local officials said Payne jumped from the balcony. The singer was one of five members of popular British boy band One Direction, which went on hiatus after it last performed in 2015. Payne and Henry confirmed their relationship publicly in 2019 and were reportedly engaged in 2020.

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Lead Stories

Texas legislators subpoena Robert Roberson to speak hours before his scheduled execution

Texas legislators held a daylong hearing Wednesday examining the evidence and hearing expert testimony in the case of Robert Roberson, the East Texas man who could become the first in the country to be put to death for the disputed “shaken baby syndrome” theory. Roberson, 57, was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for reportedly shaking his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, to death. He is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Thursday evening in Huntsville. After the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency to Roberson earlier Wednesday, legislators voted unanimously at the end of the daylong hearing to subpoena Roberson. It’s not immediately clear what impact this will have on his scheduled execution. A copy of the subpoena posted late Wednesday to X by Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, summons Roberson to testify before the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence at noon on Monday in Austin.

“We have looked at the evidence in this case in depth,” Moody wrote on X. “Based on the laws we created, we had a much different expectation of how this would go than what actually happened. We will get answers.” In an email late Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice told The Dallas Morning News that department officials had not seen the subpoena, but said if one is issued by the legislative committee, they would consult with the attorney general’s office on the “appropriate next steps.” At the hearing, the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence heard testimony from forensic specialists, legal experts and individuals directly involved in Roberson’s case. “Although our focus is Robert Roberson, we’re here because his case has shined a light on our new science writ law,” Moody said. “Every member of this committee has been surprised by how it has been applied in this particular case.” The law, added to the books in 2013 and sometimes called the “junk science” law, allows for a new hearing in a case to consider scientific discoveries that have emerged since the initial trial. Roberson’s attorneys, and some of the experts who spoke at the hearing, argue his conviction was based on faulty and now outdated science. They say new evidence indicates Nikki died from complications related to severe pneumonia.

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Harris clashes with host in contentious interview on Fox

Vice President Kamala Harris, under pressure to broaden her appeal to Republicans and conservatives with Election Day fast approaching, sat for a contentious interview with Fox News where she said more bluntly than before that her presidency would not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s. The interview with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier, which also featured a testy back-and-forth on immigration, represented a calculated gamble for Harris, given Fox’s role as a conservative-leaning network that is one of the top news sources for Republicans. It offered her a chance to refashion a recent comment on ABC’s “The View” that she could not think of anything she would do differently from Biden, a remark that even many Democrats strategists viewed as a misstep. “Let me be very clear — my presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency, and like every new president that comes in to office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas,” Harris said. “I represent a new generation of leadership.”

From the first few minutes of the interview, Baier sought to put Harris on the defensive with aggressive questions about the Biden administration’s record on immigration, a top issue for many Republican voters. Baier repeatedly asked if she would apologize to the families of women who were killed by undocumented immigrants after the Biden administration eased President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. Baier played a clip of one of the mothers blaming the Biden administration for her daughter’s death. Harris called the crimes “tragic cases” and said she could not imagine the pain those families felt “for a loss that shouldn’t have occurred.” But she sought to shift the focus to Trump’s move to torpedo a tough bipartisan border security bill that would have funded 1,500 additional agents and allowed the president to essentially shut down the border if illegal crossings reached a certain point. Had Trump allowed that bill to pass nine months ago, Harris said, “It would be nine months that we would have had more border agents at the border, more support for the folks who are working around-the-clock trying to hold it all together to ensure that no future harm would occur.”

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Texas abortion funds don't have to turn over client names as part of lawsuit, judge rules

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Texas abortion funds do not have to hand over sensitive information like clients’ and staffers’ names as part of their legal fight to resume their work amid the state’s abortion bans. The funds sued the state back in 2022 for protection to help people access the procedure where it’s still legal. Texas bans nearly all abortions except those to save a life or prevent impairment of a major bodily function. While the court case plays out, some funds have paused their work while others have resumed in a limited capacity. The question of whether the funds would have to disclose work-related information had been key in recent months after Smith County District Attorney Jacob Putnam, one of the district attorney defendants in the case, requested it. U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower dismissed several parts of Putnam’s request as moot after both sides reached agreements to narrow or otherwise change them.

Hightower denied two other requests: One for the names of staff and volunteers because she said it would have a “significant chilling effect on the rights to free expression and association of plaintiffs and their volunteers.” She also ruled that the funds don’t have to “identify and describe every act” taken, which they fear may lead to prosecution. Most of the funds said they could not answer that request, saying it was overbroad and would violate their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. They also said they would have to reach a legal conclusion to know what types of activities might be prosecutable, which they do not know and is exactly the purpose of the suit. Hightower agreed on that point and did not opine on the Fifth Amendment claim. Andrew Stephens, Putnam’s attorney, who made the discovery requests, did not immediately respond to requests for comment and a question about whether they would challenge the ruling. Elizabeth Myers, one of the attorneys for the abortion funds, declined to comment on pending litigation. Hightower’s ruling echoed the trial court’s previous denials of similar types of information requested by other defendants in the case.

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Massive influx of shadowy get-out-the-vote spending floods swing states

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has offered Americans $47 for each swing state voter they recruit to his effort to elect Donald Trump. Democratic groups have started paying at least $160 to more than 75,000 voters who agree to contact dozens of their friends and relatives with requests to support Kamala Harris. In Philadelphia, a nonprofit plans to mail 102,000 copies of a comic book this weekend to every voter under the age of 32, featuring the Liberty Knights, a superhero squad that defeats Dr. Mayhem’s quest to steal the city’s spirit, entomb it in ruby shards and stop the youth from voting. For those who would still rather party than do politics, there are free concerts, street festivals, coat drives, tailgates and daytime raves popping up near early voting centers in key states that blur the difference. Other operations are hiring thousands of people and organizing many more volunteers to knock on doors, place phone calls and share social media about how to vote.

None of these get-out-the-vote efforts are the work of the presidential campaigns or political parties. They belong instead to a vast, shadow machinery built by partisans often under nonpartisan banners to provide the final nudge that delivers the White House by mobilizing unlikely voters in about seven states. Funded largely without public disclosure, through local outfits and national networks, most of the operations have been lying in wait for years in preparation for this moment. “We are registering tens of thousands of voters, signing up tens of thousands to vote by mail, and we are maximizing early vote,” said Kevin Mack, whose tax-deductible nonprofit, the Voter Project, created the comic book and has tried to juice voting by giving away $1,000 Target gift cards, $2,000 rent checks and $10,000 grants to community groups around the Democratic-heavy neighborhoods of Philadelphia. “At the end of the day, the combined efforts will increase youth turnout in Pennsylvania by over 100,000 people.” There is no centralized way to know how much money they will spend or just how many people they will reach. Many of the national groups refuse to disclose their budgets, while hundreds of local groups fly entirely under the national radar, funded through tax classifications that will not report their income until next year and will never disclose their donors.

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State Stories

Emotions high during HISD's frequent 'spot checks' required under Mike Miles' New Education System

State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles paused briefly to dab his eyes with a handkerchief after touring Houston ISD's Thompson Elementary last week, apparently overwhelmed with the campus' recent success. "We haven't always done well for our Black kids' education in this country," Miles told an equally teary-eyed principal. "And you're doing it." A few hours later, Cullen Middle School Principal Erica Brame-Manuel quietly fought back tears in the back of a classroom after fielding criticism as Miles conducted a "spot check" on her campus. Since entering the district as a state-appointed superintendent touting "wholescale systemic reform," one of Miles' trademarks has been regular classroom visits that are used as part of teachers' and principals' performance evaluations. While the spot checks are considered disruptive and stressful by some educators and students, Miles said they are critical to monitoring the academic turnaround at the 130 campuses within his New Education System. He's quick to point out perceived flaws in schools as they transition into his controversial system, which uses a tightly structured, centralized curriculum featuring timed lessons, daily quizzes and "Team Centers" that differentiate students' work based on quiz results.

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Texas Children's Pediatrics earns national recognition for fighting physician burnout

Texas Children’s Pediatrics earned national recognition for its efforts to improve its physicians’ well-being by reducing the prevalence of burnout — a persistent problem in the health care industry. Texas Children’s Hospital’s pediatric primary care network is among 62 health systems, hospitals and medical groups across the U.S. recognized as Joy in Medicine health organizations by the American Medical Association. The program recognizes organizations that are working to alleviate physician burnout, which skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains higher among health care workers than other professions. Organizations like the AMA have said the prevalence of burnout among health care workers is a crisis, and that reducing burnout is essential to the long-term stability of health care systems. Surveys conducted during and in the wake of the pandemic found that many health care workers were considering quitting their jobs due to stress and burnout.

“At Texas Children’s, we know that caring for our patients begins with caring for our team, and we are absolutely committed to the well-being and professional fulfillment of our physicians,” Texas Children’s Pediatrics President Dan Gollins said in a news release. Texas Children’s pediatric primary care network is the largest in the nation, with more than 350 physicians at 66 locations in the Houston, Austin and College Station areas. The organization is among eight across Texas to earn Joy in Medicine status, and the only one operating in the Houston area. The program awards gold, silver and bronze levels of achievement; Texas Children’s Pediatrics earned a bronze that is good for two years. The rate of physicians experiencing at least one symptom of burnout, such as emotional exhaustion or a reduced sense of personal accomplishment, peaked at a record high of nearly 64% in 2021. It dipped to 48% last year, the first time it’s been under 50% in four years, according to the AMA. Similar trends have also been documented among other health care workers, including nurses.

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Lina Hidalgo, Wesley Hunt, Ron Nirenberg among Texans hitting the road for presidential race

Texas politicians are increasingly being dispatched to the front lines of the presidential race. While neither campaign is spending much time in Texas down the stretch — except to fundraise — both have been calling on key leaders in Houston, San Antonio and beyond to help them in other states. “I’m just trying to help any way I can,” U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, said as she prepared to head to Nevada on Wednesday to campaign for Kamala Harris.

Garcia, in her third term in Congress, earlier this year was tapped as an adviser to the Harris campaign and has been a close ally for the White House since Joe Biden was elected in 2020. She’s just the latest Texan to hit Nevada to campaign. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, both Houston Republicans, were there on Friday to campaign with former President Donald Trump at a rally. The next day, Hunt was a featured speaker in California for another Trump rally. “This man literally took a bullet for this country,” Hunt said to applause as he referenced the assassination attempt of Trump in July. Hunt has been an important surrogate for the Trump campaign all year. As one of just four Black Republican members of the U.S. House, Hunt has been sent to key areas of Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee to make a direct appeal to Black men to back Trump. Meanwhile, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who was featured during the Democratic National Convention in August, has also been hitting the road for Harris. Earlier this month, she was in Tuscon, Ariz., to help rally campaign volunteers. Early voting in Arizona is already underway.

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Texas is one of several states slow to roll out Biden's energy rebates for homeowners

President Joe Biden's push to hand out billions in rebates to homeowners for energy efficiency upgrades that experts say will reduce the strain on power grids in heat waves and winter storms is slow going in Texas and many other Republican-led states. While New York, California and five other states are already making the rebates available for customers upgrading their heat pumps or air conditioning systems, 23 states including Texas have yet to submit their plans for doing so to the Department of Energy. The $8.8 billion program, part of Democrats’ massive 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, has become a political football ahead of next month’s presidential election, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis initially vetoing a budget request by state officials to administer $346 million in rebates for consumers — before changing his mind this summer. South Dakota, led by Gov. Kristi Noem, an ally of former president Donald Trump, has declined to participate in the program altogether.

Trump has criticized the IRA as an attack on oil and other fossil fuels, raising the prospect of sections of the law being repealed should he be elected. Vice President Kamala Harris has championed the landmark legislation as instrumental to the nation's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In Texas, the stakes are particularly high. An estimated four million homes still run on out-of-date, inefficient home heating systems, a major contributor to the days long power outages seen during winter storm Uri, said Doug Lewin, an energy consultant in Austin. “The IRA efficiency programs would be a big help,” he said. “There’s a really big opportunity to lessen the risk of winter storm Uri redux.” A recent study by scientists at Texas A&M University found that replacing old heat pumps with modern, more efficient technology and improving homes' insulation, which the federal rebates would help pay for, would reduce winter peak power demand by 23 gigawatts. Peak load during Uri was estimated at 85 gigawatts.

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Fort Worth challenges TCEQ approval of concrete batch plant

Fort Worth is trying to reverse a Texas state agency’s decision to allow a concrete batch plant just north of Texas 170. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved The Organic Recycler’s air quality permit on Sept. 23 after receiving 360 comments from the public including appeals from Mayor Mattie Parker, council member Alan Blaylock and State Rep. Nate Schatzline opposing the project. The plant would be at 13001 Old Denton Road and across the street from the Overlook Ranch apartment complex. Roughly 100 people showed up to an April community meeting to voice their concerns about the potential impact of dust particles emanating from the site, as well as the impact of exhaust fumes from idling concrete trucks. However, a July 24 letter from the TCEQ’s executive director Kelly Keel noted any potential emissions or dust from the site would fall within the limits set by the air quality permit.

The letter also noted the company submitted a dust control plan to mitigate the impact on the surrounding area, and encouraged residents to report any violations to TCEQ’s Fort Worth Office. The city of Fort Worth argued TCEQ’s standards rely on outdated data that doesn’t protect the health and safety of the public, in a legal filing shared with the Star-Telegram. “My top priority has always been, and remains, to advocate for the best interests of District 10 and all of Fort Worth, with a particular focus on protecting our neighborhoods,” Blaylock said in a press release posted to his city Facebook page. Blaylock commended residents for opposing the permit while arguing the TCEQ did not adequately address their concerns. “Not one individual, out of the hundreds who spoke at this public hearing, was in favor of the project,” Rep. Schatzline said. He echoed Blaylock’s concern about TCEQ’s review process Both elected officials said they are taking action to ensure their constituents’ concerns are considered.

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Decorated professor struck, killed by garbage truck: TX cops

A Texas A&M University professor died after being struck by a garbage truck, authorities say. The fatal collision happened Tuesday, Oct. 15, outside the Lake Walk at Traditions apartment complex in College Station, according to the College Station Police Department. It’s unclear what led to the crash, but police said 50-year-old Hilaire Kallendorf was a pedestrian when she was struck by the City of College Station garbage truck. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Kallendorf, who earned her PH.D. from Princeton University, was a religious studies and Hispanic studies professor at Texas A&M, according to her profile on the university’s website. She received several grants and awards throughout her career. Kallendorf had been away from the university on a leave of absence, a campus spokesperson told The Battalion, Texas A&M’s student newspaper.

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UT Austin gets OK to demolish city's first integrated middle school despite preservation efforts

The process of demolishing the building that housed the first integrated middle school in Austin started last month despite efforts from preservation advocates to stop it. UT got a permit from the Texas Historical Commission to tear down the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and build a $70 million football training facility in its place. The building formerly housed University Junior High. UT and the City of Austin created University Junior High in the 1930s to give university students a place to practice teaching and to meet the city's growing population. It integrated in 1957 after the Allan Junior High building burned down, and the Hispanic students needed a place to go. The building sat in the middle of a diverse community, so the integration was considered natural. Before it shut down 10 year later, the student body was predominately made up of students of color.

The School of Social Work adopted the building in 1994, and artist Raúl Valdez painted a mural depicting social issues in the stairwell shortly after. The new facility aims to cut the walk time between Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium and the athletes' current practice facility, Athletics Director Chris Del Conte announced in February. Students in the social work school will move closer to the center of campus, Brent Stringfellow, associate vice president for campus operations, wrote in the permit application. Austinites and members of the UT community formed the save the past for the fUTure coalition to fight to preserve the building by getting it historical protection through the Texas Historical Commission. The commission named the building a State Antiquities Landmark on July 27.

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The billionaires backing the new "anti-woke" University of Austin

Billionaires frustrated with elite colleges are banding behind a fledgling school in Texas that boasts 92 students. Trader Jeff Yass, real-estate developer Harlan Crow and investor Len Blavatnik are among the high-profile people donating to the University of Austin, or UATX. The new school has raised roughly $200 million so far—including $35 million from Yass—a huge sum for a tiny school without any alumni to tap. Crow, a major GOP donor, was an early backer. “Much of higher ed today seems to want to reject Western accomplishments and the accomplishments of Western civilizations in their entirety,” he said. “Many people think that’s a bad idea.” Crow said he expects UATX to encourage ideological diversity. Crow and his wife, Kathy, have hosted several events for the school at their Dallas home and let the school use space in an office park he owns for its summer program, provocatively called Forbidden Courses. Crow has been a controversial benefactor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He has said he has never discussed pending cases with Thomas.

Frustration with the state of debate and levels of unrest at prestigious universities has spurred some of the richest Americans to flex their financial muscle. Billionaires like Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman led campaigns to oust Ivy League presidents they viewed as being too soft on antisemitism on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza. Many wealthy donors believe elite colleges are overwhelmingly progressive—and are attracted to the idea of an alternative school that says it encourages meritocratic achievement and myriad viewpoints. Enter UATX, which welcomed its initial class of first-years last month in a former department store near the Texas Capitol. The school says it is nonpartisan and refers to its mission as the “fearless pursuit of truth.” Its foundational curriculum marries classical texts—students were given a copy of Homer’s Odyssey upon enrollment—with an emphasis on entrepreneurship. A video posted to the school’s YouTube page contrasts scenes of pro-Palestinian protests and encampments at other schools with a civil UATX seminar. The video ends with the message, “They burn, we build.” Yass, who has long pushed for school choice and is UATX’s biggest donor, said in a statement, “Higher education needs competition. It is time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American learning institutions were founded.” PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has long known Lonsdale and has separately been paying students to skip college, made a small gift. Former energy trader John Arnold and his wife, Laura, who are advocates of criminal-justice reform and open debate on campus, are major donors. Alex Magaro, co-president of investment firm Meritage Group, gave $10 million last month.

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Matt Queen, SBC pastor and former seminary professor, pleads guilty to lying to FBI

A former professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary pleaded guilty Wednesday (Oct. 16) to lying to the FBI during an investigation into sexual abuse. Matt Queen, the pastor of Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, had pleaded not guilty earlier this year when charged with obstruction of justice for actions taken when he was a professor and interim provost at Southwestern, a Southern Baptist Convention school in Texas. As part of an investigation into the SBC and its entities, federal officials have been looking into alleged sexual abuse that occurred in 2022 at the seminary. School officials were required to turn over any documents related to abuse to the Department of Justice.

However, an unnamed seminary official, known as “Employee-2,” allegedly ordered that a report on the 2022 abuse case — which detailed that the seminary had known about the alleged abuse but failed to take action on it — be destroyed. According to federal officials, Queen heard Employee-2 order “Employee-1,” the staffer who wrote the report, to destroy it and then allegedly lied to federal officials about it. Queen was also accused of creating fake notes about the conversation surrounding the report. Queen said under oath that he had heard the conversation about destroying the report. “On or about June 21, 2023, MATTHEW QUEEN, the defendant, testified under oath that on January 26, 2023, he had in fact heard Employee-2 instruct Employee-I to make the Document ‘go away,’” according to a court filing.

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Kate Rumsey: From cradle Republican to Democratic candidate

(Kate Rumsey is a former federal prosecutor, criminal defense attorney and Air Force JAG who ran in the last primary election.) “But you are a Democrat,” I blurted out to Rahm Emanuel as he walked into Pete Sessions’ D.C. office. Emanuel, then a Democratic congressman who later served as Barack Obama’s chief of staff, stopped by on a late evening at the Capitol to cheerfully greet his D.C. office neighbor and interns, including impertinent me. It was 2003, and I was a sophomore in college at the University of Notre Dame, interning in Washington for Dallas Republican Pete Sessions, the second of several Republican internships that I had in college. I was a cradle Republican, raised in a conservative area in North Dallas. And I was in disbelief that a Democrat and Republican — especially this Democrat and Republican — were friends. So how did this cradle Republican run as a Democratic candidate for the Texas state house 20 years later? My current beliefs stem from a different side of my upbringing that I can only now see with hindsight.

My grandparents were West Texas farmers, public school teachers, and LBJ Democrats. They raised my father, who became a pharmacist and Medicaid advocate. He owned an independent pharmacy, fought big chain pharmacies, and invested in his employees who worked with him for decades. My mom was a labor and delivery nurse at Parkland Hospital who taught me that the government had no business in a delivery room. And one of my brothers came out as gay. Yet on a surface level, being a Republican was part of who we were as a family and in our community. We were Texans. We loved our country. We went to church. And we were all conservative. The “we” was more important than the “why.” I tethered my sense of self to Republicanism, despite many fundamental disagreements. I was conservative, but I disagreed with the war in Iraq. I was a Notre Dame graduate but was firmly pro-choice. I was a Republican but supported the LGBTQ+ community. I soothed my inner conflict by telling myself and others: “I’m fiscally conservative, but socially liberal,” as if that explained away my inner rift. After law school, the cracks really started to show. My pro-choice and pro-gay marriage stances became wedge issues. After graduating law school, I became a federal prosecutor and an Air Force judge advocate general in the Obama administration, jobs that required me to stay nonpartisan, a convenient cover for my feelings of being politically orphaned. I was consistently voting blue but did not consider myself yet a Democrat. I was still a Texan. I loved my country. I went to church. But could I unshackle myself from the other parts of my cultural identity? If I did, then would I still be included in the “we” that made up my hometown?

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Texas lawmakers address lotto system after game cheated by foreigners

Imagine playing the Texas Lottery, but the odds being systematically stacked against you, in ways you might not expect.There’s what some call unfair rules that allow people to game the state’s lotto system when they buy tickets online through third-party services. Recently, a $95 million jackpot was won. Those who pocketed the cash engineered the system. On Tuesday, the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs will look into lottery courier services. These allow people to buy lottery tickets online. Lawmakers are set to examine whether these courier services are operating legally in the state, and “whether a change in law is needed to respond to technological advancements to protect children in our state and to maintain original legislative intent,” the committee agenda item read.

Eric Dexheimer, an Investigative reporter from the Houston chronicle who uncovered the loop NewsNation’s Dan Abrams, Texas does have plans to make changes.“What they’re doing is putting some obstacles in place, to make it less likely that it’ll happen again, Dexheimer said. “So, one of the things that the Texas Lottery Commission did, was…provided official lottery terminals, which you need to print out tickets. And these were some outlets that had barely printed any tickets prior to this, so they needed new equipment.”

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City Stories

Stars Cafe moving after nearly 60 years, clearing I-35 expansion path

Stars Cafe, a 58-year-old Austin business, announced its East 31st Street location will close Nov. 10, in order to make way for the expansion of Interstate 35. “Well…….it’s finally here. We finally got our walking papers,” read a post on the restaurant’s social media. The café, which Austin residents sometimes refer to as “Star Seeds,” plans to relocate. The post said that a new location will be announced after Nov. 10. “We have been a cherished part of the Austin community for the past 58 years,” the post read. “Stars Cafe has always been more than just a place to eat; it has been a gathering spot of the amazing and the not so amazing, a haven for friends and families and mortal enemies, and a backdrop for countless memories and ‘I can’t believe that happened’ times.”

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Austin school board candidate raises $50K in race for the at-large District 8 seat

Fernando Lucas de Urioste, who is running for the at-large District 8 seat on the Austin school board, has far outraised his opponents in that race as well as any other candidate seeking a school board post, according to the latest campaign finance reports. De Urioste raised $50,278 in campaign contributions from Aug. 9 through Sept. 26, far more than any of the other six Austin school board candidates who submitted campaign finance reports out of the eight running in contested races. Two candidates are vying to represent District 2, a single-member district that encompasses Southeast Austin, and six people are jockeying for the District 8 seat, an at-large seat that represents the entire district. Incumbents Kevin Foster and Lynn Boswell are running uncontested in the Districts 3 and 5 races, respectively.

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National Stories

Outspoken Columbia prof Shai Davidai banned from campus for ‘harassing’ school officials over anti-Israel protesters

Outspoken Columbia business professor Shai Davidai was banned from campus after he clashed with rowdy anti-Israel protesters and confronted school officials last week during the first anniversary of Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state. The Ivy League school sent Davidai’s lawyer a letter stating that the professor’s access to school grounds was cut off as of 3 p.m. Tuesday because Columbia leaders claimed he harassed at least five faculty members during the raucous scene, violating school rules. “Threats of intimidation, harassment or other threatening behavior by University employees, including faculty members, will not be tolerated,” the school said in the letter that Davidai provided to The Post.

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The system that moves water around the Earth is off balance for the first time in human history

Humanity has thrown the global water cycle off balance “for the first time in human history,” fueling a growing water disaster that will wreak havoc on economies, food production and lives, according to a landmark new report. Decades of destructive land use and water mismanagement have collided with the human-caused climate crisis to put “unprecedented stress” on the global water cycle, said the report published Wednesday by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, a group of international leaders and experts. The water cycle refers to the complex system by which water moves around the Earth. Water evaporates from the ground — including from lakes, rivers and plants — and rises into the atmosphere, forming large rivers of water vapor able to travel long distances, before cooling, condensing and eventually falling back to the ground as rain or snow.

Disruptions to the water cycle are already causing suffering. Nearly 3 billion people face water scarcity. Crops are shriveling and cities are sinking as the groundwater beneath them dries out. The consequences will be even more catastrophic without urgent action. The water crisis threatens more than 50% of global food production and risks shaving an average of 8% off countries’ GDPs by 2050, with much higher losses of up to 15% projected in low-income countries, the report found. “For the first time in human history, we are pushing the global water cycle out of balance,” said Johan Rockström, co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water and a report author. “Precipitation, the source of all freshwater, can no longer be relied upon.”

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Biden has approved $175 billion in student loan forgiveness for nearly 5 million people

With less than three weeks before the November election, the Biden-Harris administration is reminding voters how it has delivered a historic amount of student debt relief even as Republicans have challenged several of its efforts in court and balked at the costs. Another round of forgiveness was announced Thursday, bringing the total amount of student loan cancellation to more than $175 billion for nearly 5 million people since President Joe Biden took office. That’s roughly equal to 11% of all outstanding federal student loan debt. More than 1 million of these student loan borrowers received debt relief through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which promises loan forgiveness to public-sector workers – like teachers and nurses – after they’ve made 10 years of qualifying payments.

The PSLF program has been in place for more than 15 years but had been riddled with administrative problems. “For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office,” Biden said in a statement. “We vowed to fix that,” he added. Biden’s Department of Education made it easier for borrowers to qualify for PSLF – a stark contrast to former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly proposed ending the program when he was in the White House. Thursday’s announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF. Biden’s signature, one-time student loan forgiveness program was struck down by the Supreme Court last year. It would have canceled up to $20,000 of student debt for many low- and middle-income borrowers. In 2022, 16 million borrowers got an email from the Biden administration that said they qualified for debt relief – but no loan forgiveness was ever granted by the program.

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McConnell called Trump 'stupid" and 'despicable' in private after the 2020 election, a new book says

Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist,” according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month. McConnell made the remarks in private as part of a series of personal oral histories that he made available to Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press. Tackett’s book, “The Price of Power,” draws from almost three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and from years of interviews with the normally reticent Kentucky Republican. The animosity between Trump and McConnell is well known — Trump once called McConnell " a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.” But McConnell’s private comments are by far his most brutal assessment of the former president and could be seized on by Democrats before the Nov. 5 election. The biography will be released Oct. 29, one week before Election Day that will decide if Trump returns to the White House.

Despite those strong words, McConnell has endorsed Trump’s 2024 run, saying earlier this year “it should come as no surprise” that he would support the Republican party’s nominee. He shook Trump’s hand in June when Trump visited GOP senators on Capitol Hill. McConnell, 82, announced this year that he will step aside as Republican leader after the election but stay in the Senate through the end of his term in 2026. The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races. Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.” “And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.” Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.” Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said in his oral history, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”

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Jimmy Carter, at age 100, casts his 2024 ballot by mail

Jimmy Carter cast his ballot in the 2024 election Wednesday. The former president voted by mail, the Carter Center confirmed in a statement. It happened barely two weeks after Carter celebrated his 100th birthday on Oct. 1 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he’s been living in hospice care. His son Chip Carter said before the family gathering that his father had this election very much in mind. “He’s plugged in,” Chip Carter told The Associated Press. “I asked him two months ago if he was trying to live to be 100, and he said, ‘No, I’m trying to live to vote for Kamala Harris.’” The Carter Center’s brief statement said it had no more details to share.

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Israel complicates election’s final stretch, an issue Democrats hoped would fade

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hoped the ongoing violence in the Middle East might simmer below the surface in the final weeks of the presidential race, but fresh Israeli military offensives are making that virtually impossible, U.S. officials and campaign aides say. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set the Gaza Strip ablaze with a renewed bombing campaign and launched a ground invasion into Lebanon alongside aerial strikes in Beirut aimed at annihilating the militant group Hezbollah. He is expected to order an imminent attack on Iran’s military facilities in response to its missile strike on Israel this month. The rapid escalation has tied the Biden administration in knots, resulting in the United States first calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon only to reverse that policy nine days later and openly endorse Israel’s ground offensive.

The whiplash has caused confusion and consternation among Washington’s European and Arab allies who are pushing for the United States to restrain its closest ally in the Middle East. But administration officials remain loath to pick a public fight at such a tenuous moment politically. “They clearly want to avoid any public confrontation with Netanyahu over Lebanon or Gaza that could result in blowback from Israel’s supporters before the election,” said Frank Lowenstein, a Biden ally and former Middle East negotiator in the Obama administration. “At the same time, they are sensitive to losing critical Arab American votes in key swing states if their rhetoric leans too far in Israel’s direction,” he added. The administration has issued statements in response to recent incidents that have drawn international backlash, including Israel’s attacks on U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon; its deadly bombing of Gaza’s al-Aqsa hospital, which engulfed nearby tent camps in flames; and a U.N. report indicating no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly two weeks. Yet those remarks have been carefully calibrated to avoid portraying a sharp break with Netanyahu. The latest opportunity to do so came Tuesday, when Israeli media published the contents of a confidential letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urging Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza or face potential restrictions on U.S. military assistance. Within hours of the letter’s disclosure, spokespeople for the White House and State Department clarified that it “was not meant to be taken as a threat” and that no action would be taken in the next 30 days — pushing any potential punitive action until after the election. They declined to say if weapons restrictions were even on the table.

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Lead Stories

Religious school choice advocates envision next steps after significant wins

The school choice movement has notched some dramatic wins over the past few years. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can’t exclude religious schools from tuition assistance programs, while programs that channel public funds into accounts that parents can spend on alternative education are on the rise. “We are in a school choice moment, the school choice movement,” Nicole Stelle Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who directs the university’s Education Law Project, said Thursday (Oct. 10). “After more than three decades of incremental growth, the tide has turned in the battle for parental choice and education.” Garnett was speaking to advocates for religious schools at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, who had gathered to discuss the movement’s next steps at an event called “Church and State: Reimagining Faith Communities’ Role in K–12 Education.”

Robert Pondiscio, an AEI senior fellow, told attendees that school choice measures had flourished in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing the “crisis of trust in public education, in institutions in general” caused partially by many parents’ feeling they could no longer depend on public schools. Pondiscio said the “grievances and flash points” over COVID-19, race and gender all also pushed anxious parents away from the public school system. “Remote learning ripped the lid off” the “black box” that had been U.S. education so that parents could see what their children were being taught, he said. “There is no such thing as a values neutral education,” said Pondiscio, repeating a common sentiment among the event’s speakers. Pondiscio said such culture war issues had long operated in education.“We invented the culture war in schools. It didn’t come for us. We created it,” he said. Pondiscio celebrated the rapid spread of universal education savings account programs, which permit parents to opt out of the public school system and receive thousands of tax dollars for their children’s educational expenses, since they first went into effect in Arizona two years ago. “The biggest thing that ESAs do is open the door for public dollars to be used for religious education, so, as you know, it’s functionally a voucher,” Pondiscio said.

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Ted Cruz, Colin Allred come out swinging over abortion, immigration in Texas debate

Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Colin Allred came out swinging in their Tuesday night debate, each portraying their opponent as too extreme to serve in the U.S. Senate. Allred began by introducing himself as a fourth-generation Texan with a bipartisan record in Congress before attacking Cruz as divisive and “the most extreme senator” in Washington. “I’m the exact opposite of Sen. Cruz,” said Allred, who also criticized Cruz for vacationing in Cancun during deadly 2021 blackouts in Texas. “The truth is, we don’t have to be embarrassed by our senator. We can get a new one.” Cruz urged voters to listen for the difference between Allred’s words and actions and promised to expose his opponent’s “radical” record, saying Allred would seek to obscure it. “We’re doing an awful lot right in the state of Texas,” Cruz said. “Colin Allred wants to change that. I want to keep Texas, Texas.”

In a fast-paced back and forth on abortion, immigration, inflation and other hot-button issues, the candidates sought to portray themselves as aligned with Texas values and their opponent as dangerous and out of touch. Tuesday’s one-hour debate, held at WFAA’s downtown Dallas studio without an audience, came as recent polls show Allred, a congressman from Dallas, making significant gains on Cruz. Even so, most political handicappers give Cruz the edge three weeks ahead of the Nov. 5 election, and a University of Houston survey released Tuesday showed Cruz leading Allred 50-46. The debate, aired live on WFAA-TV (Channel 8) and other TEGNA stations across the state, was moderated by Jason Whitely, WFAA’s senior political reporter, and Gromer Jeffers Jr., The Dallas Morning News’ political writer. The first question probed the candidates’ thoughts on abortion, specifically whether Cruz supports exceptions for rape and incest. Cruz avoided addressing his position on those specific exceptions, instead saying the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade returned regulations to the control of the states. He objected to Allred blaming him for Texas’ near-total abortion ban, saying those policy decisions were up to state lawmakers. “You wouldn’t expect Texas’ laws to be the same as California,” Cruz said. “You wouldn’t expect Alabama to be the same as New York.”

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All eyes on Gov. Greg Abbott as fellow Republicans urge him to pardon Robert Roberson

A GOP megadonor and close ally of Gov. Greg Abbott is working with an unusual bipartisan coalition to call for clemency in the case of Robert Roberson, who is scheduled to be executed on Thursday in the death of his 2-year-old daughter. “I felt like God was pushing me and telling me that I needed to get involved in this case,” said Doug Deason, who advised the Trump administration on criminal justice issues and has been a crucial voice among Texas Republicans who oppose the death penalty and support other reform measures. “I’ve taken it very very seriously, I’ve done everything that I possibly can.” Texas lawmakers will also be holding a hearing at the Capitol on Wednesday to highlight Roberson’s case and other issues related to convictions based on“junk science.” That term is often used to refer to the diagnosis of “shaken baby syndrome” that was the basis for Roberson’s capital murder conviction in Anderson County back in 2002.

“This was a pretty clear case where Robert Roberson did not have due process,” said Lacey Hull, a Republican state representative from Houston, during an appearance on CNN this morning. “Texans deserve to know that our justice system is fair … and we cannot say that right now.” Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A slew of new scientific evidence and medical experts say that Roberson is not responsible for his daughter’s death. Similar claims of “shaken baby syndrome” made by prosecutors in child death cases have been discredited across the country. But Texas judges have so far denied all of Roberson’s legal appeals, and since he is set to die in just two days, a pardon or a commutation of his sentence by Abbott is his best chance. In an interview, Deason told the Chronicle he has been talking directly with Abbott’s general counsel, James Sullivan, and two other Abbott staff members in recent weeks. The bestselling author John Grisham, who has written about the Roberson case, is also a part of those conversations along with Roberson’s legal team, Deason said.

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Dems raise 2.5 times as much as GOP in Senate battlegrounds

Senate Republicans had been warning for weeks that they were at risk of being overtaken by a Democratic fundraising wave. It ended up being a tsunami. All told, Democratic candidates across the 10 top Senate battlegrounds raised a collective $203 million last quarter, nearly 2.5 times the GOP’s $83 million. In fact, Senate Democratic fundraising in the last three months was so meteoric the question wasn’t whether Democrats outraised their Republican opponents — it's whether they doubled, tripled or quadrupled them. Three battleground Democrats each raised more than $30 million between July 1 and Sept. 30 — an absolutely staggering sum. And all but three outraised their opponents by at least a 2:1 margin, if not more. Here’s a breakdown of the top races:

Montana: Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, the most endangered incumbent seeking reelection, raised more than any of his peers with a $32.2 million quarter. That’s over three times Republican Tim Sheehy’s $9.7 million. Ohio: Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown raised nearly five times as much as Republican Bernie Moreno. The incumbent had a $30.7 million quarter compared to Moreno’s $6.5 million. Ohio has seen more TV spending than any other Senate race this cycle. Arizona: Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego raised $21.8 million, nearly 2.5 times as much as Republican Kari Lake’s nearly $9 million. Gallego has been trouncing Lake on TV and leading in public and private polling. Maryland: Democrat Angela Alsobrooks raised $13.4 million last quarter for the open Senate seat. That’s four times as much as former Gov. Larry Hogan, who raked in $3.3 million. Hogan has a well-funded super PAC helping on TV, but he’s still trailed in recent polling. Pennsylvania: Republican Dave McCormick, a former CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, raised $7.6 million last quarter. That’s less than half of Sen. Bob Casey’s nearly $16 million haul. Casey is going to need it — Republican super PACs have been dumping millions in to defeat him.

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State Stories

In wake of Ken Paxton’s acquittal, Senate mulls changing rules for impeachment

Work has begun on legislation to change state impeachment proceedings, a Texas Senate committee was told Tuesday. After the Senate voted last year to acquit Attorney General Ken Paxton of impeachment charges, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick criticized the process as rushed, secretive and unfair to the accused. Patrick followed by directing the Senate State Affairs Committee to study and propose changes to the impeachment process when the Legislature meets next year. During a State Affairs meeting at the Capitol on Tuesday, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, said he has been drafting laws to address what he saw as flaws in the process.

Birdwell’s input is notable. The six-term senator chaired the committee that drafted the rules governing Paxton’s trial in the Senate. Birdwell was not at the Capitol Tuesday due to a COVID-19 illness, according to Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, who read aloud a letter from Birdwell. Last year, Patrick, who presided over Paxton’s trial, criticized the impeachment as “rammed through” the House without due process. The House voted 121-23 to impeach Paxton two days after its General Investigating Committee unveiled 20 articles of impeachment accusing the attorney general of corruption and misusing his office. Patrick has called for the Texas Constitution to be amended to require evidentiary hearings and a slower House impeachment process. “This is not a partisan issue,” Patrick said at the end of Paxton’s trial. “We owe it to future legislatures to make these changes so no future official impeached by the House, whether Republican, Democrat or independent, is subject to the way this impeachment process occurred in the House this year.”

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Troy Nehls: Add new federal judges

Federal district courts across the country are currently plagued by overwhelming caseloads and multiyear backlogs. These overloads are causing Americans, including Texans, to be denied access to our justice system, impeding the constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial in criminal cases and making it difficult to resolve civil disputes. This situation is totally unacceptable and is incumbent upon Congress to rectify. Our nation’s federal court system consists of three levels: district courts, circuit courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. Across the 50 states and U.S. territories, we have 94 district courts with 677 authorized judgeships. Texas has four federal district courts. From 2000 to 2020, America’s population grew by approximately 50 million residents. Despite the drastic increase in population, Congress last authorized new district court judgeships in 2002, more than two decades ago, through the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act, in which 11 new federal district judgeships were added.

As of June 30, 2024, our nation’s court system has 724,209 pending cases, which don’t include misdemeanor criminal cases, according to data compiled by the United States Courts. The Southern District of Texas alone, headquartered in Houston, has a backlog of 14,737 cases as of June 30, 2024. The Eastern District of Texas is experiencing a backlog of 6,470 cases. Currently, the average time between the filing of a civil suit to a resolution of the case in the Southern District of Texas is 7.6 months. Criminal cases in the Southern District of Texas have an average time of 5.1 months between the filing of the indictment and a resolution of the case. In the Eastern District of Texas, the average time from the filing of a civil suit to a resolution of the case is 7.6 months, and the average time for a criminal case is a stark 23.9 months. Given these increasingly persistent backlogs in our federal court system, the Judicial Conference, which was created by Congress in 1922 and is the national policymaking body for the federal courts headed by Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, made recommendations to Congress in March 2023 to create 66 new district court judgeships to meet the increased workload demands and alleviate the backlog our justice system faces. Ultimately, every American should be afforded the administration of justice in a reasonable timeframe, which is exactly why I co-led the U.S. House of Representatives version of the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved (JUDGES) Act of 2024 alongside Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Hank Johnson, D-Ga.

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Houston Chronicle Editorial: HISD's $4.4 billion bond requires trust. Mike Miles hasn't earned it yet.

No one, no matter how angry they are about the state’s takeover of the Houston Independent School District, should look away from the aging, decaying buildings in which we expect some of our youngest Houstonians to learn. The “temporary” portable buildings at Cornelius Elementary School, long bursting at the seams and now storm-damaged as well, were never supposed to last 30 years, subjecting generations of the same families to the same cramped conditions. The kids at Benavidez Elementary School deserve a restroom with floors that aren’t wet and peeling, urinals that aren’t broken and bagged, faucets that aren’t missing handles. The principal at Cage Elementary shouldn’t have to embark each morning on an expedition through the campus to pinpoint which component of a patchwork system of rented and portable air-conditioning units is malfunctioning today. The students of HISD shouldn’t have to worry whether traces of lead are seeping into the water, past the district’s jerry-rigged mitigation efforts. Or whether a troubled individual with a semi-automatic can slip past a lack of fencing and secure entry vestibules at hundreds of campuses.

We, the taxpayers who fund the state’s largest school district, should be willing to invest our hard-earned money to fix these things, and to build others — including more Pre-K classrooms and career and technology centers — for our young scholars who will someday become Houston’s workers and artists and parents and community organizers and political leaders. We should pay it forward the way past generations did for us. In normal times, that’s how public education is supposed to work. But these aren’t normal times. Voters are being asked to approve a $4.4 billion bond for HISD on the November ballot at a time when our school district is under state control, led by a state-appointed board of managers that replaced our democratically elected trustees and by a state-appointed superintendent who is wholly unaccountable to the community he serves. From the beginning, this editorial board made it clear that, if the takeover had to happen, we wanted Superintendent Mike Miles to succeed. Kids’ futures at chronically failing campuses depended on it. We also implored Miles to build trust among teachers, parents and the general community. At almost every turn, he failed to build that trust.

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TEA report finds ‘no evidence of wrongdoing’ by Mike Miles, Third Future Schools

The Texas Education Agency's investigation into alleged misuse of state funds concluded Third Future Schools — a Colorado-based charter school network founded by Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles — did not violate any Texas laws. The investigation also found “no evidence” of any wrongdoing by Third Future Schools Texas or Miles, who was not one of the subjects of the TEA’s investigation. TEA officials said a special investigation began after Spectrum News Texas reported in May that Third Future Schools Texas had inappropriately diverted state funds from public school students in Texas through partnerships between three Texas school districts — Austin, Ector County, and Midland ISDs.

The outlet reported Third Future Schools charged fees to its Texas schools, which fed into a general fund that, in part, subsidized one of its schools in Colorado before it closed. According to a 2022 audit, Third Future Schools Texas also reported it had run a deficit due to debts to “other TFS network schools and to TFS corporate.” Spectrum News’ initial story prompted outrage among HISD community members and state lawmakers, who called for an investigation into Miles’ spending practices and an audit of the charter school network, including its financial dealings and potential noncompliance with state laws. In a 29-page report, the TEA said it was closing its investigation after concluding that the charter network and the three districts had not broken any laws. It also found the allegations in Spectrum News’s report — as well as a separate story by the Texas Observer — were either not applicable to the network's partnerships, could not be substantiated or were proven to be false. “TEA concludes that there is no merit to the allegations contained in the media reports that state funds were being inappropriately diverted from public school students in Texas,” David Rodriguez, the executive director of the TEA’s division of investigations, said in a letter Tuesday to the board president and superintendent of Third Future Schools Texas.

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Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones seems to threaten radio hosts' jobs after getting agitated over questions

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones seemingly threatened the jobs of radio hosts during a contentious interview on Tuesday morning. Appearing on 105.3 The Fan, Jones grew frustrated and irritated by the questions he was facing about Mike McCarthy and the lack of moves the Cowboys made in the offseason. Following Sunday’s embarrassing 47-9 loss to the Detroit Lions at home, many fans were calling for McCarthy to be fired as the Cowboys fell to 3-3 on the season. Jones has only made one coaching move during the season, when he fired Wade Phillips in 2010 and installed Jason Garrett as head coach. The Cowboys owner said that won’t be happening this time around. “I won’t be making any others during the season,” Jones told 105.3 The Fan.

“We were 1-7 at that time — 1-7. I think as I recall, we had gotten beat the week before by about the same score – we were on the road, not at home – but about the exact score that we got beat Sunday. We got beat and so I made the change, and we had one win. Little bit of difference there, man.” Jones stated that making a head coaching change midseason usually doesn’t go over well. “They aren’t good, and they usually are ineffective and they just aren’t good,” Jones explained. “They’ve got to be — at that particular time (in 2010), I did think it was the thing to do. I think it did produce a positive effect, but we’ll never know, will we? “All Wade did was move over to Denver, he didn’t become the head coach, he became the defensive coordinator. And it was one of the few times in my 35 years in the NFL that I heard throughout the league that the one coach was responsible for them having the team (they did), and that was Wade Phillips running the defense for Denver when they won the Super Bowl.” It’s been a struggle for the Cowboys in the first six weeks of the season. After being one of the best teams on both sides of the ball in 2023, Dallas now ranks 25th in defense in total yards and 30th on offense in points per game (21). Quarterback Dak Prescott has thrown eight touchdowns and six interceptions on the season. The team has also been dealing with significant injuries to Micah Parsons, Demarcus Lawrence, and Daron Bland. When asked about why he didn’t make more offseason moves to improve the team, Jones grew agitated and seemingly threatened the radio hosts’ jobs. “This is not your job. Your job isn’t to let me go over all the reasons that I did something and I’m sorry that I did it. That’s not your job. I’ll get somebody else to ask these questions. I’m not kidding,” Jones said on 105.3 The Fan. “You’re not going to figure it out what the team is doing right or wrong. If you are, or any five or 10 like you, you need to come to this (NFL) meeting I’m going to today with 32 teams here, you’re geniuses.”

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Texas county adopts policy to ensure unclaimed bodies are treated with dignity

A Texas county that for years gave unclaimed bodies to a local medical school without families’ consent will now cremate or bury those people instead — but only after officials document that they have done all they can to contact relatives. The revamped rules, approved unanimously Tuesday by the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, are the latest change prompted by an NBC News investigation that revealed how the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth cut up and leased out the remains of hundreds of unclaimed people to other schools, medical technology companies and the Army. The vast majority of the unclaimed bodies — people whose families could not afford funeral arrangements or could not be found — came from Tarrant and Dallas counties, which each saved half a million dollars a year in burial and cremation costs. “The county is now in a position to do things ethically, as opposed to before, when we counted on the University of North Texas Health Science Center to handle our business,” Commissioner Alisa Simmons said after Tuesday’s vote.

Tarrant County had delegated the work of contacting dead people’s families and cremating their remains to the Health Science Center. The new policy brings that responsibility back to the county — at an estimated cost of $675,000 a year. Officials in Tarrant and Dallas counties had justified sending unclaimed bodies to the Health Science Center by saying their use for training and research would help improve medical care for the living. NBC News found repeated failures to contact relatives who were reachable before the bodies were declared unclaimed. The Commissioners Court did not publicly discuss the details of the new policy — or its costs — before it voted unanimously to adopt it. Commissioners Court records indicate that the county has $57,760 in a burials account and will have to find additional money to cover the cost of the new policy. A spokesperson for Judge Tim O’Hare, Tarrant County’s top elected official, said in a statement that Tuesday’s vote was important “to honor the dignity and memory of deceased individuals the County is responsible for handling after they pass away.”

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Mexico still sees steady flow of migrants to US border

Despite perceptions in the United States, the flow of migrants coming to the border continues at a steady pace, Mexican border experts say. The difference is that thousands are now coming from southern Mexico to border cities like Juarez for appointments at U.S. ports of entry, while others are seeking entry in ways that are hard to document — such as hiring smugglers. That’s what some scholars and government officials said Monday at an immigration conference in Juarez. “A lot of people are saying migration has halted. I dare say this is not the case,” said Enrique Valenzuela, head of the Chihuahua Population Council. “Here on this border, we find ourselves at somewhat of an impasse, where it would appear the flow of people stopped. But we see there is more interest in coming in through CBP One. We know because people come to us seeking help with the application.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently reported 58,000 migrant apprehensions between ports of entry last August and 44,700 others processed through CBP One at ports of entry. Valenzuela said migrant shelters that are church run, as well as those operated by Mexican government entities, remain 40 percent full or more. The one thing that has vanished is large groups of people approaching the U.S. border wall and trying to surrender to the Border Patrol and claim asylum. Valenzuela said various factors account for that, including word-of-mouth among the migrants that approach no longer guarantees they will be released into the U.S. while their case goes through immigration court. “It became clear that surrendering did not guarantee their stay,” he said. Valenzuela said it’s possible the election of a new U.S. president will affect the migratory flow, as it has in the past. But he said no one knows exactly what will happen in weeks to come. Rodolfo Rubio Salas, an investigator with Colegio de Chihuahua (Chihuahua College), said at least there is no mystery on how Mexico will handle migration in the future. He said President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo brings continuity to the policies of her predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

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Kiewit beats out 2 firms for Texas desalination plant job

Corpus Christi picked Kiewit Infrastructure South Co. to design and build the city’s first seawater desalination plant in order to create a drought-proof water supply for its growing population, according to an Oct. 4 news release from the city. The Inner Harbor Seawater Desalination Treatment Plant project aims to relieve water scarcity for Corpus Christi Water customers across seven counties in the area, according to the project website, and will produce up to 30 million gallons of water per day. Currently, Corpus Christi’s four surface water sources depend solely on rainfall.

Last year, Texas lawmakers agreed on a $1 billion plan for new water projects and to repair aging infrastructure, though the cost to fully address the state’s water needs is much higher. Texas is dealing with leaky pipes and old treatment plants stressed by a dwindling water supply, more demand and extreme weather such as persisting droughts, according to the Texas Tribune. Texas is not alone in upgrading its water systems: A slew of major AEC firms have reported strong demand for water infrastructure projects in recent earnings calls. Desalination is growing in popularity amid worsening water scarcity, but it remains a less common treatment method. Processing saltwater for drinking water is relatively costly and requires significant energy, and the process disturbs the environment both when the plant takes in water and when it discharges brine, according to E&E News.

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Charles Luke: Are vouchers too costly for Texas?

During the last session of the Texas Legislature, Governor Greg Abbott promised to veto any school choice bill that did not include an expansive universal voucher in the form of an Education Savings Account (ESA). While such bills emerged in both the regular session and subsequent special sessions, they were defeated by a coalition of rural Republicans and Democrats. When House Public Education Chairman, Rep. Brad Buckley proffered an omnibus funding bill in the fourth special session with a Governor-approved universal ESA type voucher in it, the voucher was stripped from the bill with the passage of an amendment offered by Rep. John Raney from Bryan, Texas. A major concern about the voucher was its long-term budgetary cost. While the cost of vouchers in Buckley’s bill, (HB1) was estimated at around $500 million, some in Austin cringed at the potential budgetary ramifications if more families began using the voucher.

Former State Representative Paul Colbert says, “regardless of any temporary limitations that might be initially applied to a Texas voucher program, the governor has made it clear that his goal is to provide ESAs to every child in the state.” Colbert , who spent 12 years in office, served as the Texas House Public Education budget chair and Appropriations member and as the research director of the Texas Senate Education Committee, indicates that the cost to the state could be astronomical if more people use the voucher. “Last year,” says Colbert, “the website of the Texas Private School Association said their member schools enrolled 250,000 students. The website for the Texas Home School Coalition claimed that 750,000 students were being home-schooled. Adding those two together means that about 1 million students were in private primary and secondary education in Texas. If each of these students were to receive the $10,500 ESA voucher proposed last year, that would cost $10.5 billion of our state tax dollars per year, or $21 billion in the biennial (2-year) budget. That is without a single child leaving a public school for private education, and it would bankrupt the state. Plus, if just 1 percent of current Texas students did leave, public schools would lose over $1 billion per biennium in state funding. Multiple states that adopted “limited” voucher programs have seen them balloon far beyond their estimated costs as those limits have been lifted. Given the goals of our state leadership, that would surely happen here.”

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Mifepristone case update: intervenor-plaintiffs file motion for leave to file

The States of Missouri, Kansas and Idaho—the intervenor-plaintiffs in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—filed a motion for leave to file with an attached amended complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas Amarillo Division on Friday. As we previously reported, the parties involved submitted a Joint Status Report on Sept. 30, where the intervenor-plaintiffs stated that they intended to file an amended complaint that “will confirm that the States do not challenge the original 2000 approval of mifepristone, merely the FDA’s actions from 2016 to 2023.” The amended complaint does not challenge the drug’s original approval, nor does it call for the FDA to vacate its original approval or declare that mifepristone and misoprostol fall outside the scope of the FDA’s regulation, as the original complaint did.

The amended complaint asks the Court to reinstate the drug’s 2016 risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS), rescind the 2019 generic approval and reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement. It also asks the Court to hold unlawful “the provision of drugs to adolescent populations because the FDA lacked authority under § 355c(a)(2)(B)(i) to extrapolate pediatric effectiveness,” another change from the original complaint. The FDA’s 2016 Major Changes to REMS allowed pregnant people to take mifepristone at up to 70 days of gestation from 49 days, allowed non-doctors—such as nurse practitioners—to become certified prescribers of mifepristone and eliminated the requirement for follow-up visits to a doctor after taking the drug. In 2021, the FDA removed the in-person dispensing requirement, a decision they made in response to the coronavirus pandemic, but they finalized it in 2023, along with requiring pharmacies that dispense mifepristone to be certified. The current mifepristone REMS can be found on the FDA’s website.

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World Series, Austin’s music festival and a State Fair: Abbott dotes on Texas tourism

Gov. Greg Abbott spoke about the boost the State Fair of Texas and SpaceX have been for Texas during fireside chat at American Airlines headquarters. There’s no doubt that Lone Star State is a prime tourism state. Just look at the last few weeks of major events held from Dallas Cowboys games to the Austin City Limits Music Festival and even the Texas State Fair coming to a close this weekend. Gov. Greg Abbott spoke in a fireside chat held in Fort Worth at the American Airlines headquarters Tuesday. Moderated by Geoff Freeman, CEO and president of the U.S. Travel Association, the two discussed Texas’ booming economy fueled by Texas’ “everything’s bigger” attitude. Last year, he said, over 470,000 people moved to Texas from another state.

“Businesses don’t relocate without someone visiting first,” Abbott told attendees. “People don’t buy a second home without visiting first. Travel is really that incubator of other spending that happens. You’ve seen a lot of that spending right here in Texas.” Abbott explained the state is growing at a rate where its difficult to find a place to stay because of how busy hotels are hosting various events happening at the same time. But the events bring in major dollars to the economy. According to Abbott, Formula 1 in Austin injects about $1 billion into the Austin economy alone because of travel and tourism. He said half a billion was added into Austin County because of the two-week music festival, Austin City Limits. He also pointed to the growth in North Texas, like the relocation of the PGA headquarters to Frisco and opened a new headquarters in 2022. That eventually led to the massive Omni PGA Frisco Resort. Abbott reiterated that Texas is built for just about all of the major entertainment experiences imaginable, just maybe not the Winter Olympics. The state is naturally accustomed to high demand and big venue events, he said. “Texas has always been a huge entertainment center,” Abbott said. “There were different people — before Taylor Swift, there was Willie Nelson.”

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County Stories

New center offering mental health, support services to Tarrant students set to open in 2025

An F-18 fighter jet took off over the future site of Communities In Schools of Greater Tarrant County’s Center for Student Support. “We planned that,” Lindsey Garner, president and CEO of CISGTC, joked to a crowd of more than 50 education leaders, local officials and partners who have backed the project since its capital fundraising campaign began in 2023. Matt Dufrene, CISGTC campaign chair and vice president at Texas Health Resources, could hardly believe the day had come — on Oct. 9, CISGTC celebrated a milestone when shovels ceremonially hit the ground in Westworth Village, marking the start of construction on the CIS Center for Student Support. The $5.5 million project will serve as the organization’s new headquarters and a hub for resources aimed at supporting thousands of at-risk students and their families throughout Tarrant County, Garner said.

So far, CISGTC has secured $3.2 million in donations from supporters including the Amon G. Carter Foundation, The Morris Foundation and the Ryan Foundation. Scheduled to open in the fall of 2025, the center will feature a mental health counseling wing, a fresh food pantry in partnership with Texas Health Resources and a training and enrichment facility. The expanded space will allow CIS to extend its services, including trauma-informed training for staff and community members, along with enhanced case management services, Garner said. Communities In Schools, or CIS, is a dropout prevention program funded in part by the Texas Legislature and administered by the Texas Education Agency. There are 27 different CIS programs in Texas, including CIS of Greater Tarrant County and CIS of the Dallas Region. The program received $33.5 million in funding from the Legislature in 2022; other funding comes from schools and private and public donations. While thanking the organization’s supporters, she spoke to the crowd about the evolving needs of Tarrant County students and the urgency of creating a centralized support hub to better serve the region’s most vulnerable. “We asked local school districts what they see as the most pressing challenges in the coming years,” Garner said. “All this feedback manifested in the planning for the future.” Following those conversations, it was clear mental health would be a priority, Garner said. One of the key features of the new center is its dedicated mental health counseling space, which will allow CIS to expand its services to include after-school and weekend sessions for students and their families. This flexibility is crucial for parents who may work during traditional school hours or for siblings who require joint sessions.

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Dallas County approves opening second early voting site in Rowlett after judge’s order

Rowlett voters will now have two sites to cast ballots early for the Nov. 5 election, but it’s unclear if both locations will be open by the time early voting starts Monday because the city is threatening to revoke one of the building’s operating certifications. The Dallas County Commissioners Court voted 4-1 to add Rowlett Community Centre as an additional polling location to Freedom Place Church, a little less than a mile away. The approval comes after Rowlett’s mayor sued the Commissioners Court and the county’s top elections official, arguing the church didn’t have enough space to accommodate early voters properly. Dallas County District Court Associate Judge Rachel Craig last week approved a temporary injunction denying the church as the city’s sole early voting location. Around half a dozen sites will be open in Rowlett on Election Day. Commissioner John Wiley Price, who represents Rowlett, was the lone dissenting vote. He believed Freedom Place Church would have enough parking for voters and feared the county’s approval to override its elections department’s site designation set a “dangerous precedent.”

“What happens when the next city decides that they want a second voting center?” Price said. The commissioner’s comments counter Rowlett Mayor Blake Margolis and a resident couple who sued. They said it’d be illegal to host early voters only at the church. They cited its 10 parking spaces shared with four tenants as insufficient for the city’s around 65,000 residents and said it would hamper access for voters with disabilities and those who are elderly. Meanwhile, whether Freedom Place Church keeps its doors open is up in the air. The city recently sent a letter to the evangelical church saying a review of its certificate of occupancy found it was issued last year by mistake, and the church has to provide a revised plan to show it has adequate parking. Otherwise, its operation certification would be revoked. Church officials accused the city of religious discrimination and threatened legal action. Cori Reaume, Rowlett’s director of community development, didn’t immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment on the status of the church’s certificate of occupancy. Hiram Sasser, an attorney representing the church, said talks are ongoing.

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City Stories

Fair Park operator accused of misspending donor funds says it is owed $2.1 million

Fair Park’s operator said Tuesday that it’s owed money. Greg O’Dell, Oak View Group’s president of venue management, sent a letter to council members stating that the company is owed $2.1 million in deferred fees over the last three years, further complicating a fight over the park’s financing. “Per the contract, operating expenses and/or deficits are to be paid by revenue from Park operations, fundraising or City subsidy,” O’Dell said in Tuesday’s letter sent to council members. That adds further uncertainty on how the park will be run. OVG officials have said there is a $3 million shortfall in the current fiscal year’s accounting books.

“OVG has repeatedly expressed concern about the growing deficit in operating funds and has offered solutions, including transitioning of certain services at the Park to the City or otherwise reducing certain services offered at Fair Park,” O’Dell’s letter said. The letter is the latest development after Fair Park First, the nonprofit organization contracted by the city to oversee the park, accused OVG of misspending $5.7 million of donor funds earlier this month. Fair Park First subcontracts with OVG to run the day-to-day operations. O’Dell’s letter restated that Fair Park First officials knew and authorized the use of donor funds. Discussion on Fair Park’s finances and oversight is expected to continue in meetings with the Dallas City Council and Park Board on Wednesday and Thursday of this week.

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National Stories

Local election officials in Georgia must certify results, state judge rules

County election boards in Georgia are not allowed to refuse to certify election results, a state judge ruled Tuesday. Concerns about fraud or abuse are to be settled in court, the judge said, not by county officials acting unilaterally. “If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced. Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said in his order. In the wake of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump and his allies pressured county officials to block the certification of his loss. Since then, Republican members of the boards have used the once-routine process of approving election results and sending them on to the state as a political battleground.

McBurney said the law is clear when it says county officials "shall" certify the results. In the footnotes, he said the word was quite clear. "To users of common parlance, 'shall' connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!" he wrote, quoting Gandalf's famous battle cry from "The Lord of the Rings." "And, generally, even lawyers, legislators, and judges, construe 'shall' as 'a word of command,'" he continued. Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, had gone to court claiming she was required to refuse to certify the election results if she believed the results were incorrect or unreliable. Adams, who is a member and the regional coordinator of former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s activist group Election Integrity Network, abstained from voting to certify primary results in Georgia this May. She is one of a growing number of Georgia officials who have refused to certify election results since 2020, worrying election experts that county officials might try to block the routine certification of election results in the name of baseless conspiracy theories.

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Special report: Horse units patrol border from dusk till dawn

Weighing in at over 1,000 pounds and equipped with night vision, the horses on the Border Patrol’s horse patrol units play an integral part in securing the nation’s border, agency officials tell Border Report. In the Rio Grande Valley Sector, there are 31 horses — all geldings, and most mustangs — and 30 Border Patrol agents who ride them. Officials say their stealth and swift skills are a force multiplier that help to stop migrants from illegally crossing from Mexico into South Texas, especially at night. Border Report recently visited the RGV Sector’s horse patrol training academy in Edinburg, and went on a night ride along with Border Patrol agents on horseback where several migrants who were trying to cross the border were apprehended with the help of horses. We saw firsthand why agents vie for this popular detail, who is selected and how they get these horses to work the border.

“They’re very good partners. In the night they do excellent. They’re able to see. They’re able to identify objects or people coming across before pretty much before agents do,” Border Patrol Supervisory Agent Danny Rios, who has led the horse patrol unit for the RGV for the past few years, told Border Report. “They’re very useful out in the field. They can get into areas that other entities aren’t able to get into. They’re very stealthy out in the field,” Rios said. But before they’re able to go into the field for overnight duty, these horses — and the Border Patrol agents who ride them — must go through extensive training and pass a national Border Patrol training program, that takes about six weeks. The training facilities for the Rio Grande Valley Sector are housed behind the RGV Sector’s headquarter building where there are hitching posts, stables and a large field where new horses are broke in. It’s also where agents must hone horseback skills before they are admitted into this popular detail. There are 24 mustangs currently in the RGV Sector’s horse patrol unit, and seven quarter horses. And Rios says they want to increase the program to 36 horses and agent riders.

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Harris PAC’s $1 million contribution from Ripple’s Chris Larsen shows crypto industry warming to VP

For months, crypto companies and their executives have been pouring tens of millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s effort to win the White House. Chris Larsen isn’t one of them. The co-founder and chairman of Ripple recently contributed $1 million worth of XRP tokens, the currency created by Ripple in 2012, to Future Forward, a super PAC that’s supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Larsen, who’s backed candidates across the aisle for the last few years, told CNBC in an interview on Monday that his comfort level with Harris comes from conversations he’s had with people inside the campaign and what he’s seen from the vice president since she replaced President Biden at the top of the ticket in July. It helps that Harris is from the Bay Area.

“She knows people who have grown up in the innovation economy her whole life,” Larsen said. “So I think she gets it at a fundamental level, in a way that I think the Biden folks were just not paying attention to, or maybe just didn’t make the connection between empowering workers and making sure you have American champions dominating their industries.” Larsen’s affection for the Democratic nominee isn’t brand new. In February, he gave the maximum personal contribution of $6,600 to Harris (which would cover the primary and general election), about five months before she became the Democratic presidential nominee, FEC filings show. At the same time, he contributed $100,000 to the Harris Action Fund PAC. In total, Larsen has given around $1.9 million to support Harris’ campaign directly and through PACs, according to FEC data compiled by crypto market and blockchain analyst James Delmore and independently verified by CNBC. Larsen, 64, has a net worth of $3.1 billion, according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership of XRP and involvement in Ripple, which provides blockchain technology for financial services companies.

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Despite her call to 'do something' for Harris, Michelle Obama has yet to hit the campaign trail

Barack Obama has begun stumping for Vice President Kamala Harris. Bill Clinton is holding a series of campaign events for her in battleground states. Yet the Democratic superstar many members of the party would like to see helping Harris has been absent from the campaign trail so far. With just 20 days until the election, Michelle Obama has worked behind the scenes to boost turnout in key swing states, but she has yet to schedule an official appearance for Harris since the Democratic National Convention. Two people familiar with the matter said she has expressed fresh concerns about security following two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump. Both Harris and Trump are receiving an unprecedented level of security after the former president faced two apparent attempts on his life this summer. Measures like more Secret Service agents and bulletproof glass are now commonplace on the campaign trail.

“After the two assassination attempts against former President Trump, the staffs of all the former presidents and first ladies recognized the new reality and so does the Secret Service,” a person familiar with the matter said, calling them “a wake-up call to everyone” to redouble their efforts on security “in light of the new reality.” Her low profile stands out after her rousing speech in August at the Democratic National Convention, when she implored members of her party not to get complacent about the November election and repeatedly urged voters to instead “do something!” Michelle Obama is expected to add Harris campaign events to her schedule as Election Day nears, five people familiar with the planning said, though nothing has been finalized at this point. She is expected to play a role in the “closing arguments” for the Democratic campaign, three of those people said. By the time polls close on Nov. 5, another one of the sources said, “she will have made her voice heard.”

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Elder care costs are outpacing inflation. Americans want a lifeline.

The costs of caring for ill and aging loved ones don’t show up on store shelves, but they’re front and center for voters like Sharon Zimmer. Zimmer, 65, of Onalaska, Wisconsin, has been caring for her husband, Chuck Zimmer, since he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and dementia in 2018. “Everything that we worked hard for is going back into his care,” said Sharon — one of the more than 38 million unpaid family caregivers to whom Vice President Kamala Harris appealed last week with a proposal to have Medicare cover the costs of at-home care. The ranks of U.S. family caregivers have swelled by around 4 million since 2015, according to AARP, causing many to drop out of the workforce. For Sharon, that decision came in 2021, when she gave up most of her part-time retail work after it became too much to juggle with caring for Chuck, now 67. The move slashed their annual household income by nearly $24,000.

The couple now have health insurance through Medicare, but they didn’t qualify for the program when Chuck was first diagnosed, causing a big early hit to their finances. Even now, the Zimmers are still dipping into their retirement funds to subsidize his care. Their out-of-pocket costs are set to exceed $17,000 this year, not including security and transportation. That is far more than the average $7,200 unpaid caregivers shoulder annually, up from $7,000 in 2016, according to AARP. And while inflation overall slowed to an annual rate of 2.4% in September, the costs of at-home care for ill and elderly people were 8.7% higher than they were the same time last year, federal data show. Sharon called Harris’ proposal “huge.” While she’d been leaning toward supporting Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, over women’s rights issues, she called the new plan “a deciding factor for us.” Everything that we worked hard for is going back into his care. Caregiving costs have continued to squeeze millions of households even as price increases for other goods and services cool or outright reverse. Many are long-term, essential expenses that eat away at other financial buffers, said Kelsey Flock, a dementia care specialist at the Aging and Disability Resource Center of La Crosse County, Wisconsin. “If your loved one is diagnosed younger, they’re losing their retirement, they’re losing their income, maybe losing the primary caregiver’s health insurance,” Flock said, “so you’re coming up with all of those extras.”

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What to know about early voting in Georgia and North Carolina

Two critical battleground states – Georgia and North Carolina – are kicking off early in-person voting this week, and the Peach State is already seeing a record number of voters. Between a flurry of legislative changes and the fallout from Hurricane Helene, the experience could look different for many voters heading to the polls in the coming weeks. In Georgia, voters can head to the ballot box beginning on Tuesday and in North Carolina, early in-person voting begins on Thursday. Georgia is shattering its record for early voting turnout in the critical swing state on Tuesday, according to state election officials, with over 188,000 votes cast by 2 p.m. ET. “We are looking at blowing by 200,000 votes cast in person today. Hats off to our counties and the voters who are turning out. HUGE!” Gabriel Sterling with Georgia’s Secretary of State office posted on social media.

New state laws after 2020 that tightened rules for absentee ballots and cracked down on the availability of drop boxes may make the option less appealing than early in-person voting, election experts said. While many drop boxes were available 24/7 in 2020, this year there will be fewer of them, and they will be in election offices or early vote locations with hours that tend to mimic normal business hours. “The drop boxes have really been made so inconvenient to use that fewer voters are able to utilize them,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director for All Voting is Local. “I don’t want to discourage people from using drop boxes by any means, but I can see why people would think it’s easier to show up in person.” Meanwhile, the opportunities to vote early in-person have expanded: Georgia law mandates two Saturdays of early voting and allows for two Sundays of early voting if a county desires. A 2021 law that makes it a crime to offer food or drinks to voters waiting to cast a ballot – which was highly publicized by news outlets and immortalized by comedian Larry David in episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” – mostly survived legal challenges. So, offering a bottle of water or a snack to voters within 150 feet of a building where ballots are being cast is still banned. The law also sought to ban offers of food or beverages within 25 feet of a voter standing in line, even if it was well beyond 150 feet of the building where ballots were being cast. A judge paused that provision, allowing voting rights groups to offer so-called line relief to voters that may find themselves waiting in particularly long lines.

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Lead Stories

Ted Cruz says he's getting no help from national Republicans in tight race against Colin Allred

As polls show his race tightening, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is lashing out at national Republicans for not doing more to help him in his battle against Democrat Colin Allred. Cruz told Fox News he’s being massively outspent by Allred on the airwaves and couldn’t even afford to get his own ads on TV until three weeks ago. And he complained U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell hasn’t spent a penny on the race even though his PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, is sitting on millions of dollars meant to fight for a GOP majority. “Mitch McConnell runs the largest Republican super PAC in the country and has $400 million. But that super PAC is used to reward the Republican senators who obey him and to punish those who dare to stand up him,” Cruz said during an interview on Life, Liberty & Levin on FOX News on Friday.

Cruz’s comments come just days after Allred’s campaign announced it had raised $30.3 million since July — about $9 million more than Cruz raised during the same period. But Cruz said Allred is getting help from national Democrats. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last month announced it is preparing to spend millions to support Allred as they see his chances improving to oust Cruz. The committee didn’t spell out exactly how much it would spend. But Cruz told Fox that the combination of national money and Allred’s fundraising haul has his back against the wall going into the final three weeks of his bid to hold onto his seat in the U.S. Senate. “We are in the middle of a full-on battle,” Cruz said. “We are being massively outspent.” There is a heightened tension in part because in-person early voting in Texas starts next week and public polls have shown Cruz and Allred in a tight battle. On Sunday, Politico reported on an internal polling memo by the Senate Leadership Fund that highlighted the trouble Cruz is in. The fund's internal polling, done by the Tarrance Group in Virginia, showed Cruz leading Allred by 3 percentage points in September. But as of Oct. 8 that was down to just 1 point. In the memo, the group pointed out Cruz has much higher unfavorable ratings among voters than Allred. While 48% of respondents said they had an unfavorable view of Cruz, Allred’s unfavorables were at 36%.

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What to know about tonight’s debate between Ted Cruz and Colin Allred

Three weeks before the Nov. 5 election, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, will face off Tuesday night in their only planned debate. Here’s what to know: The one-hour debate will begin at 7 p.m. Central time. WFAA will broadcast the event live, and it will also be streamed across TEGNA apps, including WFAA+. Other TEGNA stations throughout the state will carry the debate live, including KHOU in Houston, KVUE in Austin, KENS in San Antonio, KCEN in Waco, KAGS in College Station, KYTX in Tyler, KIII in Corpus Christi, KBMT-KJAC in Beaumont, KXVA in Abilene, KIDY in San Angelo and KWES in Midland and Odessa.

A free debate feed also will be provided to radio and TV stations in Texas with certain market restrictions. Where is the debate? WFAA will host the debate inside its studio in downtown Dallas. Jason Whitely, WFAA’s senior political reporter, and Gromer Jeffers Jr., The Dallas Morning News’ political writer, are co-moderators. There will be no audience present. What are the debate rules? Each candidate will have 60 seconds to introduce themselves and 90 seconds to answer questions. Their opponent has 90 seconds to respond, and the first candidate gets 60 seconds for a rebuttal. An additional 60 seconds for follow-up could be granted at the discretion of the moderators. Candidates will get one minute each for closing remarks. Who speaks first, who speaks last? Allred won two coin tosses last week and opted to go first in the opening and closing statements, giving Cruz the last word to end the debate.

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Armed man arrested after reportedly threatening FEMA workers

A North Carolina man was arrested on Saturday and accused of threatening federal emergency responders who have been administering aid since Hurricane Helene ravaged parts of the state last month. The man, William Jacob Parsons, 44, of Bostic, N.C., was charged under a law that makes it illegal to carry a weapon in a way that threatens the public. He was arrested at a supermarket where a Federal Emergency Management Agency bus was parked, according to Capt. Jamie Keever, a spokesman for the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office. Mr. Parsons had a handgun and a rifle in his possession. No FEMA personnel were at the site, he said.

The Rutherford County Communications Center received a call on Saturday afternoon that a man armed with an assault rifle had made a comment about harming FEMA workers in the area, according to a statement released by the sheriff’s office. The man was overheard voicing threats at a gas station in neighboring Polk County, and either a station clerk or a customer alerted U.S. Army soldiers nearby, Captain Keever said. The Army informed the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office, whose deputies visited the gas station and obtained a description of the man’s vehicle. That information led them to Mr. Parsons at the supermarket. The arrest occurred after FEMA, which is administering aid to severely flooded counties in the region, directed its employees to stop going door to door to help survivors amid various threats of violence. FEMA workers were still working from designated locations, however. A person with Mr. Parsons’ name and age has faced misdemeanor criminal charges in the past, court records show, including a charge in 2004 of communicating threats, which North Carolina prosecutors later dropped. Social media pages that appear to be run by Mr. Parsons feature messages supporting Mr. Trump and opposing coronavirus vaccines. One of the posts from 2020 shows the logo of the Three Percenters right-wing militia group and the message “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is order.”

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Can the stock market keep going up? Market watchers think so.

Stocks have climbed since the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates a month ago, with investors betting that it marked the beginning of a series of cuts that will offer a tailwind to the market. And the economy continues to hum, with reports this month showing robust hiring and milder inflation, bolstering the rally. As big companies begin to announce their latest quarterly financial results, providing key numbers that analysts use to model where the market is headed, there is a renewed sense of optimism across Wall Street. That bullishness is largely based on confidence that the Fed will tame inflation without tipping the economy into recession, a “soft landing” seldom achieved by policymakers. “There has been a marked shift relative to 18 months ago,” said Ben Snider, an equity analyst at Goldman Sachs. “When I talk to investors there is much less concern about an economic downturn.”

Falling interest rates are generally good news for stocks because lower borrowing costs can boost corporate profits and raise market valuations. Lower rates also make the potential gains on stocks more attractive relative to the returns offered by bonds. The S&P 500 index has risen 4 percent since the Fed cut rates last month as investors have funneled more than $20 billion into funds that buy U.S. stocks. The benchmark index has set a series of fresh record highs, including after a rise on Monday. Last week, analysts at Fundstrat and Goldman Sachs both raised their year-end forecasts for stocks, with Goldman expecting a further gain of just a little over 2 percent, with the index having already surpassed its previous prediction. That would come on top of what has already been a buoyant year, with the S&P 500 up more than 20 percent through Monday. Even just a few weeks ago, concerns about the economy led analysts to lower their expectations for quarterly corporate earnings growth by more than usual, according to data from FactSet. But the initial batch of earnings reports late last week from bellwether corporations like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo were stronger than anticipated, a sign that the economy remained solid.

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State Stories

Keller ISD’s new theater policy prompts parent petition against alleged censorship

A petition on Change.org seeks signers to join an effort against Keller ISD’s new theater policy, approved in August, that some call censorship. Parent Courtney Mullaney launched the petition to end the policy, which requires a superintendent-led review of every play and musical before it can be performed. As a result, Mullaney said, previously approved productions, including “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” “Ruthless,” and “Yellow Boat” are now off limits. "As parents of children actively participating in the Fine Arts programs of Keller ISD, we are alarmed by the sudden increase in censorship of the theatre departments across the district," the petition reads.

Other high schools have performed these plays, including “Yellow Boat,” as recently as this month. The play involves a child with hemophilia who contracts AIDS after a medically necessary blood transfusion. Cary High School in North Carolina presented the show last weekend. In Texas, Royal ISD, west of Houston, produced it in 2020. Last fall, Legacy High School in Mansfield ISD put on “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” based on the book about an autistic boy who looks into the death of a neighbor’s dog. A senior in Keller ISD, Nathan Beets, wrote on the change.org petition that "theater can have a profound effect on its audience. We can’t do that if we are censored from portraying real-life stories on stage; stories that people may find uncomfortable to talk about, but are best conveyed through art." Earlier this year, Keller ISD was accused of censorship when it cancelled “The Laramie Project,” a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming. After public pushback, the district reversed its controversial decision and the play was produced.

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$1 million lawsuit filed by injured workers in Pemex Deer Park hydrogen sulfide release

Three people injured in a deadly Pemex chemical leak last week filed a $1 million lawsuit against the facility owner and operator on Monday, arguing it exposed workers to life-threatening hazards. Two people died and about 35 others were injured after hydrogen sulfide was released at the Deer Park industrial plant Thursday afternoon. At least 13 of the 35 people injured in the incident were sent to nearby hospitals. One of the workers sustained orthopedic injuries during the evacuation of the facility Thursday evening, Geoffrey Adkinson, a spokesperson for the law firm said. Each of the three workers at the forefront of the lawsuit, Sergio Antonio Olvera, Jonathan Martinez and Yoselynn Soto, suffered from hydrogen sulfide exposure symptoms including vomiting, dizziness, nausea, headaches and respiratory symptoms, Adkinson said.

A lawsuit filed Monday by a Houston-based law firm against Deer Park Refining and P.M.I Services argued the crude oil refinery “began to uncontrollably release highly flammable and toxic gases into the atmosphere in and around the refinery.” “If owners and operators of oil refineries follow the proper policies and procedures designed to protect people, then the release of highly toxic gases does not happen,” Mo Aziz, an attorney who filed the lawsuit said in a statement. The lawsuit is seeking $1 million in damages. It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the chemical release, and an investigation into the leak is currently underway. "They were working on a flange of some kind so we don't know if it was some type of manual error, again that's going to be part of our investigation so frankly I don't want to delve too much into that because this all still preliminary," Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said during a press conference. Friday, county officials asserted that Mexico-based Pemex failed to communicate with leaders after the incident.

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Montgomery County to conduct manual recount of random voting precinct ballots Nov. 5

Montgomery County will conduct a manual recount of votes in randomly selected precincts following the Nov. 5 election after several residents raised concerns about election integrity and the state’s voting system. Randomly selected election precincts on Nov. 5 will be selected to manually recount ballots for all of the elections, including a crucial presidential race. Volunteers and some part-time staff members will be tasked with conducting the recount which could take up to a week to complete. County commissioners on Tuesday approved the procedure on Oct. 8 after some discussion with Suzie Harvey, the Montgomery County Elections Administrator, who said she has “no problem” with the move. “I do agree with the concept,” she said. “I don’t have any problem with it.”

Several Montgomery County residents in a three-hour workshop meeting on Sept. 27 asked County Judge Mark Keough to consider additional safeguards to strengthen the voting process. Neda Henery, a resident, said the security surrounding the Texas voting system and electronic poll books is “nothing more than a smoke and mirrors method of deception.” Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough on Oct. 1 sent a letter to the Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s office requesting guidance for having a partial manual recount. Nelson in response said the move that would go “above and beyond the provisions that were already established in law” was permissible. The Secretary of State requires a random manual count of a single race in randomly selected counties. It’s conducted to “ensure the accuracy of the tabulation of electronic voting system results,” according to the secretary’s office.

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Department of Insurance rejects proposed Texas Windstorm Insurance Association rate increase

The Texas Department of Insurance has rejected a rate increase proposed by the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association that would have raised premiums on about a quarter-million residential and commercial properties along the coast. The proposed 10% rate hike would have been "unjust and unfair," wrote TDI Commissioner Cassie Brown in her order rejecting the filing, which was posted to TDI's website Monday. TWIA confirmed the news but did not immediately make a statement. The not-for-profit insurance association, an insurer of last resort, provides residential and commercial policies covering wind and hail damage to home and business owners in Texas’ 14 coastal counties, as well as the portion of Harris County east of Texas 146. As of March, there were about 250,000 TWIA policies in force in coastal Texas, a 37% increase from 2020.

TWIA's board voted to seek the rate increase in August, after the association's 2024 Rate Adequacy Analysis found that current rates fell significantly short of being able to cover expenses and losses. That analysis was released July 1, a week before Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Matagorda County, causing extensive damage in Texas and further complicating TWIA's finances. As of last week, TDI's order notes, TWIA had received 31,163 claims arising from Hurricane Beryl and paid more than $250 million to settle them. Ultimately, Beryl claims could wipe out TWIA's Catastrophe Reserve Trust Fund, which had a balance of $451.4 million at the end of June. Proponents of the rate increase had argued that such a move was necessary given the association's financial picture and the prospect of further extreme weather events, which have led many insurers to raise rates — or even pull back — in coastal Texas.

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What to know about Judge Janis Jack, removed from Texas foster care case

U.S. District Judge Janis Jack is a semi-retired judge in Corpus Christi who has overseen a 13-year lawsuit by Texas foster kids against the state’s child-welfare system. On Friday, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ordered Jack removed from the case and reversed her most recent – and most punitive – order against state child welfare officials. Here’s what to know about Jack and the long-standing battle with the Texas foster-care system. Jack, 78, studied nursing in the late 1960s before moving to the legal field, earning a law degree from South Texas College of Law in 1981. She was in private legal practice in Corpus Christi until President Bill Clinton nominated her in 1993 to the federal bench. The U.S. Senate confirmed her in 1994, and Jack has been semi-retired since taking senior status in 2011.The Dallas Morning News editorial board named Jack “Texan of the Year” in 2016 for her work on the foster-care lawsuit known as M.D. vs. Abbott, filed in 2011 by a New York-based children’s advocacy group that focuses on reforming state child-welfare laws. It is the only case the judge now oversees.

“Texas’ foster-care system is broken,” wrote Jack in a landmark 2015 ruling. “Most importantly, it is broken for children, who almost uniformly leave State custody more damaged than when they entered.” Jack mandated far-reaching reforms, saying the state was violating the rights of Texas foster children “to be free from an unreasonable risk of harm caused by the State.” Jack followed with about 60 orders to alleviate problems she found in the system, including overmedicating the children, failing to investigate reported abuse by caretakers, and housing children in dangerous hotels and under-supervised group homes. Jack has been vocal about her frustration with the ongoing problems after repeated orders to fix them. She once asked Texas human services officials if they’d ever seen the inside of a jail cell when they didn’t provide documents she had ordered brought to a hearing. Another time she suggested that agency leaders stay in cheap motels and eat fast food like some foster kids were doing. An example cited by the 5th Circuit Court’s order removing Jack from the case was the judge’s response – “nobody cares” – when a state lawyer said health problems kept Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Cecile Erwin Young from testifying in court. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and Texas Health and Human Services, defendants in the lawsuit, have repeatedly objected to Jack’s treatment – inside her courtroom and in her avalanche of orders – as unfair and unconstitutional. That’s partly because, in spite of the state spending $100 million to improve the system, Jack has continued to find that officials have defied her orders. In the first contempt ruling in 2019, Jack appointed monitors who were told to report back on the state’s compliance with court-ordered reforms. The most recent contempt finding in April fined Young $100,000 per day until her agency could prove they were adequately in line with Jack’s orders. The state argued that nothing they do will be enough for Jack to end the lawsuit. The 5th Circuit Court ruling last week overturned the latest contempt finding, saying her comments and rulings gave the appearance of bias against the state.

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Texas reading program allows children to hear the voice of their incarcerated mother

Many children have a fond memory of their mom reading them a book before bed, flipping through the pages and pausing to explore pictures. Children with incarcerated parents, however, may miss out on this comforting experience. “If you think about the library story time, or someone reading to you in school, or even just a mom sitting down with her children in the evening to read a book, it’s a comfortable and joyful experience,” Jill Gonzalez, executive director of Women’s Storybook Project, said. The Women’s Storybook Project connects incarcerated moms with their children through storytelling. The Austin-based program sends volunteers to prisons across Texas, where they record incarcerated mothers reading a book aloud and then send the recording, along with a copy of the book, to the child. Last year, the program served over 400 mothers and sent out 6,200 books to almost 900 children.

“I’m a firm believer that you can teach anything through a children’s book,” Gonzalez said. “There’s so many messages of friendship and hope and humor.” Judith Dullnig, who was inspired by a similar prison program in Illinois, started the Texas program in 2003. She began with a team of five volunteers who used cassette tapes to record mothers reading stories. Gonzalez took over for Dullnig in 2018. Today, the program is digital with links sent directly to the children’s guardians. “Reading a story makes a difference, because when we send the URL, mom can record it once, and the child can listen to it 100 times, and that’s reassuring,” Gonzalez said. “It helps kids feel better when they’re lonely. They know somebody loves them. And it’s so important because these kids didn’t do anything wrong.” The program is currently offered in one county jail and 11 prisons across Texas. Moms have to apply and meet certain criteria to be selected. Once selected, a mom will record themselves reading the first book – usually a nostalgic pick like Goodnight Moon. The recording is sent to the child, who then sends back a request for the next book. Books like Elephant & Piggie, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the Harry Potter series are highly requested. Mothers are given 10 minutes to record and read as much as they can. They end the recording by encouraging their child to finish the book at home and write to tell them what happened next. If a mother completes all six sessions with Storybook Project, their child will have 12 books at the end of the program.

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ExxonMobil, Texas ink deal for nation’s largest offshore CO2 storage site

ExxonMobil signed a deal with the state of Texas last week for the nation’s largest offshore carbon dioxide capture and storage site, the company announced Thursday. The deal gives the energy giant access to more than 270,000 acres of submerged land to sequester carbon dioxide, Texas’ General Land Office said in a release the same day. The proceeds from the lease agreement will go to the Texas Permanent School Fund, with the GLO estimating that it will “provide millions” to the Texas school system. The exact financials of the deal were not disclosed. The deal comes as transition-scenario projections by BloombergNEF found that any natural gas or coal emissions will need to be offset by carbon capture by 2050 for the U.S. to reach a net-zero emissions scenario.

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In South Texas, the myth of noncitizen voting takes center stage

Cecilia Castellano awoke to the sound of her doorbell in the early hours of Aug. 20. The South Texas sky outside her Atascosa County home was still dark, but as she emerged from her bedroom -- hair curlers in place, a robe draped over her shoulders -- a light cut across her foyer. Two voices on the other side of her front door announced themselves: "Police Department." "I came to the front and I actually looked out through the window ... and they were shining a flashlight in my window," Castellano recalled in an interview with ABC News' Mireya Villarreal. "They said, 'Ma'am, we have a search warrant.' I said, 'A search warrant for what?' And they're like, 'Well, can we come in?'" The officers presented Castellano with the warrant, then confiscated her phone and asked her to write down its PIN, she said. They were searching for evidence of so-called "vote harvesting," an opaque provision of a 2021 voter integrity bill championed by the state's Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and enforced by its controversial attorney general, Ken Paxton.

Both men have characterized the law, known widely as S.B. 1, as a safeguard against noncitizen voting -- an exceedingly rare occurrence already banned under state and federal law. But Castellano, a Democratic candidate for a seat in the Texas State House, calls it voter intimidation. Republicans, following the lead of former President Donald Trump, have claimed without evidence that undocumented immigrants could tilt the scales in favor of Democrats this November, increasingly promoting the debunked narrative as a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the months leading up to Election Day. "Our elections are bad," Trump said at ABC News' presidential debate in September. "And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English, they don't know even know what country they're in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them to come into our country." House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, recently tried without success to pass legislation that would have required voters to prove their U.S. citizenship through documentation -- instead of attesting to it under penalty of perjury as the current laws require -- arguing in May that, "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections." But critics and election experts say that simply isn't true, and they accuse Trump and his allies of generating unfounded and disingenuous claims of noncitizen voting as part of an effort to make it more difficult for eligible voters to register and vote. The libertarian Cato Institute called allegations of widespread noncitizen voting "alarmist theorizing," and the Republican elections chief in Pennsylvania recently acknowledged that he "found that it occurred very, very, very infrequently."

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The precarious state of marijuana

Since 2019, the skunky, citrusy and oh-so-polarizing smell of marijuana has moved from the realm of late night park benches and that one apartment that smells impossibly strongly of sandalwood, to brick and mortar stores in broad daylight. Hemp and Marijuana are the same plant. Whether a plant is legally defined as hemp, cannabis or “marihuana” depends on the Delta 9 THC content with hemp containing less than 0.3%, cannabis containing an undetermined amount of THC and “marihuana” contains more than 0.3% of Delta 9 THC. Enacted in June 2019, Texas’ House Bill 1325 authorized hemp production on the state level for both fiber and consumable products. The state law followed the national 2018 farm bill in legalizing industrial hemp and allowing for up to 0.3% of delta-9 THC on a dry weight basis, a decision that opened up the gates for an unregulated THC market.

“At the time, I think the implication is, they were only talking about delta-9 THC, which is the narcotic component of marijuana,” Calvin Trostle, Texas A&M AgriLife State Hemp & Sunflower Specialist, said. “So things that you read like delta-8 THC or delta-10, or THC-O, I think, to the writers of the Farm Bill, these were things that they just really weren’t aware of yet. And so that’s created a little bit of a gray area.” Within that gray area, an $8 billion hemp industry has germinated, but not without legal challenges. The Texas Supreme Court is set to hear a case between the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) and Hometown Hero, a cannabis company based out of Austin, that could decide the legality of delta-8 THC in Texas. As of June 2023, the hemp derived THC industry accounted for the employment of 50,100 people in Texas and more than $1.6 billion in wages annually according to a Whitney Economics analysis of the Texas hemp derived cannabinoid industry.

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UIL approves proposals aimed at addressing ‘complex’ eligibility challenges for high school athletes

The University Interscholastic League Legislative Council passed several staff proposals that are aimed at student-athlete eligibility during the general session of its annual fall meetings Monday morning in Round Rock. Those changes represent what UIL deputy director Jamey Harrison says are “just the first step” in helping the organization more effectively deal with some of the eligibility issues it's facing when it comes to the ever-changing landscape of high school athletics. “We know that we have some keystone eligibility rules that we need to keep at our core,” Harrison said. “All of that is related to having community and educational basis to our activities and to having as level of a playing field as we can possibly provide to schools. There are some instances where that doesn’t feel like it’s happening anymore, and we need to find new ways to address it. We’ve talked about a number of those over the past several years. To be honest with you, I think we were guilty of trying to find simple solutions to remarkably complex challenges, and what we’ve learned is it’s going to take a more complex set of solutions.”

Perhaps the most significant change came with an amendment that specifically grants the UIL State Executive Committee authority to investigate schools with an inordinate number of Previous Athletic Participating Forms (PAPF). The PAPF is a two-page document required to be filled out by students changing schools who intend to participate in athletics. The form asks 18 yes-or-no questions, focusing on things from the student’s residence and family situation to potential recruiting violations. Also passed was a proposal to update the requirements for filing the PAPFs, which the UIL says are not always completed in a timely manner. The change mandates that any new student at the high school level must complete the questionnaire prior to participation in athletics. Another proposal passed by the council provides a penalty the SEC can impose on a District Executive Committee when it is determined the DEC is acting in a manner inconsistent with UIL rules. DECs are responsible for ruling on protests and reports of violations concerning eligibility and other matters that occur within each district around the state. The SEC now has an avenue to appoint an independent individual to oversee the conduct of the meetings, making sure the rules are enforced consistently. Another change approved Monday prohibits athletes found to have changed schools for athletic purposes from participating in contests against varsity teams from other schools, barring an exemption from the UIL athletic director. Athletes ruled ineligible for changing schools for athletic purposes are allowed to play in sub-varsity games, but now that participation is stipulated even further.

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Mark Henry: Half of Texas’ new teachers aren’t certified. That's hurting our students.

(Mark Henry, Ph.D, dedicated over 40 years of his life to education, with 33 years served as superintendent across five Texas school districts, including Cy-Fair ISD.) Every fall brings a sense of renewal and fresh optimism. It’s the start of a new season and a new school year. But there’s something making educators pause: an ever-increasing rise in uncertified teachers. Houston ISD has over 2,000 uncertified teachers across its campuses. And it’s not just a Houston problem. The University of Texas at Austin recently released a study showing half of the state’s newly hired teachers lack certification. That means Texas students are being taught by more and more teachers who may have never stepped foot in a classroom. They lack the foundational training and formal education typically acquired through accredited four-year universities or alternative teacher certification programs. And that’s not to vilify the people coming forward — or the schools that hire them. There is a very real teacher shortage, and I know what it’s like to face those numbers. Education leaders must get creative to fill labor gaps.

That said, we can’t shrug our shoulders and let our classrooms get filled with more and more unlicensed candidates. That shortchanges students. Research shows that having uncertified teachers without prior classroom experience can result in up to four months of learning loss. Hiring candidates without a certification and allowing them to remain uncertified also shortchanges the new hires. It is overwhelming for any individual to walk into a profession with little to no experience. Imagine walking into a room full of middle schoolers if you have no experience managing a large group and no training on how to guide students through the curriculum — much less how to build trust among young people. This can also create tenuous relationships with other teachers and the school, as uncertified teachers fill a short-term gap but create a long-term problem. Unfortunately, fewer than half of new uncertified teachers stay in the profession after three years, compared to a little over three-quarters of new teachers who have completed traditional certification. When we fill classrooms with uncertified or temporary educators, we deprive students of this crucial connection. What’s equally important: Every educator deserves the full wrap-around support system of a certification process — whether that is through a four-year university or a high-quality alternative certification program. After more than 40 years in education, 33 of them as a superintendent, I have seen the teacher shortage and the uncertified teacher crisis grow in lockstep. We had school years that started with as many as 200 positions unfilled. We had long-term substitute teachers, and we eventually started “Teacher Signing Days” to encourage students to pursue the profession. We also did our best to offer competitive salaries and opportunities for professional development. But I will say, schools can feel hamstrung by the lack of funding.

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San Antonio Express-News Editorial: In House District 121, Swift would fight for public education and women’s health

House District 121 has long been a reliable Republican seat, thanks especially to the steady tenure of former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who represented this district from 2005 to 2019. Only after Straus decided to not seek reelection in 2018, did Democrats challenge in this district, which covers the North Side and includes Alamo Heights, Olmos Park, and, importantly this election, Alamo Heights ISD and North East ISD. Straus' successor, state Rep. Steve Allison, continued the Republican representation on District 121. Nevertheless, the district became a desired but unattainable white whale for Democrats who nominated strong and dynamic challengers in Celina Montoya (twice) and Becca DeFelice. Straus and Allison share many characteristics and policy views, and one of those is unequivocal support for public education and opposition to vouchers. That opposition to vouchers almost certainly cost Allison his seat. In this year’s primary election, attorney Marc LaHood, a vocal supporter of vouchers, defeated Allison. He now faces Democrat Laurel Jordan Swift, who grew up in the district, has a bachelor’s degree in biology and works in medical sales.

We recommend Swift, a former Republican, because she opposes school vouchers, and she is outspoken about women’s health and restoring reproductive rights. LaHood is unequivocal on both issues. Not only is he a staunch supporter of school vouchers, but he is an equally staunch supporter of the state’s abortion ban. Voters in this district should think long and hard about the potential impacts vouchers for private schools might have on funding for the Alamo Heights and North East school districts, widely viewed as two of the leading districts in Bexar County. In their joint meeting with the Editorial Board, LaHood and Swift engaged in a substantive, thoughtful and civil discussion of these and other issues. To their credit, they treated one another with a high level of respect and decorum that is often lacking during these contentious times. Both agreed that education is the most important issue, but only Swift recognizes how vouchers could further undermine an already underfunded Texas public education system. She’s unequivocal about increasing funding for public education, noting the state has billions of dollars available to do this.

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County Stories

Harris County-Houston Sports Authority names Chris Canetti as interim CEO

The Harris-County Houston Sports Authority has named Chris Canetti to be its interim CEO, the organization announced Monday. The announcement comes days after the agency’s board of directors unanimously fired longtime CEO Janis Burke, who had come under fire by the city’s sports executives and Mayor John Whitmire for concerns over transparency and facility maintenance. Canetti currently serves as president of the city’s FIFA World Cup 26 host committee, and will hold the position as he takes over the sports authority in the interim. Canetti was also president of the city’s World Cup bid committee and was president of the Houston Dynamo for eight years.

“Chris has a proven track record of success here in Houston,” board chair J. Kent Friedman wrote in a statement. “We know that with his experience he will help guide the organization and ensure that all obligations and responsibilities are met during this period of transition.” Canetti did not immediately return a request for comment, and a spokesperson for the agency did not have Canetti's new salary as interim CEO immediately available. The sports authority, which Whitmire helped create during his time in the Texas Senate, finances the city’s professional sports stadiums. It also ensures city and county credit ratings don’t suffer in the event of financial trouble. Its board members are appointed by city and county leaders. The agency owns Toyota Center, Minute Maid Park and Shell Energy Stadium and leases the buildings to the respective sports franchises. While NRG Stadium receives funding from the sports authority, it is owned by the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation. On Friday morning, Whitmire, executives from Houston’s professional sports leagues and members of the sports authority’s board gathered at City Hall to say the agency needed to go in a new direction.

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City Stories

Fort Worth Chamber, Economic Development Partnership to formally split in 2025

Eighteen months after creating a nonprofit to bolster economic development and hiring a high-profile state official to lead the effort, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and the Fort Worth Economic Development Partnership are splitting. Beginning the first of next year, the Fort Worth Chamber and the economic development partnership created under its umbrella will operate as separate, but complementary, organizations, according to an Oct. 10 joint letter sent by both organizations to investors and supporters. In the letter, the two organizations say the economic development partnership will focus on its core mission of business recruitment and attraction, while the chamber will pursue advocacy and workforce development.

“We’ve delivered some nice wins that we’re very proud of for the community,” said Robert Allen, president and CEO of the economic development partnership. “So the time is right for this next step in the relationship and for the Fort Worth Economic Development Partnership to truly stand on its own two feet so that it can continue servicing business attraction and recruitment for Fort Worth.” Over the last year and a half, the economic development organization has built a strong track record, said Steve Montgomery, president and CEO of the Fort Worth Chamber. He pointed to the announcement of a new Dick’s Sporting Goods distribution center, the opening of Big Ass Fans’ new manufacturing facility and the upcoming UTA West campus as key accomplishments by the economic development team. “They are focused on business attraction while we are retention, expansion and advocacy,” Montgomery said. “We’ll continue to focus on our core mission, and they will focus on theirs. We’ve worked closely together, and we’ll continue to do that. I see this as a very positive sign.” Mike Berry, president of Hillwood, and chairman of the board for the economic development partnership, said the changes are a natural evolution of the way the organization was originally structured.

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Looking to boost mental health resources, SAISD plans to add 'peace rooms' to more campuses

In a push to offer more mental health resources to students, San Antonio Independent School District has earmarked over $2 million to add "peace rooms" to more of its middle and high school campuses, according to a report by KENS 5 TV. The peace rooms, with their calming decor, are dedicated spaces where students can find a quiet moment to process heightened emotions and meditate. The district already has peace rooms at other campuses, including the Young Men’s Leadership Academy and Lanier High School. With the dedicated funding that will help pay for furniture and sensory items, the district plans to add 25 peace rooms to different middle and high schools, with the first 10 set to open in January, according to KEN 5 TV. SAISD also has an application pending with Bexar County for an additional $200,000, which would be used for training on restorative care and trauma-informed care, the news station reported.

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National Stories

How Wall St. is subtly shaping the Harris economic agenda

When two of Vice President Kamala Harris’s closest advisers arrived in New York last month, they were seeking advice. The Democratic nominee was preparing to give her most far-reaching economic speech, and Tony West, Ms. Harris’s brother-in-law, and Brian Nelson, a longtime confidant, wanted to know how the city’s powerful financiers thought she should approach it. Over two days, the pair held meetings across Wall Street, including at the offices of Lazard, an investment bank, and the elite law firm Paul, Weiss. Among the ideas the attendees pitched was to provide more lucrative tax breaks for companies that allowed their workers to become part owners, according to two people at the meetings. The campaign had already been discussing such an idea with an executive at KKR, the private equity firm. A few days later, Ms. Harris endorsed the idea during her speech in Pittsburgh. “We will reform our tax laws to make it easier for businesses to let workers share in their company’s success,” she said.

The line, while just a piece of a much broader speech, was emblematic of Ms. Harris’s approach to economic policy since she took the helm of the Democratic Party in July. As part of a bid to cut into former President Donald J. Trump’s polling lead on the economy, her campaign has carefully courted business leaders, organizing a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues. The private feedback has, in sometimes subtle ways, shaped Ms. Harris’s economic agenda over the course of her accelerated campaign. At several points, she has sprinkled language into broader speeches that business executives say reflects their views. And, in at least one instance, Ms. Harris made a specific policy commitment — to pare back a tax increase on capital gains — after extended talks with her corporate allies. They describe a Democratic campaign that is far more open to corporate input than the one President Biden had led for much of the election cycle. Ms. Harris’s team does not take all of the advice it is given. Some pleas for a more robust endorsement of big business have been ignored, for example, while some of the meetings have devolved into executives’ raising specific tax problems their companies face. The friendlier corporate ties have nevertheless raised questions about whether Ms. Harris’s overtures are campaign-season coalition building — or a sign that she will take a more centrist tack if she wins the White House. On some issues, like a proposed tax on the ultrawealthy, her campaign has been studiously ambiguous, fueling uncertainty about what kind of an economic leader she would be.

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Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode

The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention. And so Trump, after jokingly asking the crowd whether “anybody else would like to faint,” took a different approach. “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said. For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night. “Total lovefest at the PA townhall! Everyone was so excited they were fainting so @realDonaldTrump turned to music,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung wrote on X. “Nobody wanted to leave and wanted to hear more songs from the famous DJT Spotify playlist!” Trump has long obsessed over his playlist, and aides have often described him privately DJing on his campaign plane or at his Mar-a-Lago Club patio in Florida. He has also angered music artists — such as Celine Dion — who have requested that he stop playing their music at his campaign rallies.

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Why Black men have not flocked to Harris in larger numbers

his city’s main drag has not seen true bustle for decades, with dozens of vacant storefronts scattered among active businesses. But that has not stopped Bryan Killian-Bey from daydreaming about the red brick corner property on North Saginaw Street. “I have my goals,” he said, peering inside a building that he has already explored transforming into a Black-owned restaurant and lounge. “We don’t have enough places for us.” It has been a good year for Killian-Bey, 60, who in August took on a lead violence-prevention role for the city that nearly doubled his pay. But he sours when discussing the presidential election. Talking to The Washington Post nearly a year ago, he said Black men were being overlooked by both parties. And the ascent of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Black and Indian American, has not changed his mind. In December, when President Joe Biden was the presumed Democratic nominee and The Post interviewed Killian-Bey and other Black men in the Detroit area, polls showed waning enthusiasm among Black voters for Biden and the Democrats.

After Harris was nominated, a late August Washington Post-Ipsos poll found a significant jump in the number of Black Americans saying they were certain to vote. But that shift was concentrated among younger Black women. Turnout interest hardly increased among Black men, with 66 percent saying they were certain to vote, compared with 63 percent in April, while turnout interest among Black women rose to 71 percent from 61 percent over the same period. Reports of apathy among this key group recently inspired basketball icon Magic Johnson and former president Barack Obama to deliver impassioned pleas for Black men to more robustly back Harris at events sponsored by the vice president’s campaign. The Harris campaign on Monday signaled a need to reach out to this demographic, releasing an “opportunity agenda for Black men” that includes such items as loans for small businesses and a focus on health challenges facing Black men. Still, some of the initiatives are not new or do not target Black men specifically, and it was not clear whether they would affect these voters’ willingness to embrace Harris.

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Why Harris and the Democrats may not be able to count on Hindu Americans in November

Utsav Sanduja, born in Canada 34 years ago, has long admired the global power the United States wields, and couldn’t wait to become an American citizen. Not long after immigrating 14 years ago, he filed a lawsuit over what he judged an unreasonable delay in his visa application. This November, his citizenship secured, Sanduja will be voting in his first U.S. presidential election. “Once you’re a citizen, my God, you just want to do everything in your power to be able to exercise your constitutional liberty,” he told RNS. “It’s not just an American election, it’s an election across the planet, really, and it’s just too critical to not get involved.” Sanduja is more involved than most new voters. Earlier this month he launched the Hindus for America First PAC, intended to provide a “safe space” for Hindus, like him, who no longer feel the Democratic Party has Hindu interests at heart and plan to vote for Donald Trump.

“I am very concerned about religious pluralism, and I feel that there ought to be more disparate voices in our politics,” said Sanduja. “And what I noticed was that the Hindu voice, unfortunately, has been kind of hijacked by woke elements.” From the appeal of lower taxes for the ultrawealthy, to job security against illegal immigration, to securing the nuclear family unit, Hindu Americans, Sanduja maintains, have more in common with the existing religious right than not. “This is our time to shine,” he said. Sanduja’s views are shared by a growing minority of American Hindus, who are mostly first-generation Indian immigrants who have historically voted Democratic. Data from both the Carnegie Endowment and APIA Vote show Indian Americans’ support for Democrats has been decreasing since 2020. Analysts suspect that November’s election results will show the pattern continuing. “We’ve been so strongly Democratic that I think sometimes we’ve been taken for granted,” said Rishi Bhutada, a Houston native and treasurer of the nonpartisan Hindu American PAC. “The polling data is showing that a shift is starting to happen. It’s one of those things where, if you’re not paying attention to it as a political observer, it will surprise you.”

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Crude oil prices fall more than 4% as looming surplus overshadows Iran-Israel tensions

Crude oil futures fell more than 4% on Tuesday, as a looming global oil surplus next year overshadowed the risk of a supply disruption from the conflict between Israel and Iran. Oil prices spiked earlier this month after Iran hit Israel with a ballistic missile attack, raising fears that Israel would respond by targeting the Islamic Republic’s oil facilities. The International Energy Agency said Tuesday that its members are prepared to take action if there is a supply disruption in the Middle East. “For now, supply keeps flowing, and in the absence of a major disruption, the market is faced with a sizeable surplus in the new year,” the IEA said in its monthly report.

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Kamala Harris sets an interview with a not-so-friendly outlet: Fox News.

Vice President Kamala Harris has agreed to an interview with Fox News, the network said on Monday. The interview, with Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, will take place near Philadelphia on Wednesday, shortly before it airs at 6 p.m. Eastern on Mr. Baier’s program, “Special Report.” Ms. Harris is expected to sit for 25 to 30 minutes of questions, the network said. This is Ms. Harris’s first formal interview with Fox News, whose day-to-day programming is heavy on conservative punditry that often explicitly supports her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump. It could also represent an opportunity for the Democratic nominee three weeks ahead of Election Day. Ms. Harris will have a chance to deliver her message to a viewership that may be skeptical of her candidacy. Her willingness to appear on Fox News may aid the perception that she is open to facing tough questions. And she can reach a swath of independent voters, more of whom watch Fox News than CNN or MSNBC, according to research by Nielsen.

Senior Democratic officials have long shown hostility toward Fox News, going so far as to formally bar the network from hosting a primary debate in 2020. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, was the last Democratic presidential nominee to sit for a Fox News interview. President Biden has not appeared on the network since taking office, though he has jousted at news conferences with its senior White House correspondent, Peter Doocy. But a thaw has occurred. Ms. Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, was interviewed on “Fox News Sunday” the past two weekends. (Mr. Walz’s aides reached out to Fox to schedule his second appearance.) In recent months, the network has also welcomed a string of Harris supporters, including Gov. Gavin Newson of California, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is now such a regular that he cheekily told Democratic convention-goers, “You might recognize me from Fox News.” Mr. Baier’s interview with Ms. Harris is scheduled to air on the same day that Fox is set to broadcast an unusual town hall in which Mr. Trump plans to field questions on subjects like abortion, child care and day care from an all-female audience. Ms. Harris has appeared across a range of traditional and niche media outlets in recent weeks. On Tuesday, she is set to record a live interview in Detroit with Charlamagne Tha God, host of the syndicated morning radio show “The Breakfast Club,” which is particularly popular with Black millennials. Last week, she sat for interviews with “The View,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Howard Stern Show.”

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Copyright October 22, 2024, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved