Lead Stories

Dustin Burrows: Keeping the 'Representative' in the Texas House of Representatives

I am honored that a majority of my peers have asked me to serve as Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives for the 89th session of the Texas Legislature. As such, I am responsible for protecting the sometimes-fragile deliberative environment of the House to guarantee open and respectful policy debates. The two basic principles common to any legislative body are the right of the majority to rule and the right of the minority to have a voice and participate in the process. The process works best when these two principles are in balance. The Speaker’s responsibility is to apply and enforce the rules the body adopts, protecting both principles.Applying equally to all 150 members, House rules are the tool devised by members to establish order and maintain decorum. Notably, House rules also include limits on the powers of the Speaker, which is why the Speaker does not and should not dictate House rules.

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The rules maintain the truly representative nature of the Texas House, allowing members the freedom to debate and deliberate policy issues most important to their districts without fear of threat or intimidation. Our chamber is a gathering place for passionate people duly elected by the Texans in their districts to advocate on their behalf precisely because they reflect the unique character of their districts. Whether a member represents rural Texas or one of our dynamic cities, their differences are settled on a level playing field, defined by rules adopted by the members, not dictated by the Speaker. The outcomes will be determined by the merits of the debate and the votes cast by members on behalf of the constituents to whom they are accountable. That is why the Texas House of Representatives has always been called the “Peoples’ House.” Since 2015, when the people of my Lubbock-area district first gave me the honor of advocating on their behalf, I have had the privilege of experiencing how remarkably effective the House can be in the face of seemingly impossible tasks. Accounting for the concerns of roughly 30 million people, allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for shared priorities, and wrestling with issues affecting Texans’ safety and prosperity is a massive undertaking. When the House is at its best, we tackle big problems together by building broad coalitions that are bigger and stronger than our geographic and political differences. As Speaker, I commit to working with all members of the House, whether they vote for me or not, to solve the unique issues most important to their districts. This is the sacred duty of the Speaker, and I will fulfill it.

US adds 227,000 jobs in November, rebounds from October slump

The U.S. job market rebounded in November after a major slowdown, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department. The U.S. added 227,000 jobs last month and the jobless rate ticked slightly higher to 4.2 percent, marking a significant improvement from a weak October jobs report. The U.S. added just 24,000 jobs in October, according to revised figures released Friday. Economists expected the U.S. to add roughly 200,000 jobs in November and for the jobless rate to hold at 4.1 percent, according to consensus estimates. The November jobs report comes a week before the Federal Reserve is set to meet for the final time this year. Fed officials are expected to cut interest rates one more time before the end of a year in which inflation fell sharply back toward the central bank’s 2 percent target.

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The September jobs number was revised up by 32,000 to 255,000, and October was increased by 12,000 to 36,000 for a combined 56,000 additional jobs than previously reported in those two months, the Labor Department said. Economists noted the continued strength in the labor market Friday and the fact that the October slump was driven by temporary factors like strikes and weather events. “The latest jobs data says the labor market is still going strong,” Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a post on social media. “After the softer numbers in October from the weather and striking workers, November bounces back with strong job growth along with upward revisions.” Across the last three months, the economy added 173,000 jobs per month on average, Gould said. Average hourly earnings increased by 4 percent over the last year to $35.61 from $34.23, Labor Department numbers show. That’s compared to a 2.5 percent increase in the headline consumer price index, which moved to 315.5 from 307.5 between October of last year and this year. Some economists were concerned Friday by a slowing in the employment rate for workers in their prime working years between 25 and 54.

Under Trump, an 'all of the above' energy policy is poised for a comeback

President-elect Donald Trump talks a lot about "unleashing American energy" — specifically oil, which he likes to call "liquid gold." And based on his nominees for key energy posts, there's every indication that a Trump administration 2.0 will actively promote oil and natural gas. But another phrase is popping up a lot right now in Republican circles: "All of the above." Trump's pick for "energy czar," who has a history of supporting both oil and renewables, has been described as an "all-of-the-above energy governor." A key Republican in Congress hopes that Chris Wright, Trump's choice to be the new secretary of energy and a believer in fracking, nuclear and geothermal energy, will support "an all-of-the-above energy policy." Statement after statement, story after story. Even the summer before the election, the phrase was reportedly the talk of the Republican National Convention.

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It's shorthand for a set of policies that support oil and natural gas — and simultaneously, every other form of domestic energy, including solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear. The phrase has been around for decades. It appears to have been first promoted by the fossil fuel lobby before being embraced by a Democratic president, Barack Obama. For Obama, the phrase meant supporting natural gas and pursuing cheap gasoline while also investing in renewable power. Today, it's a mainstream Republican position on energy. President Biden, some argue, also supported "all of the above" in practice — although he didn't use the phrase. But he only supported it in the near term. For the long term, he promoted green energy instead of fossil fuels, talking about a "clean energy transformation" that would remake the economy and address the climate crisis by gradually phasing out oil. In contrast, the version of "all of the above" being talked about in conservative circles today asserts that oil is here to stay — but it leaves room for cleaner energy, too. Trump has promised to "drill, baby, drill," but presidents in the U.S. don't dictate oil production. They can try to influence it, but market forces still dominate companies' decision-making. Case in point: Biden tried to accelerate the shift from fossil fuels, but under his administration U.S. oil production hit new record highs. The American Petroleum Institute has presented Trump with a policy wish list for the industry, including many things that the president-elect has promised to do, like rolling back incentives for producing and buying electric vehicles, restarting permitting for liquid natural gas exports, opening up more land for drilling for oil, and repealing or relaxing environmental regulations.

Texas Legislature is primed for red meat issues, but expect some bread and butter, too

With Republicans firmly in control of the Texas Legislature, the 2025 session could offer plenty of cultural conflict issues that appeal to many GOP voters and activists, but lawmakers are also expected to mix bread and butter with their red meat. Conversations with nearly a dozen lawmakers and legislative staffers indicate the session could focus on improving the state’s infrastructure and adding safeguards against ever-changing technology, including artificial intelligence. Last week during a forum sponsored by the lobby group Professional Advocacy Association of Texas, the chiefs of staff for Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan said the legislative session could largely involve bolstering the state’s infrastructure. Get the latest politics news from North Texas and beyond. Here are some of the major issues lawmakers could tackle during their 140-day session, which starts in January.

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Abbott says he has enough votes in the Legislature to approve a plan allowing Texas families to use public money to attend private schools. The proposal, which involves publicly funded education savings accounts, has been defeated in the Legislature by a bipartisan coalition of urban and rural legislators. The fallout from this year’s hard-fought primary elections, in which Abbott used his resources to oust some House lawmakers who blocked his plan, has led proponents to predict a voucher-style program will pass next year. Such a plan could be joined with increased dollars for public schools and teacher pay raises, as some lawmakers against Abbott’s plan will work to get the best deal possible. Texas can expect another significant budget surplus, so Abbott and some lawmakers are pushing for another major property tax relief package. Last year, lawmakers — after contentious debate — voted for a historic $18 billion property tax cut. With a surplus projected at $20 billion, another relief package is likely. Lawmakers could consider whether to stop linking public school funding to property taxes. That would provide additional relief but require an overhaul in the state’s approach to public school funding.

State Stories

The Texas Longhorns’ path to a national title is clear, even without first-round bye

Steve Sarkisian filed his own complaint Sunday about the College Football Playoff process, adding to the pile around committee members. Frankly, I don’t know why they serve. The perks are snacks and all the football you can watch and talk. Pretty much what I do for a living, and coaches and athletic directors and commissioners don’t take potshots at my credibility. At least not publicly. Anyway, Sarkisian took issue with first-round byes for the four highest-ranked conference champs. First I’ve heard him gripe about it. Possibly carping now because, if the byes went instead to the four highest-ranked teams regardless of whether they’re wearing league crowns, Texas would be off until New Year’s. Sark’s point is well-taken and will no doubt be addressed in the next round of playoffs. Especially after SMU got its hoof in the door at the expense of Alabama.

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But, until then, Sark can take solace in the fact that, of the schools that will play a first-round game, only Penn State has an easier path to the championship game on Jan. 20 in Atlanta. Or so says ESPN BET odds, which ranks Georgia, Oregon and Texas as the favorites to win it all. After that three-way tie for first, it goes Ohio State, Penn State, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Indiana, Arizona State, Clemson, SMU and Boise State. Note: Normally I don’t promote gambling interests, so, please, don’t wager the kids’ Christmas money on any of this. I couldn’t live with the guilt. Going by that list, Penn State would potentially face the 11th- and 12th-worst bets (SMU and Boise) in the first two rounds. Texas is right behind at 10th and 9th (Clemson and Arizona State). Disclaimer: Don’t blame me because Vegas called the Ponies a bad bet. I just report the news. The fifth-seeded Longhorns appear to be better off than Tennessee, which could face 4th and 1st (Ohio State and Oregon), or Indiana, which is lined up for 6th and 1st (Notre Dame and Georgia).

Lacey Hull: Texas law protects parents falsely accused of child abuse. Sadly, this innovative law cannot help Robert Roberson.

On Nov. 21, a Dallas man was exonerated — in Michigan. He had been convicted in 2014 of second-degree child abuse based entirely on testimony from a child-abuse pediatrician who claimed that only abusive shaking could explain why his eight-week-old daughter had fallen ill. The child’s parents had repeatedly sought medical care for her medical symptoms. Her father also described an incident that he thought might be relevant: That the baby had once fallen off his knee and he had caught her by the head right before she hit the floor, leaving a bruise on her face. But when a CT scan revealed retinal hemorrhages, a “child-abuse pediatrician” declared that this condition could only have been inflicted by violent shaking. Thankfully, the child fully recovered a few days later, yet her father was prosecuted and sentenced to a year in jail. Because the crime was a felony, he was stripped of his pilot’s license, depriving him of the career he had used to support his family. This man’s name will soon be added to the National Registry of Exonerations, which already includes 40 caregivers convicted using the since-debunked “shaken-baby syndrome” hypothesis.

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Another Dallas man, convicted using the shaken-baby syndrome hypothesis in 2000 after being accused of unwitnessed violent shaking, will soon be added to that registry too: Andrew Roark. His innocence and exoneration were recognized on Nov. 18 by Dallas County’s District Attorney after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that shaken-baby syndrome lacks scientific validity. To date, caregivers wrongfully convicted using the shaken-baby syndrome hypothesis who have now been exonerated have collectively served at least 310 years in prison. Conservatively, the average cost of incarceration in Texas is estimated to be about $31,000 per year, putting the cost of those years of wrongful incarceration at nearly $10 million of taxpayer money Not to mention the cost of untold suffering, including families torn apart and innocent children ripped from parents who were falsely accused of abusing them. As a member of the Legislature, I was proud to support Senate Bill 1578, that was passed in 2021 due to concerns about child-abuse pediatricians employed by hospitals rushing to presume abuse. This law gives parents accused of child abuse in a Child Protective Services agency investigation the right to a second medical opinion, regardless of ability to pay, and the right to present a conflicting opinion to a judge in family court. This law was a direct response to a disturbing trend: medically fragile children wrongfully separated from blameless parents by the allegations of child-abuse pediatricians with potential conflicts of interest and a lack of impartiality. Notably, this Republican-sponsored bill passed both chambers of the Texas Legislature without any dissenting votes. We lawmakers recognized that protecting children is one of our most important mandates but involves a more complex approach to public policy than a rush to presume that injured or ill children must have been abused by those who bring them to hospitals seeking treatment. Child abuse is undeniably horrific, but so is mistakenly destroying families. We need to ensure there are checks and balances and that we are getting it right. Sadly, our innovative law cannot help a Texas man who has spent over 20 years on death row after being wrongfully accused of child abuse. That wrongfully accused man is Robert Roberson III. After being hastily accused of abuse by hospital personnel when he brought his daughter to the emergency room seeking help, he was treated like a pariah in part due to his demeanor as a person with autism.

Austin has little to no 'forever chemicals' in its drinking water. What did the city do right?

New testing results show Austin has little to no traces of forever chemicals in its drinking water. Exposure to these chemicals, also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, have been linked to prostate and kidney cancers, thyroid conditions, decreased fertility and other health problems. PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they take thousands of years to break down. The chemicals are “bioaccumulative,” meaning they build up in an organism faster than they can be excreted. Over 1 million people in the greater Austin area get their drinking water from the Highland Lakes. Out of the 29 PFAS compounds Austin Water officials tested in the lakes, only faint traces of six were detected. The test results were verified by the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Water samples were tested at each of Austin’s three water treatment plants four times over the past year. At the Handcox Water Treatment Plant, none of the tested PFAS compounds were found. PFAS are found in seemingly everything, including clothes, nonstick pans, cosmetics and probably your bloodstream. The EPA announced earlier this year that it would start regulating five of the most dangerous PFAS. So far, almost 50 Texas water systems have reported PFAS levels exceeding the new limits, two of which are in Williamson County. Water systems in Seguin and San Antonio have also reported levels exceeding the limits. The EPA estimated that somewhere between 6% and 10% of all public water systems will fail the new guidelines. But Austin didn’t. Why? Kasi Clay, the water quality manager for Austin Water, said the results are thanks to protections on the Highland Lakes. “Our drinking water is less impacted by industries and activities that can introduce PFAS,” she said. Clay said traces of PFAS found in Austin’s drinking water were so low they were barely even testable.

Former North Texas CFO gets federal prison in wire fraud case

A former North Texas chief financial officer with a prior conviction has been sentenced to four years in federal prison on wire fraud charges, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. Jon Robert Rush, 56, of Keller, pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge in April 2024, the statement said. Rush was vice president and later chief financial officer of a Dallas Fort Worth International Airport logistics and transportation company, according to the attorney’s office. Between 2016 and 2020, Rush misdirected company funds to pay off personal debt, concealing the fraud by entering the transactions in the company’s accounting software, according to the statement. Rush was ordered to pay over $1 million in restitution, according to the attorney’s office. He was convicted in 1994 of conspiracy to commit counterfeit check fraud and wire fraud, which the court cited as the reason for his sentence at Wednesday’s hearing.

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SMU lands No. 11 seed in College Football Playoff, will face Penn State

The Mustangs will have a chance to compete for a national championship this year. About 12 hours after losing in the ACC Championship 34-31 to Clemson, SMU learned on the College Football Playoff selection show Sunday that it had punched its ticket to this year’s expanded 12-team playoff as the No. 11 seed. Having earned an at-large bid, the Mustangs will play Penn State on the road Dec. 21, with kickoff at 11 a.m. Dallas time. SMU’s 2024 playoff berth is its first since the College Football Playoff began in 2014. The playoff field was expanded from four teams to 12 starting this season, offering opportunities for more teams like SMU to secure a spot. Texas also earned a spot in the playoff; the No. 5 seed gets a home matchup against Clemson.

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The Mustangs made a statement as ACC newcomers this season, finishing 8-0 in conference play. While a win over Clemson in Saturday’s title game would’ve secured an automatic bid and a first-round bye as one of the four-highest-ranked conference champions, the Mustangs were still in the running for an at-large bid. There was a question about whether SMU could be jumped by a three-loss Alabama team not competing in the SEC Championship this weekend if it were to be blown out by Clemson. SMU fell behind 24-7 at halftime after a disastrous start, but orchestrated a 17-point comeback to tie the game at 31-31. With 16 seconds remaining, two big plays put Clemson in field goal range, allowing the Tigers to knock down a 56-yarder to win. Keeping SMU in the playoff field also set an important precedent. Had the Mustangs been left out after being ranked No. 8 last week and passed by a team that did not play this week, it would’ve impacted how team see their conference championship games and likely led to teams opting out in the future. But the Mustangs’ place in the playoff showed that even though they moved down in the rankings, the punishment isn’t all that severe. “It would be unprecedented. It would set a really bad precedent. It would break all the principles of what we’ve been told,” SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee said after Saturday’s loss. “We could’ve not showed up, and according to what we were told Tuesday night, we’d be in, so we showed up and competed our butts off.”

After a decline last year, Travis County homeowners should expect a return to rising property taxes

As Austin-area homeowners receive their latest property tax bills this winter, they should expect to see an increase. According to an analysis by the Travis County Tax Office, the average property tax bill this year for homeowners who live in their homes is $1,123 higher than last year, or about an 11% increase. This is the largest projected jump in the average tax bill since at least 2014. The increase comes after voters approved several propositions at the ballot box in November. Voters supported measures to increase teacher pay and help lower the cost of child care in the area, all of which will be paid for by raising tax rates. Annual increases in property tax bills have been the norm for Travis County homeowners for at least the past decade. Since 2013, the average annual increase has oscillated between $282 and $536, according to a KUT analysis of tax office data. Property taxes fund the vast majority of public services in Texas, including those provided by cities, counties and public schools.

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The rise in property tax bills this year comes even as Austin City Council members voted for property tax relief earlier this year and amid a yearslong fall in home values. In 2022, interest rates on mortgages began to rise following historic lows. The increase has made buying a house more expensive and pushed down prices and values of homes in Austin and across the country. This year’s likely property tax increase comes after concerted efforts from lawmakers to bring bills down. In 2023, Texas voters approved a proposition put forward by lawmakers that allowed the state to take several actions to lower property taxes, including excluding a larger portion of a home’s value from the amount that is taxed. In response, homeowners in Travis County got a respite last year from rising property taxes. The owner of an average-priced home likely saw a decrease in their bill of nearly $500 from the year before. “Last year, the state provided some relief for property tax payers and it was certainly welcomed,” said Bruce Elfant, the Travis County tax assessor-collector. “This year, we’re kind of back to normal.”

Livestock dying in Johnston County because of what ranchers say are 'forever chemicals' in fertilizer

Cows, horses and fish keep dying on Tony and Karen Coleman's ranch in Johnson County, and they blame "forever chemicals." PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are known to contaminate water, air, fish and soil across the world. It's estimated that PFAS, often referred to as "forever chemicals," are present in most humans' blood because of repeated exposure. The Colemans allege such chemicals are in fertilizer that has contaminated their animals, according to a lawsuit the couple filed in June along with three other Texas ranchers against the Environmental Protection Agency. The North Texas ranchers say 39 of their animals have died since the start of 2023, according to a report by NewsNation. They watched their cows stagger, writhe on the ground and make loud panicked sounds before dying, the report says.

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“It’s like a nightmare you can’t wake up from,” Tony Coleman told the cable news network. “You go home at night and you don’t really sleep well, because you know the next day is coming, and you know what it’s going to bring. I don’t think there’s enough words. It’s like ripping your heart out.” The Colemans say the PFAS originated on their neighbor's farmland, and was in fertilizer made from treated human sewage called biosolids that was spread on that property and made its way to the Colemans' ranch, according to the report. Their suit against the EPA says the agency violated the Clean Water Act and Administrative Procedures Act by failing to regulate PFAS in the biosolids. The EPA denied the allegations in September, saying the plaintiffs' order to identify and regulate PFAS was not available, NewsNation reported. San Antonio is one of several Texas cities that have contracts with fertilizer companies to take their biosolids, according to a report by the Texas Tribune. The report says if the EPA starts regulating PFAS in biosolids, water utilities are concerned the responsibility would fall to them to remove the chemicals from wastewater.

How a hidden fee pushed the cost of Texas residential solar systems through the roof

Across Texas, door-to-door salesmen talked up solar energy as a no-brainer: a way to boost a home’s value, snag a federal tax break and escape ever-rising utility bills. But since a rooftop solar system typically costs $25,000 or more, financing was key, and the sales reps had an answer for that. They pitched a new kind of instant, no-hassle loan with low interest rates and zero money down. The loans came from “fintech” (short for financial technology) lenders, and thanks to artificial intelligence, they could be approved in mere seconds. Customers could complete the entire transaction on a smartphone or tablet “at the kitchen table,” to quote one lender’s marketing materials. But when they entered their digital signatures on loan agreements, there was no way for consumers to know they were paying a large, hidden markup, a San Antonio Express-News investigation found. It happened to thousands of Texas homeowners.

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The charge ranged from 10% to 30% of the cost of a rooftop system and sometimes exceeded 50%, according to plaintiffs’ lawsuits, loan documents, industry experts and government reports. The lenders' failure to disclose the fee, along with overly broad statements about the federal solar tax credit, camouflaged the true cost of the loans and caused many consumers to spend thousands of dollars more for their rooftop systems than if they had paid cash or gotten financing from banks or credit unions, the paper found. The markup is best-known as the dealer fee but is sometimes called the program or platform fee or the original issue discount. By whatever name, it increases the dollar amount of a loan above and beyond the cost of materials and labor, and it means the homeowner has to pay interest on a larger principal for as long as 30 years. A San Antonio couple, Cathy and Frederick "Bill" Evans, say that after signing contracts for a rooftop solar system, they learned the loan included an undisclosed dealer fee of nearly $13,000 — almost 30% of the project’s cost. “They need to do something about what we’re going through,” said Cathy, 70, referring to elected officials and regulators. “We fought, and we got nothing except money going out of our pockets.” In a lawsuit against four fintech lenders that operate nationwide, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said that in his state alone, the companies collected $35 million in “hidden fees” over six years ending in 2023, driving up the cost of more than 5,000 rooftop solar systems. Minnesota has a total of 18,500 rooftop systems. Texas has more than 276,000. The dealer fee came “at the expense of consumers who may never have taken out a loan … if they had been informed of the true cost of such financing,” Ellison said in court filings. The attorneys general of Kentucky and Tennessee are pursuing similar suits.

TxDOT wants to keep approving its own federal environmental reviews

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is asking the federal government to let the state continue to approve its own environmental reviews — a delegated authority intended to fast-track highway projects. The public has until Monday night to weigh in on the arrangement that critics have long skewered as "the fox guarding the hen house." Since 2014, TxDOT has operated under the agreement with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), allowing the state agency to assume responsibility for environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Those reviews analyze the impact of highway projects on everything from air and water to homes, businesses and historical sites. TxDOT says the sweeping powers delegated to the state streamline efforts to avoid "substantial delays in the delivery of important transportation projects," shaving months off the environmental review process.

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"TxDOT is still subject to the same statutory and regulatory requirements that would apply without NEPA assignment, and our agency takes the responsibility for ensuring compliance with those requirements seriously," TxDOT spokesperson Adam Hammons said in an e-mail. "Over the past ten years, TxDOT has been subject to multiple audits and monitoring events by FHWA." One FHWA monitoring report issued this year found TxDOT was in violation of federal regulations related to the installation of traffic noise barriers. The report said the state was making changes to come into compliance. Critics of the arrangement say the self-certification process known as "NEPA assignment" doesn't result in the rigorous reviews intended under federal law, especially for large-scale projects like the expansion of I-35 through Austin. "The federal government does not have the same vested interest in pushing through these projects that TxDOT does," said Addie Walker with Reconnect Austin, a group that's pushed for burying I-35 through Central Austin. "They have a really strong interest in pushing these projects through, and especially with NEPA assignment, no real incentive to slow down, listen to what the community and local and regional governments are saying."

He was Houston’s ‘hero doctor.' Now, he's leading a group of COVID vaccine critics allied with RFK Jr.

Four years after he was hailed internationally as a “hero doctor” for his work during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Joseph Varon, a Houston-based critical care physician, has emerged as a key player in a reinvigorated anti-vaccine movement. The 62-year-old physician who once cajoled colleagues to receive the COVID vaccine is now advocating against it as a leader of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), an increasingly powerful physician group that sows doubt on COVID vaccine safety while pushing COVID medications that have been discredited by public health agencies. Varon’s newfound advocacy comes at an opportune moment. With Donald Trump returning to the White House and one of the country’s most prominent vaccine skeptics, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., poised to take over as the nation’s top health official, Varon and other doctors who push questionable treatments stand to gain more influence over people’s health decisions, experts said. “I would not want to see Varon and RFK Jr. in charge during the next pandemic, whenever it comes,” said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

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Varon’s physician group has partnered with Children’s Health Defense – a known anti-vaccine group led by Kennedy – and recently congratulated Kennedy on his nomination to the post. In interviews over the last year, Varon has talked openly about his changing views of COVID vaccines, which he previously supported but now calls unsafe, contrary to established public health guidance and studies that estimate the vaccines prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths. Varon’s attorney, Stephen Barnes, said that “conclusions and implications…that Dr. Varon did not follow the science during his career, including during the COVID pandemic, are unsupported.” Barnes argued that top public health authorities – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization – are no longer credible. Varon’s about-face on vaccines, however, falls in line with his three-decade career at multiple Houston hospitals, where he pushed medical boundaries and more than once found himself under the microscope of federal authorities and health care regulators. The doctor – who until May taught first-year medical students at the University of Houston and primarily works out of a two-story, red-brick office building just outside the Texas Medical Center – has been penalized by the Texas Medical Board twice, faced allegations of Medicare fraud and been accused of allowing unqualified medical students to work without adequate supervision at two different hospitals, records show.

Texas leads nation in riskiest states for porch piracy, report finds

In a study conducted by The Action Network, Texas has been identified as the state with the highest risk of porch piracy, th 29.8% probability of package theft. This result comes just after National Package Protection Day on Wednesday, drawing attention to the issue of package theft across the nation. The findings indicated that 5% of Texans have reported having a package stolen within the last three months. Mail is the most susceptible to be stolen followed by Amazon ackages according to the report. North Carolina ranks as the second-most affected state, with a 14.4% implied probability of porch piracy. Meanwhile, Florida, coming in third, reported a staggering 3,270 cases of theft from residences in the previous year.

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Tax breaks for LNG plants don’t benefit the communities granting them, report says

Three low-income school districts in Texas have granted more than $2 billion in tax relief to new liquefied natural gas terminals on the Gulf Coast, according to a report released this week by the Sierra Club, which tallied publicly available data on agreements between companies and local public entities. Those tax breaks, intended to attract investment and employment opportunities, totaled about $4 million per permanent post-construction job promised by developers of the gas projects, said the 34-page report, “The People Always Pay: Tax Breaks Force Gulf Communities to Subsidize the LNG Industry.” Sierra Club researchers compiled dozens of different tax agreements from 15 LNG projects in Texas and Louisiana that are currently operating, under construction or planned. Proponents of such incentive programs say offering tax breaks supports big business that fuels the economy, attracts investment and upholds American energy dominance. Critics say the tax breaks deprive local communities of important revenue.

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“Subsidies remain the norm in the U.S.’ buildout of massive, capital-intensive export terminals, concentrated on the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast,” the Sierra Club report said. “LNG developers in these areas typically receive lucrative tax breaks that deny the local community critical funds for social services and infrastructure.” A collection of enormous LNG projects has cropped up along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana in recent years, fueled by booming gas production in the shale fields of Texas. The facilities pipe in shale gas, compress it into a super-cool liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit and then load it onto ocean tankers for sale overseas. Five new terminals in the Gulf already have helped make the U.S. the world’s largest exporter of LNG. Another five are currently under construction, four of them in Texas. According to the Texas comptroller, those four projects represent $49 billion in investments in the state, while Texas’ three operating LNG terminals exported more than $9 billion in 2023.

National Stories

Daniel Penny defense may have been handed 'partial victory' with dropped charge, legal expert suggests

Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett suggested Daniel Penny's defense may have been handed a "partial victory" after Judge Wiley granted the prosecution's motion to dismiss the most serious charge of second-degree manslaughter on Friday. "In [dropping the charge], Judge Wiley created what looks like reversible error so that if the jury convicts on the lesser charge next week, it would be overturned on appeal. Why? Because the judge contradicted his own earlier ruling that the jury could only consider the second count if they found Penny not guilty of the first count. Guess what? That didn't happen," Jarrett said on "Hannity," Friday, hours after the prosecution's motion was granted. "Now the judge is letting the jury do what he said he couldn't do. And the defense is right. This is coercive, sort of forcing the jury to convict by changing the rules after the fact. It's not just unorthodox, it's legally wrong," he continued.

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Lara Trump steps down as RNC co-chair and addresses speculation about Florida Senate seat

Lara Trump will step down as co-chair of the Republican National Committee as she considers a number of potential options with her father-in-law, President-elect Donald Trump, set to return to the White House. Among those possibilities is replacing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whom Trump tapped to be the next secretary of state. If Rubio is confirmed, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will choose who takes the seat through the remainder of Rubio’s term, which expires in 2026. “It is something I would seriously consider,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t know exactly what that would look like. And I certainly want to get all of the information possible if that is something that’s real for me. But yeah, I would 100% consider it.” Elected as RNC co-chair in March, Lara Trump was a key player in the Republicans retaking the White House and control of the Senate while maintaining a narrow House majority. What she does next could shape Republican politics, given her elevated political profile and her ties to the incoming president.

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The idea of placing a Trump family member in the Senate has been lauded in some Republican circles. Among the people pushing for her to replace Rubio is Maye Musk, mother of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “The Senate is an old man’s club. We desperately need a smart, young, outspoken woman who will reveal their secrets,” she posted on X. Lara Trump is 42. Elon Musk, who was with Lara Trump on election night at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, responded to his mother’s post: “Lara Trump is genuinely great.” Led by chairman Michael Whatley and Lara Trump, the RNC invested heavily in recruiting roughly 230,000 volunteers and an army of lawyers for what it called its “election integrity” effort, four years after Donald Trump lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, citing false or unproven theories about voter fraud. Outside groups such as Turning Point Action and Musk’s America PAC took a greater responsibility for advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. While Whatley will remain RNC chairman, Lara Trump said she felt she had accomplished her goals in the co-chair role. “With that big win, I kind of feel like my time is up,” she said. “What I intended to do has been done.” Lara Trump praised Musk’s new endeavor, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a nongovernmental task force headed by Musk and and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. They’ve been tapped to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations as part of Trump’s “Save America” agenda for his second term.

Google sues to stop the US from monitoring it like a bank

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced on Friday it had placed Google Payment Corp. under federal supervision, reports Reuters. Google reportedly filed a lawsuit to block the CFPB’s order, which could result in routine inspections and monitoring like those imposed on banks. The agency found that Google’s error resolution and fraud prevention processes pose risks to consumers, citing consumer complaints about Google Pay Balance and Google’s peer-to-peer payments. Those complaints, which Google’s lawsuit claims are “unsubstantiated,” according to The Washington Post, include that the company didn’t seem to fully investigate fraudulent charges and didn’t “adequately explain” the results of those investigations.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced on Friday it had placed Google Payment Corp. under federal supervision, reports Reuters. Google reportedly filed a lawsuit to block the CFPB’s order, which could result in routine inspections and monitoring like those imposed on banks. The agency found that Google’s error resolution and fraud prevention processes pose risks to consumers, citing consumer complaints about Google Pay Balance and Google’s peer-to-peer payments. Those complaints, which Google’s lawsuit claims are “unsubstantiated,” according to The Washington Post, include that the company didn’t seem to fully investigate fraudulent charges and didn’t “adequately explain” the results of those investigations.

The Trump NIH pick who wants to take on ‘cancel culture’ colleges

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said. Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures. He isn’t yet sure how to measure academic freedom, but he has looked at how a nonprofit called Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression scores universities in its freedom-of-speech rankings, a person familiar with his thinking said. The nonprofit scores schools based on a survey of students’ perceptions of factors such as whether they feel comfortable expressing ideas. Schools are also penalized if their administrators sanction faculty for opinions or disinvite a speaker from a campus event after a controversy.

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Universities that are leading recipients of NIH grants but have poor FIRE rankings include the University of Pennsylvania (“very poor”), Columbia University (“abysmal”) and the University of Southern California (“very poor”). Schools with top scores in FIRE’s most recent rankings are the University of Virginia, Michigan Technological University and Florida State University. The academic-freedom prerequisite is among several proposals for overhauling the NIH and its billions of dollars in grant-making that Bhattacharya would pursue if the Senate confirms him, the people said Among Bhattacharya’s other plans are funding studies to replicate the work of other scientists to help root out scientific fraud. He would also create a scientific journal that would publish studies alongside comments by named reviewers, to encourage more open discussion of scientific ideas. He has proposed dialing back the amount of NIH grant money that pays for publication in journals. And he would seek to pause so-called gain-of-function research that engineers viruses with new, potentially dangerous, traits to study them. He would like to institute term limits for the scientists running the NIH’s various research institutes and centers and would assess a congressional Republican proposal to reduce the number of institutes and centers to 15 from 27, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Biden officials race to help stabilize Syria after regime collapse

The Biden administration raced Sunday to try to help stabilize Syria after the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, targeting the Islamic State with dozens of airstrikes and monitoring Syrian stockpiles of chemical weapons. President Joe Biden announced that U.S. forces had hit Islamic State camps and operatives in Syria, and said that the United States was working with its partners to address concerns that extremist groups could capitalize on the power vacuum left by Assad’s departure to Russia. “We’re clear-eyed about the fact that ISIS will try to take advantage of any vacuum to reestablish its capabilities to create a safe haven,” Biden said, speaking from the Roosevelt Room. “We will not let that happen.” The rebel groups that toppled the autocrat had their own “grim record of terrorism,” he said. “They’re saying the right things now. But as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions.”

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The flurry of activity capped an astonishing turn of events in which rebel forces needed just days to upend a status quo that stretched across the administrations of three U.S. presidents, and as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to steer a very different foreign policy from that of his predecessor. Biden said he had directed his administration to work to ensure that Syria remains as stable as possible, as many actors inside and outside the country seek to capitalize on the situation to grab power and advantage. With Israel seizing control of border areas of Syria and Turkish-backed forces skirmishing with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s northeast, the situation remains deeply combustible. Chief among the fears is that the Islamic State — which long held portions of Syrian territory under the fierce rule of its caliphate — could seize advantage of the situation to reestablish itself as a major force in the country. Many parts of the U.S. government were caught off guard by Assad’s collapse, including longtime advocates for Assad’s ouster, according to one senior U.S. official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about sensitive internal assessments. U.S. officials are far from confident that the rebels will govern in a humane or productive manner, the official said. To battle back the militant group, forces from the U.S. Central Command, whose area of responsibility includes the Middle East, on Sunday struck over 75 Islamic State targets using B-52, F-15 and A-10 warplanes, the command said in a statement.

For Taylor Swift, it’s the end of the ‘Eras’

Anyone with an ear tuned to the world of pop music knew the Eras Tour was going to be a big one. It was Taylor Swift’s first tour in almost five years, the longest gap of her career. And Swift, long the biggest star in pop music, had become even bigger, transcending the Top 40 to become a cultural phenomenon. Now, almost two years later, Swift started the final show of the tour on Sunday night in Vancouver, Canada, with her standard opener, “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince.” “It’s a pretty cool night to be in Vancouver, huh?” she asked. Meghan O’Keefe of Philadelphia was attending her fifth Eras show on Sunday night. She paid only $15 for the tickets, but they came with a catch. No view. “They’re behind the stage, but I am here,” she said. “I totally didn’t expect that.” (She ended up being allowed to move to a full-view seat.) The tour included extensive music, not just from Swift’s most recent album, “Midnights,” but from her entire career, from the country of “Fearless” to the pop of “1989” and the indie pop of “Folklore.” While the set list stayed fairly static, Swift added “surprise songs” every night; at Sunday’s final concert they were “A Place in This World,” “New Romantics,” “Long Live,” “New Year’s Day” and “The Manuscript.” The first concert came in March 2023 in Glendale, Ariz., and it was even bigger than anyone imagined: three hours, 15 minutes without intermission and more than 40 songs.

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Jay-Z accused in a civil lawsuit of raping a 13-year-old girl in 2000 along with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

Jay-Z, the star rapper and entrepreneur whose real name is Shawn Carter, was accused in a lawsuit Sunday of raping a 13-year-old girl in 2000 allegedly along with Sean “Diddy” Combs. The anonymous accuser, identified only as “Jane Doe,” said the assault happened after she was driven to an MTV Video Music Awards after-party. The federal lawsuit was originally filed in October in the Southern District of New York, listing Combs as a defendant. It was refiled Sunday to include Carter. Texas-based attorney Tony Buzbee, who filed the suit, did not comment. Carter called the allegations "idiotic" in a lengthy statement Sunday evening and alleged that Buzbee was engaged in unprofessional behavior. "These allegations are so heinous in nature that I implore you to file a criminal complaint, not a civil one!! Whomever would commit such a crime against a minor should be locked away, would you not agree?" Carter said in a statement to NBC News. "These alleged victims would deserve real justice if that were the case."

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Lead Stories

Texas House Republicans choose their speaker candidate, but the loser declares victory

It took three rounds of voting, but two-term Rep. David Cook emerged Saturday as the choice of most House Republicans for speaker when the Texas Legislature convenes in January. It may not be enough. Shortly after the closed-door meeting at the Capitol ended with Cook’s selection, his opponent — Rep. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock — announced that with support from Democrats, he had the votes needed to become speaker. “I have secured the votes of enough of my colleagues,” Burrows said. “It is bipartisan.” Burrows declined to answer questions from reporters but later released a list of 76 supporters with 38 Republicans and 38 Democrats. All 150 representatives will select a speaker as one of the first orders of business when the Legislature’s regular session begins Jan. 14. It takes a majority, or 76 votes, to be chosen as House leader. Speaking after the meeting, Cook acknowledged the race for the gavel is not over.

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“I’ll continue working between now and Jan. 14 to earn [the vote] of every member of the Texas Republican caucus — as well as any Democrat,” Cook said. Rep. Nate Schatzline, a Cook supporter, called Burrows’ announcement a declaration of war on the state Republican Party and a betrayal of Texas “for power.” ”Ask your rep where they stand,” he said on social media. The Texas Republican Party’s executive committee responded with a resolution urging House Republicans to unite behind Cook and calling on Burrows to end his campaign for speaker. The resolution also condemned “any effort by Republican Representatives to ally with Democrats to elect a Speaker.” All 88 House Republicans, including incumbents and incoming freshmen, participated in Saturday’s meeting, which was called to choose a consensus GOP candidate for speaker, a powerful position long coveted by the party’s right wing. The secret-ballot votes came a little more than 24 hours after Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, announced he would not seek a third term leading the House. Phelan’s return as speaker was opposed by the right wing of his party, including lawmakers and activists who blamed him for the failure of conservative priorities in the House, and he couldn’t muster the support for a third term in leadership.

Can stocks pull off a third consecutive year of big gains?

Wall Street is grappling with whether another year of robust gains is possible for a stock market that is looking precariously expensive. The S&P 500 has surged 28% in 2024 and is on pace for back-to-back annual jumps of more than 20% for the first time since a four-year stretch that ended in 1998. Strategists at some of the nation’s biggest banks are projecting more modest returns in 2025. JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs project that the S&P 500 will reach 6500 by the end of next year, a 6.7% increase from Friday’s close of roughly 6090. Others are a little more bullish. Barclays recently raised its price target to 6600. Bank of America and Deutsche Bank expect the benchmark index to hit 6666 and 7000, respectively. Analysts generally agree that President-elect Donald Trump’s pro-growth policies will be a boon for stocks, but some question how much farther they can run. A backdrop of high interest rates, geopolitical turmoil and potential trade wars could dent the market’s gains, some warn. Yet many investors are hesitant to call an end to a rally that has repeatedly defied expectations.

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“We’re kind of in the honeymoon phase of the new administration,” said Matt Miskin, co-chief investment strategist for John Hancock Investment Management. “But the Fed is going to be on the hook for reacceleration of the economy, when it’s doing pretty well, frankly, and perhaps a bit firmer inflation.” In the coming days, investors will parse another round of inflation data to see whether price pressures are continuing to ease. That report will be one of the final readings on the state of the economy before the Federal Reserve’s December meeting, where the central bank is expected to cut interest rates again. Friday’s jobs report suggested the labor market remains healthy. One reason for optimism heading into next year? More stocks are joining the rally. Traders are bidding up economically sensitive stocks that lagged behind the wider market during the first half of the year. The small-cap focused Russell 2000 index is within striking distance of its first record close in three years, and its November gains nearly doubled those of the S&P 500. More than 220 stocks in the benchmark index have closed at a 52-week high since the end of October. It would now take erasing the gains of the top 171 stocks in the S&P 500, including Nvidia and Apple, to negate the index’s total return this year, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices data as of Wednesday. Traders typically take a more inclusive rally as a sign that it has legs because the market is less vulnerable to a downturn if a few sectors stumble. “I don’t think there’s any surprise about the broadening,” said Hal Reynolds, co-chief investment officer at Los Angeles Capital Management. “I’d say the only surprise is that it’s taken so long to occur.”

Assad regime falls. Retreat of Syrian forces threatens ‘Saigon moment’ for Russia

A fast-advancing rebel offensive in Syria threatens to dislodge Russia from a strategic linchpin that Moscow has used for a decade to project power in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean and into the African continent. It also challenges Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to portray Moscow as a flag bearer for an alternative global order to rival Western liberalism, and his defense of the Syrian regime as evidence of successful pushback against American dominance in the region. A coalition of Syrian rebels launched a surprise offensive last week, reigniting a dormant civil war and seizing significant swaths of territory in Syria, which hosts important Russian air and naval bases. The rebels have already taken the cities of Aleppo and Hama and on Saturday, they said they seized the crucial city of Homs. The Russian air force has been supporting Syrian government forces by carrying out airstrikes on rebel positions. The Russian military also plans to carry out naval exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, Russian state news agency TASS said.

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Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2015 to prop up President Bashar al-Assad against an armed uprising prompted by the Arab Spring, giving it a role as an influential foreign power in the Middle East. It sought to leverage its relations with rival powers such as Iran and Israel, as well as Turkey and Gulf states, to mediate conflicts and claim status as a regional power broker. Moscow co-sponsored peace talks with Tehran and Ankara to try to end the Syrian war. At Israel’s request, it agreed to hold Iranian and Iranian-backed forces away from Syria’s border with Israel. Syria has partly been an ideological project for Putin. The intervention in Syria became a way for Russia to extend its vision of a multipolar world opposed to the Western liberal order, said Nicole Grajewski, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of a coming book on Russia’s relationship with Iran, including in Syria. “To see Russian planes leave Syria as rebel forces move onward towards their air bases, and their assets in Damascus fall, this would be so devastating for the Russian image of itself,” she said. “It would be akin to a Saigon moment for them.”

‘It’s a very dangerous strategy’: The controversial tactic super PACs used to boost Democrats this year

A sudden cash infusion boosting Libertarian candidates for Congress. An independent expenditure for a far-right gadfly in Pennsylvania. A mysterious group using offensive messaging against Hispanic Republicans. These were a few of the unusual, controversial and even desperate tactics deployed as part of a forceful embrace of a traditionally little-used strategy: super PACs helping Democrats by elevating conservative third-party candidates. Campaigns and parties generally avoid the gambit, which can be seen as dirty or underhanded because it tries to win an election by using a third-party candidate to siphon votes from the opposition instead of competing directly against them. But it was used significantly more this year than in other recent elections, a POLITICO analysis found. Three outside groups poured in some $3.5 million to support longshot candidates in 10 races, part of a broader $5.8 million spend in more than two dozen. And new campaign finance reports shed light on their donors and ties to the Democratic Party. One group, Voter Protection Project, dropped more than $3.8 million, much of which went to aid Libertarian or independent candidates in five House seats. Its single largest donor was House Democrats’ top outside group, House Majority PAC.

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Another group entered the Pennsylvania Senate race to prop up a Constitution Party candidate, spending over 50 times more than the truck driver himself reported raising. The group, ostensibly supporting a third party, used Democratic vendors. Most controversially, a group calling itself Save Western Culture popped up in the final days of the election, taking elaborate steps to conceal its funders and strategists as it enraged and offended Republicans with its messaging. One text warned that “Mexican-born” Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) was working against U.S. interests. A robocall slammed Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan for acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. And one of their ads dubbed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) a “cucked-king”. “I’m against a lot of Ted Cruz’s views, but I don’t want to insult him personally like they did, like making fun of him,” said Ted Brown, the Libertarian nominee who was the unwitting beneficiary of the group’s ads in the Texas Senate race. “Definitely not my style.” All together the three groups boosted third-party candidates in the Pennsylvania, Texas and Maryland Senate races and in seats held by Reps. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.), Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), Don Davis (D-N.C.) and two open Michigan seats. Only Davis, Chavez-DeRemer and Kaptur won or lost their races by margins small enough that the Libertarian candidate could be considered a possible spoiler. The most compelling case is Kaptur, who won her northwestern Ohio seat by 2,382 votes while Libertarian nominee Tom Pruss — supported by Voter Protection Project — received more than 15,000 votes.

Border drownings rose as migrants rushed to cross and Texas clamped down

Angelica had journeyed with her parents, older brother, aunt and uncle by foot from South America through a muddy jungle, ridden atop sooty train cars and slept in noisy city plazas hoping to reach the United States. Now it was dawn and the 4-year-old girl’s family could see their destination from across the Rio Grande. The adults sent messages to relatives back in Venezuela before stepping into the river with the two children. “Ya no aguantamos más,” wrote Robiet Farías, Angelica’s uncle, saying he could not bear waiting anymore to enter the United States. The family held one another’s hands and formed a chain with other migrants crossing the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass that November day in 2023. But as they got deeper into the river, something went wrong. Panic set in. The Farías family disappeared into the water. This stretch of the Rio Grande has become a graveyard as the number of people dying while trying to cross rises. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported. And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.

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The news organizations collected death records from every Texas county and Mexican state that borders the Rio Grande since 2017, when President-elect Donald Trump first took office pledging to crack down on illegal migration, to examine the effects of enforcement and migration policies on asylum seekers, and whether these factors have increased drownings. The data shows that at least 1,107 people drowned trying to cross the river in the seven years from 2017 to 2023. The deaths peaked in 2022 as the number of people trying to enter the United States soared. A rising number of women were among the dead. In 2023, more than 1 in 10 drownings involved a child. The spike in deaths coincided with a record surge in people attempting to cross into the United States illegally. Many of those migrants chose to cross the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, a city of 28,000 that has emerged as a flash point in the nation’s debate over migration. Abbott and the Biden administration have clashed over how to respond to the surge, with the Texas governor installing dozens of miles of razor wire, shipping containers and buoys, and the White House accusing the state of blocking its access to the river. Migrants often choose Eagle Pass because it is across the river from a part of Mexico that is considered safer than other regions controlled by criminal gangs. But the river there has a significant current in certain areas, and gets deeper as people reach the midpoint. Weeds and rocks can make it difficult to get one’s footing.

State Stories

Texas left with plenty of what-ifs after falling to Georgia in SEC Championship

The legend of Gunner Stockton will ring across Georgia’s rolling hills and down through Bulldog lore after the untried, unflappable sophomore orchestrated a league title and improbable 22-19 overtime win Saturday at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, preserving the natural order of the Southeastern Conference. For at least a couple of weeks, anyway. Texas, representing the SEC’s new order, will look back on its first championship game in its new league as an exercise in “What if?” What if a false start hadn’t wiped off a Bert Auburn field goal in regulation? What if Jahdae Barron had gotten the pick-six he envisioned?

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What if Texas hadn’t knocked Carson Beck out of the game? Stockton actually “sparked” Georgia’s floundering offense after Beck appeared to injure his right shoulder on the last play of the first half, Steve Sarkisian said, which was about as unlikely thing you’d have expected him to say going in. Beck, who finished 7 of 13 for 56 yards, is on the brink of an NFL career. Stockton’s numbers weren’t much better — 12 of 16 for 71 yards — but the kid who’d thrown 16 passes before Saturday produced 19 points in the second half and OT. He even got a little luck to go with his pluck late in regulation. On third and 15 and a shot at a winning field goal within his grasp, Stockton tried to throw away a pass that instead fell into the hands of Jahdae Barron. Texas’ stellar corner gathered the ball, looked up and saw... “Green grass,” he said. He didn’t cover much of it, though, because Jaylon Guilbeau whiffed on a block when all he had to do was get in the way. Of course, it was hardly Texas’ first mistake of the night. Besides a season-high 11 penalties for 94 yards, there were a couple flags that went uncounted because of off-setting penalties. They were called for false starts on a punt and field goal attempt. The latter on Malik Agbo cost them three points when Auburn missed a 42-yarder on his second try after making it from 37. Colin Simmons was off-sides on consecutive plays.

Texas semiconductor players get millions in CHIPS Act funding

Two North Texas technology companies are the latest beneficiaries of the CHIPS and Science Act, poised to reap over $80 million collectively as President Joe Biden prepares to leave office. The Commerce Department on Friday announced three individual preliminary memoranda of terms that allocates up to $33 million to Sherman-based Coherent, and up to $50 million to X-Fab, headquartered in Germany but with U.S. operations in Lubbock. Both entities will use the money to expand and modernize facilities, and create upwards of 200 jobs, according to a statement. A third company, SkyWater Technology headquartered in Bloomington, Minn., will get up to $16 million.

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All told, X-Fab and Coherent are set to reap the rewards of the federal government’s newfound largesse on semiconductors — a strategically-important sector — both as a linchpin of U.S. government industrial policy, and efforts to counter China’s geopolitical influence. “The Biden-Harris Administration’s bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act is making targeted investments to meet market demands for technology critical to our national and economic security,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “Today’s proposed investments across Texas and Minnesota would help bolster domestic chip production and help secure our supply chain for decades to come,” she added. GOP Senator John Cornyn, one of the CHIPS Act’s authors, hailed the funding as a boost as a means to buttress “this vulnerable supply chain, boosting our national security and global competitiveness, and creating new jobs for Texans,” he said in a statement. “The chipmaking capabilities these resources will enable at Coherent in Sherman will help the U.S. reclaim its leadership role in the critically important semiconductor industry, and I look forward to seeing more Texas-led advancements in the years to come.”

‘Deaths will be in vain’: Texas body to skip 2 years of maternal death data amid pushback

Advocates are pushing back against a Texas committee’s decision not to conduct in-depth investigations of pregnancy-related deaths from 2022 and 2023, the years immediately following the implementation of the state’s abortion ban. The Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee describes the move as an attempt to catch up on its backlog of data, and to provide more up-to-date reviews of maternal deaths. But Texas residents, maternal health advocates and medical providers on Friday urged the committee to reverse its decision, citing concerns that the state will be left without adequate data on the impact of the abortion ban. “When we don’t have a clear picture of what’s been happening, we cannot make effective changes to better or improve the future,” said Serita Fontanesi, who works at the advocacy organization Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity.

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In 2021, Texas enacted a ban on abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, followed by a near-total ban on abortion a year later. Currently, terminating a pregnancy is only allowed in life-threatening situations, an exception that has caused confusion among medical providers. The investigative news outlet ProPublica has reported on numerous cases where pregnant women died under Texas’ abortion ban. Fontanesi worries that, without investigations into deaths from after the ban, the state will not be able to improve care. “Too many birthing people and their children whose lives were lost, perhaps for preventable reasons, will go unheard, unseen, unremembered,” she said. “Their deaths will be in vain.” Committee members said at Friday’s regular meeting that their decision was not politically motivated. Dr. Patrick Ramsey, the committee’s vice-chair, said at the meeting that the reporting jump “was completely needed.”

Can recycled oilfield water quench the thirst of drought-stricken West Texas?

There is water in all the wrong places in this corner of West Texas. The Pecos River runs dry through this small town mired in severe drought. But Lake Boehmer, a pool of toxic water flowing from underground, lies just a few miles south. To the north, a well blew out on a ranch late last year and spewed salty water sky high. Early settlers built canals to divert water from the Pecos River here and named the town for the Imperial Valley of California. But today Imperial is surrounded by oilfields and farmland that has gone fallow. Oil and gas companies are injecting vast quantities of wastewater, also known as produced water, into the subsurface of the Permian Basin. These injection wells have been linked to surface deformation, blow-outs and earthquakes. Eric Selinger’s family used to farm shrimp on their property along the Pecos River outside Imperial. But the aquaculture ponds have long lain empty. He sees a potential solution in produced water and is seeking business partners to treat it for irrigation on his land. Selinger hopes that repurposing produced water can reduce the volume injected underground, and in turn, the risk of blow-outs and earthquakes.

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“I’ve got the vision and I’ve got the piece of land,” he said on a warm October afternoon. Selinger isn’t the only one betting that produced water can be used outside the oilfield. The Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates oil and gas waste, has two pilot projects to test the concept. The Texas Produced Water Consortium, based at Texas Tech University, is running its own set of treatment pilots. The Texas legislature is expected to review the issue next year. “I believe produced water in the next five years will be a viable supply alternative in some areas that need it,” said state Sen. Charles Perry of Lubbock during a hearing of the Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs on September 3. “If … for nothing else [in] the agricultural community.” But scientific study of using treated produced water is still in the early stages. Produced water can contain hundreds of constituents that are costly to test for and treat. Many of the constituents do not have toxicity standards approved by federal or state regulators. The cost of treating produced water remains prohibitive. Those challenges will have to be addressed to responsibly use produced water outside the oilfields.

Conroe ISD no longer employs teacher who banned restroom breaks for first graders

A Conroe ISD first-grade teacher is no longer employed by the district after she refused to let her students use the restroom as punishment for losing the classroom restroom pass. Conroe ISD officials declined to comment on whether the teacher quit or was fired. About five students soiled themselves during class Wednesday and were not provided clean clothes, according to the district. "Bartlett Elementary and district administrators were made aware of a situation after school dismissed on Wednesday in which a first-grade teacher at the school denied students access to the restroom as a punishment. We have conducted a comprehensive investigation, and the teacher is no longer employed by Conroe ISD. This incident is not a reflection of the thousands of exceptional educators teaching in classrooms across the district. We are committed to supporting the students and families impacted by this upsetting event and are dedicated to fostering a culture of mutual respect and care among all students, families, and staff," said Sarah Blakelock, executive director of communications for Conroe ISD, in a statement Friday.

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Calif. city says it didn’t expect Dickies move from Fort Worth

Leaders in Costa Mesa, California, say they were just as surprised as those in Fort Worth when the parent company for Dickies announced last month it plans to relocate the brand’s headquarters to the city near Los Angeles. VF Corp. will move Dickies’ operations from its hometown in Fort Worth into an existing California headquarters for Vans footwear this spring. The Denver-based conglomerate owns both brands, as well as The North Face, Timberland and other active-lifestyle labels. VF has struggled in recent years to return some of its brands to profitability. About 120 employees in Fort Worth will be affected by the Dickies move. The news that Dickies would leave Fort Worth, where it was founded in 1922, came as a shock to Fort Worth politicians and business leaders. Cities often try to work with companies that are considering a move, but VF Corp. didn’t inform anyone in City Hall until it made the public announcement Nov. 21. VF Corp. recently spent several million dollars moving Dickies into new offices in downtown Fort Worth. The company was not receiving business incentives from the city.

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Tony Dodero, a spokesperson for the city of Costa Mesa, said VF Corp. didn’t discuss its plans with officials there, either. Costa Mesa did not provide the company with any economic incentives. Costa Mesa Mayor John Stephens said in a statement to the Star-Telegram that Dickies is a welcome addition to the region. “It is very meaningful that Dickies chose to relocate in Costa Mesa. The city is dedicated to supporting the relocation in any way we can, and we appreciate the economic opportunity Dickies brings to our community and the Central Orange County region,” Stephens said. Dickies’ move is expected to be complete by May 2025. VF Corp. acquired the Dickies brand in 2017 for $820 million. The publicly traded company has struggled financially since the pandemic and is in the middle of a turnaround plan that includes cutting $300 million. The company said the move to the Vans campus in California “will help us revitalize Dickies so we can carry on the brand’s heritage for years to come.” Fort Worth officials reacted to the news by pointing out how many California companies have relocated to North Texas’ more business-friendly climate. “Fort Worth has enjoyed its relationship with Dickies and we wish them well,” Robert Allen, president and CEO of the Fort Worth Economic Development Partnership, said in November. “It’s worth noting that since 2005, more than 230 companies have left California and more than half of them have relocated to Texas.”

How J&J uses obscure Texas law to stall baby powder lawsuits

What Alice Salas misses most about her life before her two cancer diagnoses is her hair. On a recent November afternoon, she displays photos of herself at a younger age: full, waist-length locks that sheen like obsidian over the shoulders of a woman who appears to be in her late 20s, at the oldest. “I was close to 50 in that one,” Salas, 72, said as the afternoon sun slanted through the windows of the east Dallas home she grew up in. Her hair is notably shorter, noticeably thinner, and graying at the roots. Doing herself up now involves applying hair thickening fibers and drawing on the eyebrows she lost with a makeup brush. “I wanted you to see what it’s caused me, and what I have to go through every day now, you know, having to use products on my hair to cover my scalp, having to put on eyebrows,” she said. The chemo caused Salas’ toenails to fall off and grow back so hard that she can no longer cut them herself. She now gets pedicures to trim them. She is convinced that she can feel dead cells left over from the treatments.

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The cruel irony of her situation is that she holds what was an ostensibly harmless personal hygiene product responsible for making the last 16 years of her life so difficult: Johnson & Johnson’s talcum-based baby powder. And she is far from alone. Salas is one of thousands of people who have brought personal injury suits against the company with claims that its baby powder gave them ovarian cancer due to likely asbestos contamination. But the company’s use — or abuse, her lawyers say — of an obscure statute in the Texas Business Organizations Code has put her claim and thousands of others on hold. Known colloquially as the “Texas two-step,” the stratagem has offered New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson and other large multinationals a way to try and minimize their liability in such cases by filing for bankruptcy. Johnson & Johnson has a market cap of more than $372 billion and around $20 billion in cash. The company has already filed for bankruptcy twice using the Texas two-step, and bankruptcy courts in other states have twice dismissed the cases. With its liabilities now rebranded as Red River Talc, Johnson & Johnson has brought its bankruptcy plan to a Texas bankruptcy court. The company and its bankruptcy lawyers have said in court filings and media reports that the move will help plaintiffs obtain payouts on their claims, but plaintiffs’ attorneys say it is meant to force them into accepting pennies on the dollar.

Abbott supporting Hunter in Corpus Christi mayoral runoff

A statewide leader has weighed in on the Corpus Christi City Council election. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is supporting City Councilman Michael Hunter in the mayoral race, according to an email sent from Abbott’s political campaign. Hunter is challenging incumbent Mayor Paulette Guajardo in the runoff. Abbott’s involvement illustrates the competitiveness of the race and the volume of resources going into it — as well as political capital, said Paul Gottemoller, a political science professor at Del Mar College. “I can’t think of the last time a governor got involved” in a mayoral race in Corpus Christi, he said. Hunter, who is the son of Texas Rep. Todd Hunter, did not immediately respond to the Caller-Times’ requests for comment Thursday or Friday. The statement was first posted Tuesday on a Facebook page run by Hunter’s campaign.

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Eleanor Dearman: Embracing the ups and downs after getting breast cancer at 28

Leave it to me to turn “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” into my unofficial cancer anthem. For those of you who don’t know the Taylor Swift earworm, there’s one line in particular that often played on my head in repeat in the final stretch of my cancer treatments: “I was grinning like I’m winning, I was hitting my marks ‘cause I can do it with a broken heart.” Substitute “broken heart” with “breast cancer” and that was basically me for the past year. I’m not saying it was the best coping mechanism. I’m not encouraging others going through similar experiences to emulate, because frankly I’m still processing the past year and the longterm effects — physical and emotional — are TBD. But for me, smiling even as I wanted to cry and staying focused on the path ahead was all I knew to do. And with that, let’s go back to fall 2023.

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I’d just bought a house after years of saving. I was newly engaged and eagerly planning a wedding. It was one of the best years. Then, I found a lump in my left breast, and it took a turn. I was 28. At first I thought maybe it was in my head. I had my now-husband check. He felt it too. I had two close friends check. So did they. But Google cooed that most lumps are benign and only about 4% of breast cancer diagnoses in the U.S. are in patients under 40. I almost didn’t go to the doctor for it, but at the insistence of others, I mentioned it at the very end of a routine doctor’s appointment about something unrelated. An afterthought. The nurse practitioner ordered some tests to be safe. I wasn’t concerned until about halfway through the tests. I went to a diagnostic imaging office, where cheery technicians took some ultrasounds and assured me that people my age usually don’t need a diagnostic mammogram. When they came back to let me know they were going to do that mammogram after all, I knew something was up. When they sat me down in a back room to explain that the results were indicative of cancer but more testing was needed, the real worrying began. I did those tests and within days I was diagnosed with breast cancer — Stage 3, I’d later learn.

Family says Texas journalist Austin Tice, kidnapped in Syria, is alive and treated well

Kidnapped investigative journalist Austin Tice’s family is pushing White House officials to work harder for his release from captivity as the clock ticks down on the Biden administration. It’s been more than 12 years since the Houston native and former U.S. Marine was abducted in Syria. He has not been heard from since a video released shortly after his capture showed him blindfolded in the custody of armed men. During a meeting Friday with White House officials, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, his family expressed frustration over the lack of progress in securing his release. They recounted the meeting during a news conference at the National Press Club and shared some good news. “We have from a significant source that has already been vetted all over our government: Austin Tice is alive. Austin Tice is treated well,” his mother Debra Tice said. “There is no doubt about that.”

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amily members said they would like to release more information about his well-being, which they received in August, but government officials won’t allow them to do so. Seventeen family members appeared on stage for the news conference, including Tice’s parents and six siblings. The siblings shared memories of their brother and highlighted requests made during the White House meeting, including President Joe Biden’s commitment to reach out directly to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Austin’s behalf. They said the officials declined to make that commitment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the family’s frustrations. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, asked during Friday’s briefing about Austin Tice, said she had no information to share about his condition but said the administration would continue efforts to free detained Americans. Family members said they asked if Tice’s release could be helped by the situation in Syria, where a long-running civil war has flared anew and Assad’s regime is under intensifying pressure. “How can we leverage this moment and everything that’s happening in Syria as a potential opportunity for Austin?” sister Naomi Tice said she asked in the White House meeting. “We were basically just told that we need to wait and see how it pans out.” Hearing that is “beyond frustrating” for loved ones who have been told for 12 years to wait and see how things pan out, she said.

Fairview residents decry Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple compromise

The battle between Fairview and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, continued this week as a new, compromised proposal for the McKinney Texas Temple went to the public for discussion. Comments from Fairview residents at Tuesday’s Town Council meeting show the fight is far from over. While some were grateful the town negotiated the church’s requested temple down, opposition in green “Fairview United” T-shirts expressed dissatisfaction with the concessions made under threat of a lawsuit from the church, according to town officials. “I thought y’all were going to be a hero, not only for the residents of Fairview, but for others who have been trampled on by the LDS,” said Fairview resident Alycia Kuehne to the Town Council at Tuesday’s meeting. “Y’all were so fearful about a lawsuit. I say, bring it.” Residents in the town of nearly 11,000 people about 30 miles north of Dallas have fought for months against the proposed temple, which originally was a 43,200 square-foot building, 65 feet tall with a spire reaching almost 174 feet.

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The temple is planned for a lot next to an existing meetinghouse in the town, which falls under residential-area zoning restrictions that state buildings can have a maximum height of 35 feet. If built, the original temple would have been the tallest building in the town. The Town Council denied a permit request for the temple in August after months of debate. Those opposed said the building would be out of place in the town, while church members said the space is needed to accommodate a growing congregation. Last month, Fairview and church leaders reached an initial compromise after mediation to help avoid legal action. The non-binding settlement reduces the temple’s height by around 50 feet and its size by 13,000 square feet. The new proposal is a one-story, 35-foot building just under 30‚000 square feet. A tower coming up from the main structure reaches 120 feet, according to statements from the mayor at Tuesday’s meeting. A “lightning rod” reaches from the top.

City Stories

Lago Vista city leaders take fight over water infrastructure funding to Washington

Lago Vista's growing population is putting a strain on the city's water infrastructure, and city leaders are concerned about the burden on taxpayers to expand wastewater and drinking water systems. Because of this, they went to the White House this week to ask for federal help. In the last 10 years, the city's population has grown from around 6,000 to around 14,000. According to projections, it could grow to 22,000 in the next 10 years, reach 51,000 by 2040 and eventually top out at around 86,000. "That's an immense amount of growth out here that we don't have the infrastructure for," Place 1 Council Member Shane Saum said. Lago Vista is going through a lot of growing pains, and Place 5 Council Member Paul Roberts said it creates an untenable situation for growth. "We can't grow infinitely and continue to try to bring in funding through impact fees to fund these water and wastewater developments," Roberts said.

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So they took the fight for water from Hill Country to Washington D.C. after Saum requested a meeting with the White House. On Tuesday, Saum, Roberts and Place 2 Council Member Adam Benefield met with the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, which serves as a bridge between the federal government and elected officials in state and local government and works to address issues in communities across the country. Saum said they discussed water supply concerns in small towns like Lago Vista and federal funding opportunities for water infrastructure projects. "My initial message to them was not just about Lago Vista, but I was trying to convey, I think this is something cities all over Texas are dealing with," Saum said. "If you're located near a high growth city like Austin, their policies are leading to many people moving into your community, but you have to pay for it." For the city council members, walking through the gates of the White House and into the West Wing was a surreal experience. "It was a sense of great reverence, honestly," Roberts said. "It was amazing getting to the White House for something like this on behalf of the citizens of Lago Vista."

National Stories

Why finding the suspected CEO killer is harder than you might think

He killed a high-profile CEO on a sidewalk in America’s largest city, where thousands of surveillance cameras monitor millions of people every day. But the man who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a busy hotel keeps evading capture. Now, authorities say he might have slipped out of New York – meaning the elusive gunman could be anywhere. It could take weeks to find and scrub through a massive array of video footage from all the places where the gunman may have traveled. Police believe the suspect arrived in New York City 10 days before the killing – on November 24, a law enforcement official told CNN. Throughout his stay, the suspect appeared on camera numerous times – but always kept his hood over his head and wore a mask in public places. “He knows he’s on camera – it’s New York,” said John Miller, CNN’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.

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Police are searching for and scouring countless hours of video footage in hopes of finding more clues, such as whether the suspect met with anyone while in the city. “It will take them weeks. … They will build out every step of his trip that’s on video,” Miller said. “They will create a movie of his every move.” While the gunman meticulously planned many parts of his crime and getaway, he might be surprised by “how far the NYPD is going to go in collecting video,” said former NYPD Chief of Department Kenneth Corey. “And they’re not just going to take it from the crime scene to his escape route,” Corey said. “They’re actually going to rewind now, and they’re going to try to account for all 10 days that he spent in New York City. And I don’t think that he anticipates that.” Minutes after Thompson was gunned down Wednesday, surveillance video captured the suspect riding an electric bike into colossal Central Park at 6:48 a.m. Spanning 843 acres, Central Park is larger than the country of Monaco. “It’s a big park, and it’s complicated terrain,” Miller said.

An archbishop's knock formally restores Notre Dame to life as winds howl and heads of state look on

Howling winds couldn’t stop Notre Dame Cathedral ’s heart from beating again. With three resounding knocks on its doors by Paris Archbishop Laurent Ulrich, wielding a specially designed crosier carved from fire-scorched beams, the monument roared back to life Saturday evening. For the first time since a devastating blaze nearly destroyed it in 2019, the towering Gothic masterpiece reopened for worship, its rebirth marked by song, prayer, and awe beneath its soaring arches. The ceremony, initially planned to begin on the forecourt, was moved entirely inside due to unusually fierce December winds sweeping across the Île de la Cité, flanked by the River Seine. Yet the occasion lost none of its splendor. Inside the luminous nave, choirs sang psalms, and the cathedral’s mighty organ, silent for nearly five years, thundered to life in a triumphant interplay of melodies.

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The restoration, a spectacular achievement in just five years for a structure that took nearly two centuries to build, is seen as a moment of triumph for French President Emmanuel Macron, who championed the ambitious timeline — and a welcome respite from his domestic political woes. The evening’s celebration, attended by 1,500 dignitaries, including President-elect Donald Trump, US first lady Jill Biden, Britain’s Prince William, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, underscored Notre Dame’s enduring role as both a spiritual and cultural beacon. Observers see the event as Macron’s, and his intention to pivot it into a fully fledged diplomatic gathering, while highlighting France’s ability to unite on the global stage despite internal political crises.

Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks

President-elect Donald Trump, a lifelong teetotaler whose brother struggled with alcoholism and died at 42, was shaken by reports about a history of heavy drinking by his choice to lead the Pentagon, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Trump’s response was to encourage Hegseth, who has said he has never had a drinking problem, to fight for his job. Trump instructed aides to defend Hegseth, activating his campaign’s rapid-response apparatus and encouraging surrogates to publicly show support. Allies have threatened primary challenges for senators who oppose his picks, and a group funded by billionaire Elon Musk released an ad pressuring senators to back Hegseth. “Pete is doing well now,” Trump said in a prerecorded clip of an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that’s due to air Sunday morning. “People were a little bit concerned. ... He loves the military, and I think people are starting to see it.”

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But Trump has held back on pushing hard himself, according to advisers who, like many of the more than a dozen figures interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to relate private conversations. He hasn’t aggressively lobbied senators on Hegseth, according to Capitol Hill lawmakers and their aides. And he has hedged by discussing a backup plan with his former archrival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — often the first sign that he is souring on someone. Before the “Meet the Press” interview, Trump’s public statements of support for Hegseth this week were limited to promoting a weeks-old New York Post article that praised Hegseth and a Friday post calling him a winner who is doing well. “It’s clear the president has chosen not to express out loud his every thought, which is a good thing,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) said, when asked how Trump’s quieter approach to advocating for his Cabinet picks compared with 2017. “I think he’s learned that, as president, you don’t have to always say it. And I think that’s a good thing. Obviously, his picks have been less traditional, and we’ll see how it turns out.”

Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge

As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition teams move into federal agencies, thousands of civil servants — and some of the Biden appointees they work for — are scrambling to insulate themselves from the new administration’s promised purge. Federal employees are scrubbing their Facebook and X accounts for any negative posts about Trump. Some, including at least one prominent official who testified in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, are weighing putting in retirement papers, while others maneuver to transfer to seemingly safer agencies. D.C. recruiting firms are seeing booming business from those looking for private-sector work. Meanwhile, some agencies have moved to reclassify jobs with titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change. For the first time, some civil servants are taking out liability insurance to cover lawyers if they’re demoted or fired. And in a rare alliance, outgoing Biden administration appointees are joining forces with labor unions to extend collective bargaining agreements, locking in benefits before the incoming administration can seek to undo them.

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Before Trump takes office Jan. 20, career staffers are racing to outmaneuver his plans to gut and radically reshape the nonpartisan bureaucracy of 2.3 million. The president-elect has promised to fire thousands of professionals and replace them with political loyalists, slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, eliminate departments and relocate others away from what he derides as the “deep state” of intransigent bureaucrats in the capital. Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, told supporters earlier this year that Trump’s second term would “put the bureaucrats in trauma.” Beyond these sweeping structural changes, many federal employees also fear they’ll be singled out by Trump or Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech moguls tapped to run his new “Department of Government Efficiency,” who have begun calling out public servants on social media to ridicule what they see as wasteful or politically tinged jobs. “There is shock and there is actual fear, and there is self censure in the sense that people are scared about retaliation,” said Jesus Soriano, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, which represents more than 1,000 scientists and administrators at the National Science Foundation.

Musk and Ramaswamy's DOGE echoes past budget promises that faced big hurdles

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy test drove their new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, on Capitol Hill this week, visiting House and Senate Republicans, who celebrated their promise of reduced government and dramatically lower federal spending. But the duo kept their remarks short. While tossing out a number with a dozen zeroes in it – Musk has spoken of saving "at least $2 trillion" in federal spending -- they offered little by way of programmatic detail. To their credit, they were there to hear from members who have been on the frontlines of the budget wars for decades. And if they were listening to people like Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican who will now chair the House Appropriations Committee, they heard a cautionary note. Cole was among the members meeting with Musk and Ramaswamy this week and told the New York Times they were "trying to understand the full scope" of the DOGE project and "how much would be done by executive action."

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People typically talk about "the budget," but the real business of spending takes place in the appropriations process, where the notional becomes real. Such appropriations are the fundamental and ultimate business of Congress, as per the Constitution. Whatever the DOGE winds up offering or contributing, it cannot pass appropriations without Congress. Efforts to circumvent the Hill by using impoundment or other executive maneuvers will confront the Budget Control and Impoundment Act of 1974 – a major victory for Congress' spending powers in the year President Richard Nixon was weakened by impeachment proceedings that led to his resignation. Yet the DOGE team has an unmistakable swagger, not unlike their sponsor in President-elect Donald Trump. Still, for those with long Washington memories, DOGE stirs echoes of similar promises made in the past – that recall frustrations and futility.

'It's like Game of Thrones': Inside the jockeying for Trump administration jobs

President-elect Donald Trump is building his second administration at a breakneck speed, announcing his choices for nearly all of the roughly two dozen top-tier nominations, including Cabinet posts, at earlier dates than he did when starting his first term. It’s a sign not only that Trump’s team has more experience than it did in 2016, but also that it has a much more defined sense of what it wants: loyalty. The expedited pace, however, has not come without setbacks and intrigue. Trump has long skipped the careful vetting of the backgrounds and financial records of potential picks that most incoming administrations undertake. This approach has led to surprise controversies and unexpected bumps for some of his more contentious choices. Trump has “botched up the nomination process pretty bad,” a Republican senator said, adding, “They clearly aren’t vetting these people.”

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“It’s like ‘Game of Thrones’ over there. I think Don Jr. has been trying to do things at times. It’s like Susie will have a meeting and then Don Jr. will say something else," a transition source said, who said they were not implying there's any tension between the two, just that there are big personalities on the team. "Some of it has been kind of weird.” Trump Jr.’s most overt influence to date was felt in his negative feedback of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for another administration role. Pompeo is now disliked by much of the MAGA base and faced direct pushback from Trump’s eldest child. This account of the Trump transition effort is based on interviews with a dozen people familiar with or involved in the process. Many were granted anonymity to speak candidly or because they were not authorized to speak on the record. “President Trump was re-elected by a resounding mandate from the American people to change the status quo in Washington. That’s why he has chosen brilliant and highly-respected outsiders to serve in his Administration, and he will continue to stand behind them as they fight against all those who seek to derail the MAGA Agenda,” Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Alongside his highly-qualified nominees, President Trump will shatter the Deep State and restore government that is controlled by the people.”

Donald Trump says he won't try to remove Fed chief Jerome Powell

President-elect Donald Trump said he will not try to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whose term runs through May 2026. In an exclusive interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, Trump said, “I don’t,” when asked if he plans to cut short the central bank chief’s term. “The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said he will not leave his post even if you ask him to. Will you try to replace Jerome Powell?” Welker asked during the interview at Trump Tower in New York City. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t see it,” Trump replied. “But, I don’t — I think if I told him to, he would. But if I asked him to, he probably wouldn’t. But if I told him to, he would.” Welker followed up, “You don’t have plans to do that right now?” “No, I don’t,” Trump said.

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Trump appointed Powell, a Republican and a former private equity executive, as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in February 2018. Soon after, during a dispute about interest rates, Trump floated removing him. The two clashed several times during Trump’s first term, with Trump threatening to fire him on repeated occasions. In 2022, President Joe Biden reappointed Powell to a second four-year term. Powell has offered a sharp “no” to recent questions over whether he would leave his post early to allow Trump to pick a replacement sooner. He has also said he does not believe Trump can fire him. “Not permitted under the law,” Powell said at a postelection news conference. The relationship between Trump and Powell will be closely watched as Trump returns to office. Trump lashed out at Powell during his first term, arguing that he was not moving quickly enough to ease monetary policy. Trump swiped at Powell again in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, telling reporters that he had the “right to remove” Powell from the post and criticizing what he said were “a lot of bad decisions, in my opinion.” Trump has lately argued that the president should have the power to weigh in on interest rate decisions, which are made by the Fed.

Lead Stories

Growing 'chatter' about Dade Phelan possibly preparing to exit Speaker's race

There is no confirmation State Representative Dade Phelan from Beaumont has decided to exit the Speaker's race ahead of Saturday's Republican House Caucus, during which they'll vote to endorse a candidate, but there is growing 'chatter' about the possibility. Harvey Kronberg, a veteran journalist in Austin who owns and edits the Quorum Report, an online publication covering Texas politics, posted late Thursday night that "House Democrats have been informed by their leadership that Speaker Phelan will exit the race, per sources tonight." He says some Republicans believe Democrats have a lot of leverage because the GOP Caucus is divided ahead of Saturday's meeting. Phelan was elected Speaker in January of last year. David Cook is challenging him for Speaker. KFDM/Fox 4 reached out to Phelan and his staff for comment. We've not heard back.

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Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vows to ban THC products, threatening dispensaries

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said late Wednesday that banning THC products would be a top priority in the state legislature next year, a move that could shutter dozens of marijuana-adjacent businesses across the state. Patrick, who presides over the state Senate, said he would clear the path for lawmakers to prohibit all forms of consumable tetrahydrocannabinol when lawmakers return in January. Recreational marijuana is illegal in Texas, but the state opened the door to THC varieties that can still produce a high when it legalized hemp in 2019. Patrick argued in a statement that the 2019 law had been taken too far, leading to the proliferation of products with higher levels of THC, the main compound in cannabis that produces a high.

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e-Edition Account Politics Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vows to ban THC products, threatening dispensaries By Isaac Yu, Austin Bureau Dec 5, 2024 Gift Article FILE - Products advertised as containing synthetically derived delta-8 THC are offered for sale at a smoke shop in north Seattle on Feb. 25, 2022. FILE - Products advertised as containing synthetically derived delta-8 THC are offered for sale at a smoke shop in north Seattle on Feb. 25, 2022. Gene Johnson/AP Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said late Wednesday that banning THC products would be a top priority in the state legislature next year, a move that could shutter dozens of marijuana-adjacent businesses across the state. Patrick, who presides over the state Senate, said he would clear the path for lawmakers to prohibit all forms of consumable tetrahydrocannabinol when lawmakers return in January. Recreational marijuana is illegal in Texas, but the state opened the door to THC varieties that can still produce a high when it legalized hemp in 2019. Patrick argued in a statement that the 2019 law had been taken too far, leading to the proliferation of products with higher levels of THC, the main compound in cannabis that produces a high. READ MORE: Senate Commitee weighs hemp regulation challenges weeks after Houston THC business owners charged “Retailers exploited the agriculture law to sell life-threatening, unregulated forms of THC to the public and made them easily accessible,” Patrick said. The 2019 law, part of a broad bipartisan agriculture package, allowed Texas farmers to grow hemp, a form of the cannabis plant with low levels of THC, and required that consumable products contain no more than 0.3% THC. Marijuana products, which are also derived from cannabis plants, contain higher levels of THC than hemp and are still banned in Texas outside of a limited medical marijuana program. But the change complicated enforcement of marijuana-related crimes because now law enforcement has to test THC levels to determine whether products are illegal marijuana or legal hemp. Patrick’s announcement comes after the hemp law’s lead sponsor, state Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, expressed misgivings about the state of regulation on hemp products for intoxicating levels of THC and said that products should be taken off the shelves. Critics of the hemp market say the proliferation of products and growth in dispensaries around the state are not sufficiently regulated and pose a public health risk. Hemp industry groups note that their products are regulated by the Texas Department of State Health Services, but argue the state has too few regulators for the growing sector.

As Hegseth's fight to head Pentagon lags, Trump not working the phones to save him: Sources

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for defense secretary, was back on Capitol Hill on Thursday to meet with Republican lawmakers as misconduct allegations continued to cloud his selection to lead the Pentagon. Behind the scenes, Trump's political team is focused on figuring out where female Republican senators stand on Hegseth, according to two people involved in the conversations. Trump's advisers are fully aware that with such a thin GOP Senate majority, Hegseth's fate could all come down to the women in the conference. Sen. Joni Ernst, a key Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee that will hold his confirmation hearings, notably declined to voice support for Hegseth after meeting with him on Wednesday and then again on Thursday on Fox News, which Trump is known to watch.

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Ernst told Fox News host Bill Hemmer she had a "very frank" and "productive" discussion with Hegseth. When pressed by Hemmer that that didn't sound as if she had gotten to a yes on his confirmation, she replied, "I think you are right." Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate and a sexual assault survivor herself. Hegseth has faced allegations of sexual assault (which he's denied) and previously said that women should not serve in ground combat roles in the military. ABC News was told Trump has expressed to those close to him that Hegseth should have been more honest and forthcoming about the challenges he could face getting through the confirmation process given his history. Trump, who is considering other options (a list that includes Ernst) for the role, has not been working the phones for Hegseth -- as he did for Matt Gaetz. Gaetz was Trump's original pick for attorney general but said he withdrew his name from consideration as he faced his own allegations of sexual misconduct. Trump has since tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi to head up the Justice Department, pending Senate confirmation.

Texas’ new business court works to stay free of taking old cases

A fight is brewing in Texas’ three-month-old business court system, threatening to eliminate one-third of cases docketed so far. Texas created these courts to streamline complex business disputes with legislation that applies to “civil actions commenced on or after” the courts opened on Sept. 1. Most litigators take that to mean the courts can accept new cases filed since that date, not cases that already existed in non-business courts. But a competing argument—rejected so far by three business court judges—points to language some lawyers say opens the court’s doors to older cases. The law, H.B. 19, never says it applies to litigation brought “only” on or after the court’s launch date. Lawmakers must’ve intentionally omitted the word, they say, because in other laws restricting a court’s jurisdiction to a certain date the use of “only” does appear. “I thought it was a ridiculous argument and I still think it’s a ridiculous argument,” said Joel Reese of Reese Marketos.

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Reese represents Culberson Midstream LLC, a Texas natural gas operator that got a Dallas business court judge to reject plaintiff Energy Transfer LP’s bid to transfer a two-year-old case from a district court. Energy Transfer’s lawyer, Jared Eisenberg of Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann, declined to comment about the judge’s decision. His firm is appealing the order, along with separate orders from business courts rejecting two other pre-Sept. 1 filings. If they prevail on appeal, business courts would have to accept pre-existing cases so long as they meet other non-timing qualifications. The initial rollout of business courts in Texas’ five biggest cities—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth—has garnered a total of 50 cases, through Dec. 3. Sixteen of the 50 combined cases pre-dated the opening of the business courts and may be too old to stay, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis. Judges have rejected four of them for that reason, while lawyers in three others opted to walk away on their own. A decision is pending in nine others. Thus far, no judge has ruled business courts can try a case filed before the courts opened. The judges in Houston account for 26 cases, more than half of the overall caseload. Dallas has 13 cases, San Antonio and Austin have four apiece, and Fort Worth has three. “The legislature could have made its wishes clearer, more explicit, but it still seems pretty clear to me,” said Barry Barnett of Susman Godfrey. Barnett convinced Judge Bill Whitehill of the Dallas division in late October to turn back a suit brought in 2019 against his client, Hinduja Global Solutions. Accepting cases that existed before the business courts opened would overwhelm the system, Barnett reasoned.

State Stories

Trump's pick for ag secretary Brooke Rollins vows to defend farmers. Why did her nonprofit push to cut farm subsidies?

Brooke Rollins, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for agriculture secretary, has little track record in the multi-billion-dollar industry she is set to oversee. But one of the few policy positions the Texan has been tied to through her conservative advocacy is cutting farm subsidies that many say are key to maintaining the nation's food supply. In 2016, the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, which Rollins led at the time, published a report on "corporate welfare" that advocated the elimination of a state loan program for farmers, arguing it distorted the markets for crops and animal products. "Eliminate the Agricultural Loan Guarantee Program and other agricultural subsidy programs," the report read.

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In doing so, the Austin-based group that Rollins helmed for 15 years took on a farm support system that is widely viewed by Republicans and Democrats alike as critical to keeping farmers in business. The recommendation was never acted upon by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. It's unclear whether Rollins, who served as domestic policy advisor in the first Trump term but has little history working on agriculture policy, would pursue the kind of cuts to agricultural support programs advocated for by the organization she led through 2017. Rollins did not respond to requests for comment through the Washington think tank she currently leads, the America First Policy Institute. A spokesperson for Trump's transition team said Rollins, "had nothing to do with that policy, period," but declined to comment on what specific policies she would pursue. "Rollins will implement the President’s agenda and defend American farmers," she said.

JuanRaymon Rubio and Mary Closmann Kahle: How property rights legislation is decimating Texas heritage

(JuanRaymon Rubio works as a preservation consultant at Architexas, volunteers on the board of directors of Preservation Austin, and serves on the city’s Historic Landmark Commission. Mary Closmann Kahle serves on the board of Preservation Austin and as chair of its advocacy committee. She is an oral historian with experience in environmental and community history.) Property rights legislation is decimating Texas heritage. During past sessions, the Texas Legislature has given property owners expansive rights against historic designations that would protect historic/cultural heritage from demolition. Since 2018, supermajority votes (9 out of 11 members) are required by City Council to designate individual landmarks and historic districts when an owner is opposed – an extreme hill to climb. This threshold ensures that a city’s historic and cultural fabric are being actively removed from our local streetscapes. Austin City Council has voted fewer than eight times to designate a property against owners’ objections, zero times since the law change. At risk of extinction is East Austin, where 130 historic-eligible buildings have been demolished since 2016.

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On Dec. 12, Council will hear about 1500 E. 12th St., a commercial structure built between 1889 and 1911. The building traces the diverse heritage of East Austin and is eligible for a local landmark zoning for its vernacular architecture, German and African American historical associations, and community value. Situated at a key intersection, the building anchors East Austin’s 12th Street corridor, an area filled with the cultural heritage and legacy of Austin’s Black and Brown communities. This legacy is under threat today as Dallas-based Eureka Holdings pursues plans to demolish and redevelop the site, one of dozens of properties along East 12th Street in their holdings. Make no mistake – this is the first of many on East 12th Street they plan to tear down. It was recently announced that the popular East 12th nightclub, Outer Heaven Disco Club, is being forced to vacate in a few months for Eureka to redevelop. When does this end? We lost Rainey Street. South Congress Avenue, East Sixth Street, and East Cesar Chavez are slowly slipping away, and East 12th Street will follow. East Austin residents recently had some faith that a historic home on East Second street, the Sinnigson House, would meet the threshold for designation at City Council. It failed by an 8-3 vote in July. The Sinnigson House passed all the necessary hurdles and requirements, yet three votes proved more powerful than thousands of voices and dozens of community volunteers and city staff. What is the solution? Advocate groups like Preservation Austin are working tirelessly to shape proactive preservation policy and stave off rampant demolitions, but we are just one voice.

Houston lawyer charged in son's death waited 17 hours to report killing to Sabine County deputies

A Houston lawyer accused of killing his 20-year-old special needs son at their rural Sabine County property waited 17 hours to call deputies about the shooting. By then, he burned his son's body in a way he believed was honoring his wishes, authorities said. Michael Howard, a Houston-based lawyer licensed since 1984, was arrested Monday after calling family members and then authorities to report his son's weekend death. He purportedly told deputies in Sabine County, around 170 miles northeast of Houston, that he killed Mark Howard with a shotgun after mistaking him for an intruder. Investigators noted in court records that the son rarely left Howard's side. Howard waited nearly a day to report the death, Sheriff J.P. MacDonough said Thursday during a news conference.

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The accused lawyer drove his son's body in the bucket of a backhoe tractor out to the woods of his expansive property, spanning more than 2,000 acres, on the banks of the Toledo Bend Reservoir. He used gasoline to torch his son's body on a pile of wood and told police that's what the younger Howard would have wanted, MacDonough said. Howard described the burning as cremation. No one else was home at the time of the shooting, police said. The son, the eldest of Howard's two children, had Down Syndrome, with the sheriff characterizing him as high-functioning with a job. He arrived at the home around Thanksgiving. The sheriff said what remained of the son's body, fragile pieces of charred bones, was found about a mile and half from their lake home. Authorities, which included the Texas Rangers, also found evidence that Howard cleaned the area of the shooting with a water hose.

Fort Worth council to vote on Jay Chapa as next city manager

Fort Worth’s top choice to be the new city manager will be a familiar face in city hall. Jay Chapa, who previously served as an assistant city manager, was named the finalist to succeed outgoing city manager David Cooke. The city manager is responsible for the day-to-day operation of city government, oversees the budget and carries out the policies approved by the City Council. Cooke announced in July he would step down from the position in February 2025 after serving as city manager for over 10 years. The City Council will vote on whether to hire Chapa at its Dec. 10 meeting. If approved, Chapa would be the first person of Hispanic heritage to hold the city’s top job. Chapa spent 25 years working for the city of Fort Worth before retiring in January 2022 to open a private consulting business.

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During his time with the city he led the development of the 2022 bond program and helped shepherd several economic development projects, such as the city’s partnership with Texas A&M and the development of the Crescent Hotel in the city’s cultural district. “Jay is a man of brilliant creative thinking, has led most of the public-private partnership efforts in the city over the past 10 years, and has an unmatched ability to hit the ground running,” said Mayor Mattie Parker in a news release. While the city did not use a national search firm, Fort Worth received over 150 applicants for the position, according to the city’s news release. That’s triple the number of applicants who applied to the city of Dallas’ open city manager position. Fort Worth’s process drew criticism from council member Chris Nettles, who advocated that a national search firm would produce a wider array of candidates. He accused the city of tailoring the process to select Chapa, saying it’s emblematic of the negative view some have of what’s called the “Fort Worth way,” where decisions are made by a small group of insiders.

Who will be TCU’s AD after Donati goes to South Carolina?

TCU director of athletics Jeremiah Donati’s exit to the University of South Carolina caught his bosses by surprise, but this move was inevitable. Donati talked extensively with the University of Southern California in 2023 to become its AD, but late in the process he changed his mind, due primarily over family concerns. One year later, and seeing the chasm widening between The BigSEC10 and the rest of the world, Donati is following a similar path as one of his predecessors. In 2005, TCU athletic director Eric Hyman also went to South Carolina for the same job. Donati is not expected to attend TCU’s women’s basketball game on Sunday against South Carolina at Dickies Arena. Finding a new AD becomes the immediate priority for new TCU chancellor Daniel Pullin.

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“It’s the season for it, right?” Pullin said. “Coaches change, the transfer portal, so this is just part of it.” TCU has hired a search firm to pool potential candidates, and Pullin put a four to six week timeline on this process. Both he and outgoing chancellor Victor Boschini will collaborate on this search. Unlike when Chris Del Conte left the TCU AD role for the same job at University of Texas, in December of 2017, TCU has no obvious internal candidate to fill this role. Del Conte hired Donati to join TCU’s staff as an assistant, in 2011, to groom him to become an AD. Pullin, who came to TCU in 2019 to lead TCU’s business school, has deep ties to his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, and a long relationship with its athletic director, Joe Castiglione. Expect a candidate or two to have Sooner ties. Expect most of the candidates to have served as an AD. Since Frank Windegger retired as TCU’s AD in 1998, three of the school’s next four people in that position had been ADs at previous schools: Hyman had been the AD at Miami of Ohio; Danny Morrison had been the AD at Wofford; Del Conte had been the AD at Rice. Only Donati had not previously served as an AD. The TCU AD job is not the one Donati grew to thrive in after he replaced Del Conte. The creation of NIL, paying players, increased conference consolidation, and the transfer portal has added layers of responsibility to the job.

Austin startup teams with home builder to boost Texas grid reliability

An Austin-based electricity startup company announced this week its partnership with home construction company Lennar amid efforts to offer stronger grid reliability to Texans. Base Power launched in May and centers its work around installing batteries that offer on-site storage capacity for customers. When the electrical grid is up and running, the batteries are designed to support that power grid; when the grid goes down, the battery kicks in and provides electricity to the attached home. Through Base Power’s partnership with Lennar, new communities in the greater Austin area and Dallas-Fort Worth region will include Base Power’s battery technology. Here in Central Texas, Firefly Pointe in Hutto and Rancho Del Cielo in Jarrell include Base Power as an electrical service provider option as part of the Lennar collaboration.

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“Over the past summer, more than 3.5 million Texans lost power due to extreme weather and other factors,” said Eric Feder, president of LENx, which manages Lennar’s innovation and venture capital investing, in a statement. “Our investment in Base helps Lennar homeowners avoid this increasingly common occurrence with a worry-free solution. Lennar is always innovating and the inclusion of Base in select markets gives buyers peace of mind that their new home can weather almost any storm – literally and figuratively.” Austin-based electricity startup company Base Power announced this week its partnership with home construction company Lennar amid efforts to offer stronger grid reliability to Texans. (Courtesy Base Power) Zach Dell, co-founder and CEO of Base Power, told KXAN his team connected with Lennar early on in their company’s formation process to discuss this level of collaboration. The rapid growth happening across Texas comes with additional demand and strain on the grid — something burgeoning suburbs like Hutto and Jarrell are familiar with. “Growth is good. It leads to a lot of great things, but also creates challenges,” he said. “And one of the biggest challenges it creates is stress on the existing power grid.” The partnership with Lennar is an outgrowth of Base Power’s existing product model, where customers can lease on-site batteries and have them installed onto their homes. Tapping into home builders, Dell said his goal is for this to offer more resiliency protections for both existing and new homeowners at a more affordable rate.

13 Investigates: 100 Texas teachers under review in 'ridiculous' cheating scandal

Dozens of local teachers are now having their certifications reviewed by the state after being accused of paying someone to take a teacher certification test for them. 13 Investigates has obtained from the Texas Education Agency a list of 102 of the approximately 200 teachers the Harris County District Attorney's office said were involved in the teacher certification scandal. The new information shows just how widespread the scheme was across Texas. Thirty-eight teachers who previously worked in the Houston area were suspected of paying someone to take a certification test, 49 from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, five in East Texas, and even one in Central Texas.

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"It's really disheartening," said Jacob Kirksey, an assistant professor in the College of Education at Texas Tech University. "As an educator, you would not want your own students to cheat, and so I think it's a bit ironic that we have teachers who are willing to pay someone else to sit and take a test, particularly when that test is intended to measure some really important things that you should be able to know and do in your classroom." In October, the Harris County District Attorney accused Vincent Grayson, a basketball coach at Houston ISD, of being "the kingpin" of an operation that allowed about 200 teachers across Texas to cheat on their certification exam. Prosecutors said the teachers would pay someone to take the certification exam for them while two other people involved in the scheme worked as proctors for those administering the exam. The Texas Education Agency, which oversees teacher certification, told 13 Investigates it just finished reaching out to impacted districts on Tuesday to inform them about educators who are under investigation for allegedly paying someone else to take their certification exam.

New, blue bee discovered by researchers in Texas and Oklahoma

A new species of metallic blue bee, found so far in Texas and Oklahoma, was recently discovered by researchers. The bee, called Andrena androfovea, is part of a family of bees known as mining bees for their solitary lifestyle — unlike the social honey bee — and underground nests. However, in the new study detailing the bee’s discovery, the researchers note that Andrena androfovea appears to be a new branch of the mining bee family, with a peculiar penchant for nightshade plants. “The process of documenting bee biodiversity started centuries ago, but scientists are still discovering new species all the time,” James Hung, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma who co-authored the paper, said in a press release.

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Andrena androfovea was first found in the late 1980s by entomologist Jack Neff of the Central Texas Melittological Institute in Austin. Neff, another co-author of the study, caught the bee near the Texas-Mexico border while it was pollinating flowers of the purple groundcherry, part of the nightshade family. Mining bees tend to avoid nightshades, so seeing one cozying up to them was a curious sight. It wasn’t until over three decades later when Neff met Hung and Silas Bossert, an evolutionary biologist at Washington State University, that the trio discovered the nightshade-loving bee was a new species in the Andrena family. “This new species, however, is so distantly related to any other Andrena that we think it has formed its own branch on the Andrena family tree about 12.6 million years ago,” Bossert, the study’s lead author, said in the press release. “We know this because we sequenced and compared its genome to those of other bees. Using a technique called ‘molecular clock’, we can approximate how much time has passed since this lineage has separated from the other bees based on differences in its genome.”

Rep. Pat Fallon of Frisco tangles with Secret Service chief in fiery Capitol Hill exchange

A congressional hearing on Secret Service lapses surrounding attempted assassinations of President-elect Donald Trump erupted into a screaming match Thursday between the agency’s acting director and U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Frisco. Fallon, an outspoken critic of the Secret Service’s recent failures, is a member of the special House task force investigating where the agency has fallen short protecting Trump in two attempts on his life. Ronald Rowe Jr. took over after former director Kimberly Cheatle resigned in the face of intense criticism after the assassination attempt at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., where Trump was shot in the ear, a rally attendee was killed and two others critically injured.

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Rowe testified Thursday as the task force wrapped up its investigation and prepared to submit its final report. Rowe said the Butler attempt represented an “abject failure” by the agency that underscored critical problems. He said he has sought to implement reforms and be an “agent of change” to improve the agency’s performance. Fallon peppered Rowe with pointed questions before asking aides to display a photo of a Sept. 11 remembrance event in New York attended by President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump and other high-profile officials. Rowe was visible in the photo standing just behind the VIPs. Fallon asked Rowe if he was the special agent in charge, who would typically be closest to the president. Rowe quickly cut in to say the agent in charge was outside the picture’s frame and talked about the 3,000 people who died in the terror attacks. “I actually responded to ground zero. I was there going through the ashes of the World Trade Center. I was there at Fresh Kills…” “I’m not asking you that,” Fallon cut him off, his voice rising. “I’m asking you if you were, were you the special agent in charge? You were not!” “I was there to show respect for a Secret Service member that died on 9/11,” Rowe shouted back. “Oh, that’s a bunch of horse hockey,” Fallon interjected.

Texas judge blocks anti-money laundering law's enforcement nationwide

A federal judge in Texas has issued a nationwide injunction blocking the enforcement of an anti-money laundering law that requires corporate entities to disclose to the U.S. Treasury Department the identities of their real beneficial owners. U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in Sherman, Texas, on Tuesday sided, with the National Federation Of Independent Business and several small businesses and non-profits by concluding the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act was likely unconstitutional. The decision marked the second time a judge has deemed the law unconstitutional. An Alabama federal judge reached a similar conclusion in March in response to a separate challenge to the law but issued a narrower injunction, blocking its enforcement as applied to the parties before him, including the National Small Business Association.

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Mazzant said the law was an "unprecedented" attempt by the federal government to legislate in an area traditionally left to the states by monitoring companies created pursuant to state law and ending the anonymity various states provide in the formation of corporations. "For good reason, Plaintiffs fear this flanking, quasi-Orwellian statute and its implications on our dual system of government," Mazzant wrote. He said Congress had no authority under its powers to regulate commerce, taxes and foreign affairs to adopt such a law and that it likely violated states' rights under the U.S. Constitution's Tenth Amendment. The Justice Department declined to comment on Wednesday. The bipartisan measure was enacted as part of an annual defense spending toward the end of Republican President-elect Donald Trump's first term in early January 2021, after Congress overrode a veto Trump issued for unrelated reasons. Supporters of the legislation said it was designed to address the country's growing popularity as a venue for criminals to launder illicit funds by setting up entities like limited liability companies under state laws without disclosing their involvement.

Will President-elect Trump kill Fort Worth’s Panther Island?

The flood control portion of Fort Worth’s Panther Island did not find favor in the first Trump administration. The project to reroute a section of the Trinity River north of downtown was viewed skeptically by former White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, leading the Trump administration to allocate only $7.5 million of the $526 million authorized by Congress in 2016. The project was estimated to cost roughly $1.17 billion in 2017, however those costs haven’t been updated to reflect post-pandemic inflation. There’s still a lot of unknowns about the incoming administration, but one thing is clear: It is prioritizing cuts to federal spending. Trump has tapped Billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to form the “Department of Government Efficiency” to reduce the size of the federal government through cutting regulations and reducing the federal workforce.

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The pair outlined their plans in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that called for using a pair of recent Supreme Court decisions to rollback what they referred to as executive overreach by “unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies.” Musk has estimated the administration could cut “at least $2 trillion” from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. “If that’s what they seek to do, and they can get anywhere close to that number, that’ll mean a lot of projects are going to be on the chopping block,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston. It’s really too early to know how the new Trump administration will impact Panther Island specifically, but on a more general level a lot of federal spending could be cut, he said. “It’s too early to know, but it’s not too early to worry,” said Matt Angle, the director of the Democratic-supporting Lone Star Project who is originally from Tarrant County and has tracked the project since its inception. The only reason the project got funding under the Biden Administration was because of the respect for Fort Worth Congress members Rep. Kay Granger and Rep. Marc Veasey, Angle said.

“City Hall must listen”: Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson assesses state of the city

In the council chambers on Thursday, flanked by 14 of his peers on the Dallas City Council, Mayor Eric Johnson began his assessment of the city’s track record with an emphasis on 4 P’s: public safety, parks, potholes and property tax relief. “These four pillars are essential to Dallas remaining a city of opportunity for everyone,” Johnson said. He also announced he will release the city’s “first-ever comprehensive public safety policy” in the coming months — though it’s unclear what that entails. Johnson’s state of the city address, a tradition mandated by the city’s charter, echoed much of what he’s said before. The speech is generally a roadmap of what the city government has accomplished and wants to accomplish. This year’s edition comes exactly a month after the November elections, where the passage of propositions S and U was widely seen as a “wake-up call” for municipal government.

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The passed propositions waive government immunity and open the city up to lawsuits if it doesn’t adhere to the charter. They direct half of any new revenue year after year to the police and fire pension system and other public safety initiatives and also mandate the city figure out a way to hire nearly 900 more police officers. “These calls from our residents for greater public safety and stronger government accountability could not be more clear,” Johnson said. “And City Hall must listen.” The opposition to these propositions came from a big bipartisan coalition of former mayors and council members. Several saw these amendments as legal mandates that could negatively affect city operations. Almost immediately after the propositions passed, Moody’s Ratings, a top credit rating firm, downgraded the city’s debt outlook from “stable” to “negative” due to the passage of Proposition U. The firm said the proposition lowers the flexibility the city has when it comes to its expenses and in the world of stocks and bonds, that type of an assessment can impact a lender’s confidence in the city’s management of its debt. Johnson was absent from the public effort.

Bret Biggart and Mark Stover: Don’t get burned by solar; it’s time to get bad actors out of Texas

(Bret Biggart is CEO of Freedom Solar Power, a Texas solar company. Mark Stover is executive director of the Texas Solar+Storage Association.) The San Antonio Express-News and other publications have exposed the worst kind of behavior among fly-by-night or undercapitalized solar outfits. Wrenching stories from numerous consumers have exposed suspect characters dressed as solar salespeople. These stories besmirch and undermine an industry that needs to succeed. One of us runs Freedom Solar Power, one of Texas’ longest-standing solar and storage companies. The other heads the Texas Solar+Storage Association, a statewide industry advocacy group. We believe in this industry. We have spent much of our careers working to advance solar power and deliver its benefits — lower power bills, better reliability, increased resiliency and a stronger economy. We also know that growing the Texas rooftop solar industry means protecting Texans from unscrupulous salespeople and amoral companies.

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When sold transparently and installed properly, rooftop solar systems help keep people free and safe from high bills and blackouts, strengthen the power grid, protect families and communities from extreme weather, and deliver power affordably and effectively. The numbers also show that in the vast majority of cases, rooftop solar projects, such as those delivered by Texas Solar+Storage Association members, are being installed properly and customers are satisfied with their services. But as the Express-News has demonstrated, there are far too many deceptive practices and victimized consumers. Rooftop solar supporters must not turn a blind eye to these unfortunate practices and experiences. We also acknowledge that no one is perfect. That’s true for every company; even Freedom Solar has had missteps. But it’s every company’s responsibility to resolve mistakes as quickly as possible, be transparent and seek to continuously improve. Solar systems are complicated; things sometimes go wrong.

National Stories

Growth of sports betting may be linked to financial woes, new studies find

While states have cheered the new tax revenue from sports gambling, some new studies have linked the burgeoning industry to lower consumer credit scores, higher credit card debt and less household savings. With access on their cellphones, gamblers can bet more often and easily than in traditional casinos, heightening concerns about problem gambling and the financial fallout for sports fans. The rate of gambling problems among sports bettors is at least twice as high as it is for other gamblers, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. Legal sports gambling is more widespread than ever. Missouri voters in November became the latest to approve it, making it legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Last year, Americans bet more than $121 billion on sports, according to the American Gaming Association. While betting revenues are exploding, the industry is still relatively young — only blossoming after a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling opened the door for states to authorize sports gambling.

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So far, researchers have not reached a consensus about potential harms, though three papers released this year found poor financial results for consumers in states with legalized sports gambling. In a working paper released in August, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California determined access to legal online sports betting led to lower credit scores and higher rates of bankruptcies. That study examined credit bureau data of more than 4 million American consumers. “Our results ultimately suggest that gambling legalization does harm consumer financial health,” the report said. That paper did not assess specific solutions but called on policymakers to find ways to protect residents at risk of becoming problem gamblers. “If no action is taken, it is highly likely that the large increase in sports betting will lead to a long-term increase in financial stress on many consumers and policymakers and financial regulators should be prepared for this.” A study led by a Southern Methodist University professor released in June found problem gambling increased in states that introduced online casino gambling alongside online sports gambling. Another working paper from researchers at several U.S. universities found legalized sports betting drained household finances more than other types of gambling and diverted money from saving and investing.

Murder at dawn: A top executive’s final moments in Manhattan

UnitedHealth Group’s annual investor day began much like any other corporate event. There was breakfast and then around 8 a.m. Wednesday the collection of investors, executives and Wall Street analysts filed into a capacious third-floor ballroom at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan to hear upbeat presentations about the company’s future. Unbeknown to them, one of the company’s top executives had been killed earlier that morning on the street below in what police say was a targeted attack. Brian Thompson, chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, the largest U.S. health insurer, had been steps from the Hilton’s entrance at 6:44 a.m. when an assassin wearing a dark hoodie and gray backpack stepped from behind a parked car in the predawn darkness, calmly pursued him for a few steps, and then shot him with a 9-millimeter pistol.

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Thompson staggered, appeared to turn toward his pursuer, and then collapsed. The killer fled down an alley and then escaped on a bike, according to police. Inside the conference room of one the city’s busiest hotels, the show went on. It wasn’t until around 9 a.m. that Andrew Witty, chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, interrupted the proceedings to announce that the event was being canceled due to “a very serious medical situation with one of our team members.” “And as a result, I’m afraid we’re going to have to bring to a close the event today,” he added. “I’m sure you’ll understand.” The news had already started to ripple through the crowd, according to people who were there. Nearly everyone with a mobile phone and a social-media account seemed to know what the medical emergency was. Within the hour, many of the attendees were in the Hilton lobby, luggage in tow, checking out. Even for a city inured to shootings and macabre headlines, the killing of a star executive just before sunrise was stunning. It was all the more so because the shooting—which Jessica Tisch, the new New York Police Department commissioner, called “a brazen, targeted attack”—unfolded at the height of the holiday season in a Midtown Manhattan thronged with tourists admiring festive store windows, taking in the Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall and the like.

New clues emerge as investigators hunt for the gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare’s CEO

New clues emerged Thursday in the hunt for the masked gunman who stalked and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, including possible leads about his travel before the shooting and a message scrawled on ammunition found at the crime scene. The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found emblazoned on the ammunition, echoing a phrase used by insurance industry critics, two law enforcement officials said Thursday. The words were written in permanent marker, according to one of the two officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Investigators also now believe the suspect may have traveled to New York last month on a bus that originated in Atlanta, one of the law enforcement officials said.

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Police and federal agents have been collecting information from Greyhound in an attempt to identify the suspect and are working to determine whether he purchased the ticket to New York in late November, the official said. Police also released new photos Thursday of a person wanted for questioning in connection with Thompson’s killing. The images, showing an unmasked man smiling in the lobby of a Manhattan hostel, add to a collection of photos and video that have circulated since the shooting — including footage of the attack itself, as well as still frames of the suspected gunman stopping at a Starbucks beforehand. Thompson, the head of one of the largest U.S. health insurers, died in a dawn ambush Wednesday as he walked from his midtown hotel to the company’s annual investor conference at a Hilton across the street. The reason for the killing remained unknown, but New York City police say evidence firmly points to it being a targeted attack.

Obama hails 'power of pluralism' as some Democrats push to pass the torch

Former U.S. President Barack Obama, who has mostly stayed quiet in the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris' election loss, on Thursday urged a new generation of American leaders to talk with people they disagree with. In a speech at a "Democracy Forum" sponsored by his foundation, the former president said he was convinced that a renewed commitment to pluralist principles was essential to ensure the survival of democracy. "The alternative is what we've seen here in the United States and in many democracies around the globe - not just more gridlock, not just public cynicism, but an increased willingness on the part of politicians and their followers to violate democratic norms, to do anything they can to get their way."

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Obama discussed the "power of pluralism" with thousands of live and online attendees at a deeply divided time in U.S. history and an unsettling one for Democrats as Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House. Building lasting majorities that supported justice required "framing our issues, our causes, what we believe in, in terms of 'we' and not just 'us and them,'" he said. But that did not mean rolling over when opponents abused power, he said. "That's a problem. And when that happens, we fight for what we believe in." While Obama, 63, remains in high demand to campaign for his fellow Democrats, some in the party are calling for a crop of younger leaders to take the baton after Harris lost every battleground state and the popular vote and Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Concerns mount over Musk’s taste for revenge

Elon Musk’s growing criticism of President-elect Trump’s opponents and industry competitors is raising concerns he may use his increasing influence to intimidate adversaries. These fears are compounded by Trump’s repeated vows for revenge against his perceived enemies, with experts warning Musk could echo and carry out the same rhetoric on his social media platform, X, in the coming months. “Musk is a good fit for Trump, because Musk clearly enjoys … vengeance and gets off on retribution,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian and professor at George Washington University. “This is partly, at least, what animates him, maybe even more so at this point than his business enterprises.”

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Neither X nor a spokesperson for the Trump transition team responded to The Hill’s request for comment. Concerns were amplified last week after Musk went after retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who became an outspoken critic of President-elect Trump after testifying in his first impeachment trial. “Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States,” Musk wrote on X, responding to comments Vindman made in an interview about Musk’s reported conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Musk said Vindman, who served as the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council under Trump, “will pay the appropriate penalty,” to which Vindman responded, “You, Elon, appear to believe you can act with impunity and are attempting to silence your critics. I’m not intimidated.” Some Democrats rallied in defense of the combat veteran, including Vindman’s twin brother — Rep.-elect Eugene Vindman (D-Va.), who called Musk’s comments “really false and defamatory.” In another message to Musk, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said the “Vindman family embodies patriotism and public service. You know nothing about either.” While Trump has remained mostly mum about Alexander Vindman in recent years, Musk appears to be using his immense platform, where he has more than 206 million followers, to reignite the retaliatory tone.

Johnson woos his sharpest critics in preparation for Speaker vote

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is wooing his sharpest critics in the House GOP ahead of his official election for Speaker on the House floor, working to eliminate opposition and secure the strongest leadership mandate possible in a razor-thin majority. In the latest development, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — one of the leaders of an unsuccessful move to oust Johnson earlier this year — is no longer ruling out supporting Johnson for Speaker. The two chatted over the Thanksgiving break, and have been having conversations that appear to be leaving a positive impression on Massie. “We’ve been talking,” Massie told The Hill when asked if he is still opposed to Johnson. “We talked last week.” Massie cautioned that he is “not to the support levels yet.” But his openness to voting for Johnson is a major development, given his prior opposition. Earlier this year, Massie had said he would not vote for Johnson “come hell or high water.”

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The Kentucky Republican’s softening on Johnson comes as the Speaker has also secured the backing of his most vocal former critic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Greene, the main leader of the failed motion to vacate earlier this year, confirmed on Wednesday that she will vote for Johnson to be Speaker in the Jan. 3 floor vote. “Nobody’s running against him,” Greene told The Hill. Greene had first signaled openness to supporting Johnson after the November election resulted in a win for President-elect Trump and Republicans in both chambers of Congress. After a “productive” private meeting between the two last month, which The Hill first reported, Greene is now set to chair a Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee, to complement the Trump administration DOGE commission headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Johnson already won renomination for Speaker last month in a voice vote by House Republicans, with no member vocalizing opposition. The unanimous vote came after he struck a deal with hardline conservatives and anti-chaos Republicans on rules changes — which included raising the threshold to force a vote on ousting the Speaker. That caused hardliners to abandon a plan to force a recorded vote to display opposition to Johnson.

Ambitions, bills and grudges: Reasons DeSantis for defense secretary may never happen

While Gov. Ron DeSantis is a top contender to be nominated as defense secretary under President-elect Donald Trump, people around the two men see obstacles that could keep Trump from offering the job, and DeSantis from accepting it. The Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau spoke to 11 political insiders close to both DeSantis and Trump for this story. The potential hurdles are both personal and political. Trump’s current nominee isn’t sunk yet. And he has a major champion in U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican who has never had a warm relationship with DeSantis, who succeeded him when he left office in January 2019.

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It’s well known that DeSantis and Trump traded barbs during the Republican presidential primary last year. And while they have since buried the hatchet, with DeSantis offering to fundraise for Trump during the general election, both DeSantis and the president-elect have reputations for holding grudges. One potential comparison drawn was between DeSantis and Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. In 2016, Romney called Trump during his first presidential bid “a phony, a fraud.” But Romney still wanted to be his U.S. Secretary of State when Trump floated his name as a possible nomination after he won the election. The about-face came to nothing in the end. Trump ultimately passed over Romney – but not before publishing a picture of Trump and a sheepish-looking Romney meeting over dinner. There have been different opinions on this. The defense secretary job is high-profile and would keep DeSantis in D.C. and potentially on television, both of which would help him build support for a potential 2028 presidential bid. But the job is a federal governmental position, which would make raising money more difficult thanks to a 1939 law called the Hatch Act that prohibits executive branch employees from participating in certain political activities, including soliciting and accepting campaign contributions. On the other hand, the restriction may not all be all that enforceable. The Office of Special Counsel investigated Hatch Act complaints and found in a report released in 2021 that 13 senior Trump officials had violated it during his first term as president. The report notes that “discipline is no longer possible once subjects leave government service.” It’s also a new job. DeSantis would be pivoting to a whole new agenda, which is always a risk. He’s overwhelmingly powerful in Florida, ground zero for the new Republican party. And when he terms out of his governorship in 2027, he could easily transition into campaigning for president.

Why a two-year surge in global warmth is worrying scientists

As 2023 came to a close, scientists had hoped that a stretch of record heat that emerged across the planet might finally begin to subside this year. It seemed likely that temporary conditions, including an El Niño climate pattern that has always been known to boost average global temperatures, would give way to let Earth cool down. Instead, global temperatures remain at near-record levels. After 2023 ended up the warmest year in human history by far, 2024 is almost certain to be even warmer. Now, some scientists say this could indicate fundamental changes are happening to the global climate that are raising temperatures faster than anticipated. “This shifts the odds towards probably more warming in the pipeline,” said Helge Goessling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

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One or two years of such heat, however extraordinary, doesn’t alone mean that the warming trajectory is hastening. Scientists are exploring a number of theories for why the heat is been so persistent. Whatever the mix of factors or how long they last, scientists say the lack of clear explanation lowers their confidence that climate change will follow the established pattern that models have predicted. “We can’t rule out eventually much bigger changes,” Hausfather said. “The more we research climate change, the more we learn that uncertainty isn’t our friend.” Experts had been counting on the end of El Niño to help reverse the trend. The routine global climate pattern, driven by a pool of warmer-than-normal waters across the Pacific, peaked last winter. Usually about five months after El Niño peaks, global average temperatures start to cool down.

Lead Stories

Supreme Court seems ready to uphold ban on gender-affirming care for minors

The Supreme Court's the conservative majority on Wednesday seemed very likely to uphold Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In the last few years, fully half of the states have adopted similar bans, and Wednesday's case provided the first test of those laws. Three Tennessee families—and the Biden administration—are challenging the ban, which bar minors who say their gender doesn't align with the sex at birth, from having access to puberty blockers and medications needed to transition to the opposite sex. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar led off on Wednesday, telling the justices that the state cannot eliminate medically approved treatments for gender dysphoria while allowing the same medical treatments for minors suffering from other conditions, from early onset puberty to endometriosis. Prelogar said the state law singles out one particular use in its ban.

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"It doesn't matter what parents decide is best for their children," she said. "It doesn't matter what patients would choose for themselves. And it doesn't matter if doctors believe this treatment is essential for individual patients." She got immediate push-back from the court's conservatives. Justice Clarence Thomas went first, questioning whether the law is "simply a case of age classification when it comes to these treatments, as opposed to a ban?" Chief Justice John Roberts followed up by noting that this ban involves medical judgments, and studies conducted outside the U.S. "Doesn't that make a stronger case, for us to leave those determinations in the legislative bodies, rather than try to determine for ourselves," he asked. Justice Samuel Alito reeled off a list of studies from Sweden, Finland, and the U.K., studies that he said show the damaging effects of these treatments for minors. In light of that, he asked Prelogar if she would like to modify her claim that there is "overwhelming evidence" of the benefits of gender-affirming treatment. No, replied Prelogar, noting that while there is a lot of debate about how to deliver this care, "there is consensus that these treatments can be medically necessary" for some minors.

Hegseth’s history with alcohol shadows Pentagon selection

By Pete Hegseth’s account, his heavy drinking began after a brush with death when an RPG ricocheted off his vehicle but didn’t explode while serving in Iraq with an Army infantry unit. When he returned home to a Manhattan apartment after the deployment ended in 2006, disconnected from the people he served with while his wife at the time worked long hours, he turned to alcohol, he said. “I’d look around at 10 o’clock and be like, ‘What am I going to do today? How about I drink some beers? How about I go have some lunch and have some beers? How about I meet my one or two buddies and have some beers?’” Hegseth recounted in an August 2021 appearance on “The Will Cain Show” podcast. “And one beers leads to many, leads to self-medication, leads to ‘I’ve earned this.’ Like, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t.’” Allegations of excessive drinking have shadowed Hegseth’s career in the years since as he’s risen from running a veterans nonprofit to becoming a star Fox News host and now President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the Defense Department — a selection that hangs in the balance on the Hill as some senators question his relationship with alcohol.

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In 2017 at a Republican conference in California, Hegseth was so “visibly intoxicated” that it enabled a woman to be the “aggressor” in having sexual relations with him, according to a statement from Tim Parlatore, his attorney — an encounter that the woman later described as a rape to police. Hegseth disputes that claim, saying the encounter was consensual, and prosecutors declined to file charges. At Fox News, Hegseth had a reputation as a heavy drinker, according to six former Fox News employees who worked directly with Hegseth and saw him drinking on the job or visibly drunk at work events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Several years ago, during a St. Patrick’s Day segment on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” support staff at the cable news network set up a display of beers for a holiday segment on the show. After the segment aired, Hegseth walked by the display table and drank each beer, according to two former colleagues who witnessed the incident and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive episode. The incident struck the colleagues as jarring for two reasons: One, the displayed drinks had been sitting out for hours and were stale and warm; two, the show wraps up at 10 a.m., an early hour for alcohol consumption.

What could happen to Texas’ Medicaid program under Trump

Texas leaders have shown a decadeslong antipathy toward Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that covers millions of low-income and vulnerable residents. They declined additional federal money that, under the Affordable Care Act, would have allowed Medicaid to offer health care coverage to more low-income families. The state was among the last to insure women for an entire year after they gave birth. And when the federal government last year ended a policy that required states to keep people on their Medicaid rolls during the coronavirus pandemic, Texas officials rushed to kick off those they deemed ineligible, ignoring persistent warnings that the speedy process could lead to some people being wrongfully removed. Come January, when Donald Trump assumes the presidency for the second time, Texas leaders could get another opportunity to whittle down the program — this time with fewer constraints. Trump has not shared any plans to cut Medicaid, which covers about 80 million Americans, and his campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

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Health care advocates and experts, however, say that his past efforts to scale back the program, as well as positions taken by conservative groups and Republican lawmakers who back him, indicate that it would likely be a target for severe reductions. “We expect the Republicans to move very quickly to cut Medicaid dramatically and indeed end its guarantee of coverage as it exists today,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families in Washington, D.C. Currently, the federal government picks up, on average, nearly 70% of Medicaid spending, with states assuming the remaining costs. (A state’s share varies based mostly on what percentage of its residents are impoverished.) Any decisions to cut federal spending would likely lead states to shrink the number of people they deem eligible and the care that enrollees are entitled to receive, Alker and other experts said. That would be particularly devastating in Texas, which already has one of the country’s lowest percentages of residents covered through Medicaid and where officials lack the political will to make up the difference in funding with state money, experts say. Parents with two children, for example, must earn less than $285 monthly to qualify for Medicaid for themselves.

Another Texas grid regulator plans to step down by the end of the year, leaving two vacancies

Jimmy Glotfelty plans to resign from the Public Utility Commission of Texas effective Dec. 31, the second commissioner to share an intention to leave the five-member body in as many months. A commissioner since August 2021, Glotfelty said in letter to Gov. Greg Abbott Wednesday that he would leave his post nearly a year before his six-year term was set to expire on Sept. 1, 2025. “It has been an honor and privilege to serve the people of Texas in this capacity. I am proud of the work we have accomplished to address the challenges that face the Texas electric system during this time of change,” Glotfelty wrote to Abbott in a letter reviewed by the Chronicle.

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Glotfelty’s notice to the governor follows Commissioner Lori Cobos’ announcement two weeks ago that she plans to resign from the state agency, which oversees Texas’ electric, water and telecommunications utilities and the state’s power grid, by the end of the year. The departures come as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has warned that January could see an elevated risk of outages amid a higher chance of extreme cold. They also leave the commission shorthanded as the Texas Legislature convenes in Austin next month. Lawmakers are expected to focus on legislation to reform how electric utilities prepare for extreme weather and to boost natural gas and nuclear power generation on the ERCOT grid. Glotfelty said in an interview that he isn’t leaving the PUC because he has another job lined up, as “it’s pretty hard, in my view, to go and look for a job when you’re a state official.”

State Stories

‘Public health crisis’: Residents urged to demand animal shelter funding amid stray dog crisis in Liberty County

Residents of the Santa Fe subdivision in Cleveland, are living in fear after a series of stray dog attacks. Packs of aggressive dogs have been spotted roaming the area, with some residents sharing alarming stories of being attacked outside their homes. Photos show the bite marks left on victims, underscoring the seriousness of the problem. KPRC 2 Reporter Corley Peel visited the Liberty County Commissioner’s Courthouse to get answers from Judge Jay Knight. Judge Knight explained that Liberty County does not have an animal control department, citing funding limitations as a key hurdle. He stated that he is working with the county attorney to find solutions, but for now, residents remain at risk. While in the Santa Fe neighborhood, KPRC 2 witnessed firsthand the aggressive behavior of stray dogs. A pack of dogs ran alongside the station’s vehicle, barking as they approached.

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Earlier in the day, KPRC 2 photojournalist Damon Sales encountered a man trying to control a group of dogs he had taken off the streets, highlighting the complexity of the situation. The Liberty County Sheriff’s Office responds to dog bite calls but faces challenges when trying to handle stray animals. Without a county shelter, deputies must rely on animal control services from nearby cities, which are not always available after hours. Shelby Bobosky, Executive Director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network, has raised concerns about the lack of animal control services in Liberty County, calling it a “public health crisis.” She noted that under Texas law, counties with populations of 75,000 or more are advised to have an animal shelter or advisory committee. Bobosky urged residents in areas without animal control to speak up. “I urge everyone in rural areas that do not have a city or county shelter to go to your elected officials and commissioner court meetings and ask them to fund an animal shelter,” she said. As the situation unfolds, Liberty County officials are being pressed to prioritize funding for animal control to protect public safety. In the meantime, residents are encouraged to report stray dog sightings and remain vigilant.

Reports: TCU AD Jeremiah Donati headed to South Carolina

TCU athletics director Jeremiah Donati is reportedly headed to the SEC. Multiple reports from college football insiders Ross Dellenger, Brett McMurphy and Pete Thamel say that the University of South Carolina is close to finalizing a deal to hire Donati as its next athletics director. The Star-Telegram reached out to Donati and has yet to receive a response from TCU or Donati. Head of the athletics department for seven years, Donati has overseen TCU’s rise to win eight national championships in various sports and double-digit Big 12 Conference crowns.

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Donati hired football coach Sonny Dykes before the 2022 season and Dykes led the Horned Frogs to the national championship game in his first season. In 2022-23, TCU became the first team in the College Football Playoff era to reach the CFP, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the College World Series in the same academic year. Donati also hand picked Mark Campbell to take over the women’s basketball program and the Horned Frogs are currently ranked top-10 in Campbell’s second season. While at TCU, Donati oversaw $500 million worth of facility improvements and while in charge for Frog Club for four years, it generated its three highest totals of giving. Donati was also running in the USC athletic directors job last year, but opted to stay in Fort Worth for another year.

Traffic snarls North Texas roads as state’s population booms

Many Dallas-Fort Worth residents are used to sitting in traffic. Yet on a few Dallas roads in particular, North Texas drivers are spending more time than usual — and time is money. A “historic amount” of recent Texas Department of Transportation projects have helped address long waits, with traffic delays down 7% across the state, according to a study by the Texas Transportation Institute. That includes Dallas’ Southern Gateway project on Interstate 35E in 2023, which TxDOT says reduced delays by 60%. “Major transportation investments across Texas, like those in the Texas Clear Lanes initiative and the hundreds of other projects across the state, are easing that burden and helping commuters save time and fuel as traffic levels rebound,” TTI senior research scientist David Schrank said in a release. But congestion persists in Texas’ largest regions as the state’s population balloons. Based on TTI’s research, here is a look at the most congested roadways in Dallas-Fort Worth.

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U.S. Senate passes Ted Cruz bill cracking down on deepfake nudes

The U.S. Senate has passed legislation by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that aims to shut down publication of nonconsensual deepfake pornography and intimate images. Cruz said the bill would give victims, many of whom are teenage girls, a chance to seek justice against those who publish the computer-generated images. “It will also hold Big Tech accountable by making sure websites remove these disgusting fake videos and pictures immediately,” Cruz said in a statement. His bill would criminalize publishing intimate images, often referred to as “revenge porn,” including realistic computer-generated photos and videos depicting real people. It would require apps such as Snapchat and websites to remove such images within 48 hours of a victim’s request. The Federal Trade Commission would enforce that requirement.

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Cruz was joined at a news conference earlier this year by 15-year-old Aledo High School student Elliston Berry, whose classmate used an artificial intelligence program to transform innocent pictures of her and her friends into nudes. The classmate spread those images across social media, causing Elliston to dread setting foot on campus. Although the perpetrator left her school, she said she still worries about the pictures resurfacing. She and her mother, Anna McAdams, have been pushing lawmakers to crack down on the sharing of nonconsensual intimate images, including those produced through programs capable of creating authentic-looking nude photos. Most states, including Texas, have laws against revenge porn, and many of those address deepfakes, but penalties can vary and victims still have trouble making websites remove offending images, Cruz has said. Cruz’s bill passed Tuesday night by voice vote and no recorded opposition, a good sign for its chances of passing the House and being signed into law by the president.

Beaumont attorney sanctioned for ‘nonexistent’ AI-generated case citations

A plaintiff’s lawyer in Beaumont has been sanctioned by a federal judge for submitting a response brief that included citations to “nonexistent cases” and “nonexistent quotations” generated by artificial intelligence. In the underlying lawsuit, James Gauthier sued Goodyear Tire & Rubber in Jefferson County district court in June 2023 alleging that, after working for the company for 24 and a half years, he was fired after he “refused to alter” the timeline of events related to a June 2021 release of hydrocarbons at the company’s Jefferson County plant, which he reported. Gauthier alleges the company wanted him to revise his timeline so it could “avoid a violation for releasing hydrocarbons and failing to timely report and respond to the release.” Goodyear removed the suit to federal court in July 2023.

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In a brief in support of its motion for summary judgment, Goodyear explained that it had concerns about the case law Gauthier cited. “Although Gauthier ostensibly cites cases to support his opposition to Goodyear’s motion, the undersigned has been unable to locate two of the cases and several other cases Plaintiff relies upon do not contain the quoted language and/or stand for the propositions for which they are cited,” Goodyear argued. “Based upon actual, applicable authority, the court should grant Goodyear’s motion for summary judgment” U.S. District Judge Marcia Crone issued a six-page order Nov. 25 noting that Gauthier’s counsel, Brandon Monk of The Monk Law Firm in Beaumont, failed to respond to arguments from Goodyear that “specifically identified the nonexistent legal authorities contained in the response.” “He failed to withdraw or otherwise address these issues when raised by Goodyear,” Crone wrote. “In fact, Monk’s sur-reply to Goodyear’s reply makes no mention of the problems inherent in the response. … It was only after the court entered the show cause order that Monk sought leave to amend the response.”

Project 2025 wants to slash green subsidies. Here's how that would affect Texas jobs, energy bills

President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign website touts his desire to rescind the Biden administration’s “job-killing” electricity regulations and bring Americans “the lowest-cost energy and electricity on Earth.” But a full repeal of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, along with implementation of other energy and climate proposals suggested in a conservative policy playbook known as Project 2025, could reduce job growth and raise energy bills, according to a study from the left-leaning think tank Energy Innovation. Those outcomes could be especially pronounced in Texas, the nation’s energy capital and a leading beneficiary of the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for renewable energy development.

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Texas could lose out on more jobs than any other state if Project 2025’s energy and climate provisions were fully realized, compared to if current policies were maintained. The state could see 124,000 fewer jobs by 2030 and 175,000 fewer jobs by 2035, according to Energy Innovation’s analysis. Meanwhile, energy costs for the average Texas household could increase by more than $110 per year by 2030 and by more than $400 per year by 2035, according to Energy Innovation’s modeling. “All of that means that Texans have less money in their pockets at the end of the year, either because they're not employed as much as they would have been, or they're spending more on energy,” said Robbie Orvis, Energy Innovation’s senior director of modeling and analysis. Though Trump has pledged to “rescind all unspent funds” under the Inflation Reduction Act, he's repeatedly disavowed a connection to Project 2025, a 900-page report spearheaded by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, wrote Project 2025’s section on the Department of Transportation. That section calls for reducing fuel economy standards to slow the transition to electric vehicles. In an interview, Furchtgott-Roth cast doubt on Energy Innovation’s findings of potentially reduced economic growth and jobs, pointing to favorable trends on Wall Street after Trump’s victory.

Jury determines cannibal serial killer who burned bodies in Fort Worth dumpster should die

A man who sliced the throats of five people over four and a half years, cut three of the bodies into pieces, and sexually abused in a motel bathtub the dismembered corpse of one of his victims should be executed in the state’s death chamber, a jury in Fort Worth determined on Wednesday. Jason Thornburg, who said he ate a piece of the heart of his third victim, was, after 14 days of testimony in his capital murder trial in Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County, condemned to die by lethal injection. Thornburg butchered three people over five days in September 2021 at the Mid City Inn in Euless. The killings were fueled by his methamphetamine use, sexual sadism and desire to have intercourse with a sex worker for free, the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office suggested to the jury.

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“He is a psychopath. He is evil. He is the type of evil that we want to believe doesn’t exist in our community,” Assistant District Attorney Amy Allin said in the state’s punishment phase closing argument. The slayings revealed Thornburg’s depraved indifference to life, Allin said. After hacking the victims’ bodies with a Milwaukee straight blade knife, Thornburg scrubbed with ammonia and a lavender solution his easy-to-clean tiled motel room floor and temporarily stored the bodies of David Lueras, Maricruz Mathis and Lauren Phillips in garbage bags under his bed. In two trips, he drove with the bags in plastic containers to west Fort Worth, unloaded the bins into a dumpster and lit the bodies on fire. Later that morning, Thornburg drove to a Home Depot to return the four empty 20-gallon totes for a cash refund, and a store employee put the containers back on a shelf. The jury two weeks ago found Thornburg guilty of the capital murder of multiple people during the same course of conduct.

Mattress Mack to undergo open-heart surgery, Houston furniture mogul announces in social media post

Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale will undergo open-heart surgery next week, according to a video he posted on social media Wednesday afternoon. The 73-year-old owner of Gallery Furniture said in the video that he had a "leaky mitral valve," and is scheduled for a four-hour operation at the Houston Methodist Hospital Dec. 10. McIngvale said that he will be at the hospital for roughly a week after the surgery and on bed rest following the operation for at least another 10 days.

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University of St. Thomas' Richard Ludwick resigns as president of Houston Catholic school

University of St. Thomas President Richard L. Ludwick will resign from his position on Dec. 31, according to officials at the private Catholic institution in Houston. Ludwick announced his decision Wednesday. In his seven years at the university, the president oversaw major enrollment growth, several academic program expansions and the school's entrance into Division III of the NCAA. But his time also came with upheaval in key administrative offices and a failure to fix the financial problems that toppled his predecessor.

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Fr. Dempsey Rosales, director of the Center Semillero for Hispanic/Latino Theology, will serve as interim president while the university's Board of Directors conducts a national search for a permanent leader. Rosales is a tenured professor of theology and holds the J. Michael Miller Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies. “I step into this role with a deep sense of gratitude and responsibility, knowing that our mission is to educate minds and inspire lives rooted in faith and reason,” Rosales said in a statement. “Together, we will continue to uphold the traditions of academic excellence and spiritual growth that define this institution, preparing our students not only for success but for a life of purpose guided by the core values of our Basilian founders: goodness, discipline, knowledge, and community.” Ludwick will leave the presidency having ushered in an era of excitement for many University of St. Thomas students, despite his administration having some vocal critics among the faculty. While in office, Ludwick created new engineering programs, opened the Kolbe School of Innovation and Professional Studies for associate's degrees, and instituted the Rising Stars scholarship program for first-generation college students.

Mayor Whitmire says controversial fire department employment rule needs to be taken up with state

As a Houston City Council member advocates for changing a rule that kept a firefighter who shared an intimate video of a colleague employed, Mayor John Whitmire said the case had been “politicized unnecessarily” and suggested the issue be left up to the state. Melinda Abbt worked at Houston’s Station 18 in the East End with Chris Barrientes. In 2008 while Abbt was on a call, Barrientes took an intimate video from Abbt’s computer and not only watched it repeatedly, but shared it with others. Abbt didn’t find out until 2017. City council was set to approve a $850,000 payout over a lawsuit filed against the city, but the vote was delayed Wednesday.

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The state law that kept Barrientes on at the department is referred to as the 180-day rule, which only allows the fire department to investigate or terminate firefighters accused of misconduct within 180 days of the act happening, regardless of when management finds out. Barrientes, who was demoted two ranks and served a 90-day suspension as a result of the case, has since resigned. His last day as an engineer operator with the department was Nov. 26. Whitmire told the council Wednesday that he and new Fire Chief Tom Muñoz had told Barrientes he had “no future in the Houston Fire Department” ahead of his resignation. Whitmire also issued an apology to Abbt on behalf of the city. But while he expressed sympathy for Abbt, Whitmire said the union contract was not the place where the 180-day rule needed to change. “That should be debated in the halls of the legislature, another day, another time,” Whitmire said as the council had tense discussion on the matter.

TEA to select new conservator to oversee HISD board governance, academic progress in early 2025

The Texas Education Agency plans to name a new district conservator to oversee Houston ISD's school board governance and progress toward meeting student academic outcomes in early 2025. Doris Delaney, HISD’s current districtwide conservator, is retiring Dec. 13 after more than eight years overseeing Kashmere High School and the state’s largest school district, according to the TEA. TEA Commissioner Mike Morath appointed Delaney, a Kashmere graduate and retired Aldine ISD administrator, in September 2016 to “to ensure and oversee district-level support for Kashmere High School” due to the school’s repeated failing annual state accountability ratings, according to court documents.

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Local tax breaks for LNG Plants don’t benefit Texas communities, report says

Three low-income school districts in Texas have granted more than $2 billion in tax relief to new liquefied natural gas terminals on the Gulf Coast, according to a report released Monday by the Sierra Club, which tallied publicly available data on agreements between companies and local public entities. Those tax breaks, intended to attract investment and employment opportunities, totaled about $4 million per permanent post-construction job promised by developers of the gas projects, said the 34-page report, “The People Always Pay: Tax Breaks Force Gulf Communities to Subsidize the LNG Industry.” Sierra Club researchers compiled dozens of different tax agreements from 15 LNG projects in Texas and Louisiana that are currently operating, under construction or planned. Proponents of such incentive programs say offering tax breaks supports big business that fuels the economy, attracts investment and upholds American energy dominance. Critics say the tax breaks deprive local communities of important revenue.

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Subsidies remain the norm in the U.S.’ buildout of massive, capital-intensive export terminals, concentrated on the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast,” the Sierra Club report said. “LNG developers in these areas typically receive lucrative tax breaks that deny the local community critical funds for social services and infrastructure.” A collection of enormous LNG projects has cropped up along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana in recent years, fueled by booming gas production in the shale fields of Texas. The facilities pipe in shale gas, compress it into a super-cool liquid at -260 degrees Fahrenheit and then load it onto ocean tankers for sale overseas. Five new terminals in the Gulf have already helped make the U.S. the world’s largest exporter of LNG. Another five are currently under construction, four of them in Texas. According to the Texas Comptroller, those four projects represent $49 billion in investments in the state, while Texas’ three operating LNG terminals exported more than $9 billion in 2023. “The liquefied natural gas industry in Texas is a crucial component of the state’s energy sector, driven by abundant natural gas reserves and extensive infrastructure. Texas’ location and robust export capabilities make it a key player in the global LNG market, contributing significantly to the state’s economy.”

County Stories

Overdose deaths in Travis County are declining for the first time in 3 years

For the first time in three years, Travis County is seeing a slight decline in accidental drug deaths. In 2023, there were 314 drug deaths from January to July. In that same time frame this year, there were 255 drug deaths, according to the Travis County Medical Examiner's Office. Fentanyl-related deaths are also down. There were 134 fentanyl-related deaths from January to July this year compared to 180 in 2023. Data for the second half of 2024 isn't available yet, but Robert Luckritz, the Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services chief, said overdoses appear to be trending downward, despite a surge in early May.

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The data marks the first break in what has been a constant surge of fatal drug overdoses in the county over the past few years. But drug deaths are still well above the levels from several years ago. To put it in perspective: In all of 2018, Travis County saw nine fentanyl-related drug deaths. There have been more than nine fentanyl-related deaths every month of 2022, 2023 and the first half of 2024 in Travis County. “We’re still very far from winning the battle against this crisis. Overdoses are still the number one cause of accidental death here in Travis County,” Travis County Judge Andy Brown said. "But we need to take a moment to recognize that investing in people and resources and Narcan and things like that are starting, hopefully, to make a difference." Luckritz attributed the slight decline in deaths this year to the increased prevalence of Narcan, an overdose reversal drug.

City Stories

Goodland, with 15K homes, coming south of Grand Prairie

A Dallas real estate development firm is spearheading a major development south of Grand Prairie featuring 15,000 homes, shops, restaurants and open spaces. Grand Prairie announced Monday, Dec. 2, that Provident is developing the master-planned community Goodland near Texas 360 and U.S. 287 on the southern edge of Grand Prairie. The community will stretch in to Ellis and Johnson counties. The city annexed over 1,500 acres to help move the development forward. “This is a significant step in our city’s development,” Mayor Ron Jensen said in a news release. “Unlike many of our neighboring cities, we have the unique advantage of new development opportunities to our south that will drive the growth and prosperity of our city. We recognized the opportunity and took decisive action.”

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According to the news release, Goodland is designed to be a city within a city. Plans include a central mixed-use and walkable Town Center, complete with civic buildings and other commercial development. Provident managing director Rylan Yowell said the homes will cater to different lifestyles and price points, including townhomes, custom homes, gated adult communities and more. “Goodland harkens back to a simpler way of life. Imagine kids playing hopscotch or neighbors catching up on the front porch. This is not the sprawling suburbs of northern DFW or your typical master-planned community. This is a Texas town in the making with a new pattern of life,” Yowell said. Provident is known for other developments throughout north Texas, including Preston Hollow Village, Stacy Green in Allen, Tavolo Park in Fort Worth and Hillstead in Lavon.

National Stories

Disgraced Air Force general tried to have reprimand watered down. A judge said no.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Phillip Stewart, convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and other offenses for pursuing an affair with a subordinate, tried to have some of the most stinging language removed from a formal reprimand he received as part of his punishment. The judge refused to do it, saying there was "a factual basis" for the lacerating rebuke. Stewart is a former commander of the 19th Air Force, the service's pilot training command based in San Antonio. In June, he was tried before a military jury at Fort Sam Houston on charges of sexually assaulting a female officer on his staff. It was only the second court-martial of a general officer in Air Force history. Stewart maintained that his sexual relations with the woman were consensual.

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High school exit exams dwindle to about half a dozen states

Jill Norton, an education policy adviser in Massachusetts, has a teenage son with dyslexia and ADHD. Shelley Scruggs, an electrical engineer in the same state, also has a teenage son with ADHD. Both students go to the same technical high school. But this fall, Norton and Scruggs advocated on opposite sides of a Massachusetts ballot referendum scrapping the requirement that high school kids pass a standardized state test to graduate. Norton argued that without the high bar of the standard exam, kids like hers won’t have an incentive to strive. But Scruggs maintained that kids with learning disorders also need different types of measurements than standardized tests to qualify for a high school diploma. Voters last month approved the referendum, 59% to 41%, ending the Massachusetts requirement. There and in most other states, Scruggs’ position against testing is carrying the day.

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Just seven states now require students to pass a test to graduate, and one of those — New York — will end its Regents Exam as a requirement by the 2027-28 school year. Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas and Virginia still require testing to graduate, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a group that opposes such mandates. In Massachusetts, teachers unions favored getting rid of the exam as a graduation requirement. They argued it forced them to teach certain facts at the expense of in-depth or more practical learning. But many business leaders were in favor of keeping the test, arguing that without it, they will have no guarantee that job applicants with high school diplomas possess basic skills. Without the test, they will just be passed along. I can’t just trust that my kid is getting the basic level of what he needs. State by state, graduation tests have tumbled over the past decade. In 2012, half the states required the tests, but that number fell to 13 states in 2019, according to Education Week. The trend accelerated during the pandemic, when many school districts scrapped the tests during remote learning and some decided to permanently extend test exemptions. Studies have found that such graduation exams disadvantage students with learning disabilities as well as English language learners, and that they aren’t always a good predictor of success in careers or higher education.

Biden White House is discussing preemptive pardons for those in Trump’s crosshairs

President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions. Biden’s aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments, a sense of alarm which has only accelerated since Trump last weekend announced the appointment of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics. The White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them. The deliberations touch on pardoning those currently in office, elected and appointed, as well as former officials who’ve angered Trump and his loyalists.

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Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic. The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations. The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson shot and killed outside NYC hotel

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk early Wednesday morning in what police called a premeditated ambush that sent them on a manhunt for the unidentified gunman, who fled the area on a bicycle and was last seen heading into Central Park. The health insurance executive from Minnesota was walking outside the New York Hilton Midtown about 6:45 a.m., before an investors conference his company was holding in the hotel, when a gunman wearing a hood and a mask fired off several rounds from a pistol. Thompson had been staying in another hotel across the street. He was killed in one of the busiest parts of the city, an area teeming with tourists as well as people in business suits. Even as New Yorkers prepared for a bustling Christmas season with the traditional tree lighting Wednesday night at Rockefeller Center, officers had cordoned off sections of 54th Street outside the Hilton with yellow crime scene tape and were counting 9mm casings on the ground.

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Police tracked the gunman’s movements in a neighborhood saturated by city-operated and private surveillance cameras, releasing images of him making a cash purchase at a nearby Starbucks and then, a short time later, taking aim at Thompson, who authorities said was shot in the back and leg. Surveillance camera footage obtained by The Post appears to show the suspect exiting the 57th Street F Train station timestamped at 6:15 a.m. The individual — wearing clothing, shoes and a backpack that match images released by police — leaves the station and walks briskly down Sixth Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel, where police say they responded to a call of a person being shot at 6:46 a.m. The Starbucks where police released photos of the suspect is about 100 feet south of the subway exit. Those pictures were the clearest of his partially concealed face to be made public Wednesday. By late afternoon, the NYPD had received tips and was following potential leads. Detectives traced the gunman’s entrance into the 843-acre park via Central Park South, and they determined that he exited on the west side. It was not clear if he left the bike in the park or if he abandoned it elsewhere. The targeted shooting of the chief executive officer of an American company, in the nation’s financial capital, shocked the health and business communities nationally and in Minnetonka, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis, where UnitedHealth Group is headquartered. Police said they were searching for a motive.

With GOP help, Montana lawmakers vote down transgender bathroom rule

Several Montana Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday to block a measure that would have barred transgender lawmakers from using the state Capitol bathrooms that aligned with their gender identities. The proposed measure would have banned Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a transgender Democratic lawmaker who was reelected in November, from using the women’s bathroom outside Montana’s House and Senate chambers. Last year, Zephyr was silenced in the House after speaking out against her Republican colleagues for their support of a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children. Weeks ahead of her return to the House floor, Zephyr’s colleagues in the chamber rejected the bathroom measure in a 12-10 vote. Three Republicans joined Democrats in voting against it, characterizing it as a rule that would not add value to their work while also noting they didn’t necessarily disagree with the ideology driving it.

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Zephyr told The Washington Post on Wednesday that she was grateful to her GOP colleagues who voted “no.” She said she has a “good working relationship” with them, adding that their votes against the measure showed they were “able to recognize this for the distraction that it is.” “I hope that it serves as a signal to other Republicans across the country that there are more important things that governments should be focusing on besides targeting transgender people,” Zephyr said. Montana’s measure paralleled a resolution introduced by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) last month that proposed changing House rules to ban trans lawmakers and visitors to the U.S. Capitol from using bathrooms associated with their gender identity. Mace’s resolution came two weeks after Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, became the first openly trans person elected to Congress. Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, state Rep. David Bedey (R) said he would “reluctantly” cast a “no” vote, describing the measure as “a distraction.” Bedey, though, also made clear that he still had his “own opinion” on gender dysphoria, which he said was a “scientific issue actually that needs to be resolved.” “This particular action will have the effect of making people famous in the national news and will not contribute to the effective conduct of our business,” Bedey said. The Montana legislature made headlines across the country in April 2023, when the House was discussing four anti-trans bills — one of them a ban on gender-affirming care for trans children.

Trump picks Paul Atkins to run SEC

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday picked conservative lawyer Paul Atkins to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, choosing a regulatory skeptic who will be expected to curb the agency’s enforcement division. Atkins, well known in Congress and on Wall Street, served as a Republican member of the SEC during the Bush administration, when he sometimes opposed regulations he argued were unnecessarily burdensome. If confirmed as the next SEC chair, Atkins isn’t expected to dismantle core investor protections, but is likely to re-examine or revise much of what the agency did during the Biden administration. “Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social. “He also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”

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Atkins has questioned the SEC’s crackdown on cryptocurrency firms and would likely take a friendlier approach to the market, in line with Trump’s newfound fondness for the industry. Many other Republicans want the agency to deal with the market in a more welcoming way than it did during the Biden administration. The SEC under Chair Gary Gensler sued many of the biggest crypto exchanges, accusing the platforms of dealing assets that are illegal to trade without regulatory supervision. Gensler declined to write customized rules for the crypto market, saying many digital assets are securities that should have to comply with current investor-protection rules. Atkins and other critics say Gensler’s approach was too rigid for cryptocurrencies designed to run over peer-to-peer computer networks. The SEC’s approach drove increasing amounts of crypto-market activity toward Asia and Europe, where governments created regulatory frameworks designed specifically for digital assets.

Lead Stories

Inside the costly new reality of insuring a home in Texas

When Maryann McGregor retired in 2020, she and her husband considered downsizing and selling their four-bedroom home in Clear Lake to their adult son. The couple had lived there for nearly four decades, and the house was paid off. Then their home insurance bills started to skyrocket. Two carriers stopped providing coverage, and Allstate, which had been charging them $3,300 in 2020, is no longer writing new policies in their zip code. Now they’re paying $8,000 for a policy from a little-known start-up. Their wind and hail deductible has jumped to $28,400 — twice what they paid to replace the roof last year. McGregor worries about burdening her son with the new costs. “It would be a huge impact on him to have that big insurance bill on top of the tax bills,” she said. “The insurance is more than the taxes now.”

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Homeowners like McGregor are struggling in every corner of Texas to keep their homes insured, paying more for less coverage as climate change wreaks havoc on providers. Home insurance in the state is now among the most expensive in the country, trailing only Florida and Louisiana, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of U.S. Census survey data. Insurance carriers from Allstate and State Farm to smaller start-ups have responded to the rising frequency and intensity of storms not by pulling out of local markets en masse, as has happened in more regulated states like California, but by jacking up premiums and dropping homeowners in risky areas. The Texas Department of Insurance recorded a 21% jump in statewide rates last year, the biggest annual spike in at least a decade. In the last five years, rates in Texas have risen faster than anywhere else in the country, based on data tracked by S&P Global. The Houston metropolitan area has the highest average premiums in the state, according to the Chronicle’s analysis, with communities closest to the coast paying nearly three times the national average for home insurance.

Trump mulls replacing Pete Hegseth with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

President-elect Donald Trump is considering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a possible replacement for Pete Hegseth, his pick to run the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the discussions, amid Republican senators’ concerns over mounting allegations about the former Fox News host’s personal life. Picking DeSantis, a 2024 GOP primary rival for the presidency, would amount to a stunning turn for Trump. But he would also find in the governor a well-known conservative with a service record who shares Trump’s—and Hegseth’s—view on culling what they see as “woke” policies in the military. Trump allies increasingly think Hegseth might not survive further scrutiny, according to people close to the president-elect’s team, which considers the next 48 hours to be crucial to his fate. DeSantis, who served as a Navy lawyer in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, was on an earlier list of potential defense-secretary candidates that transition officials presented to the president.

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Trump ultimately went with Hegseth. But as Hegseth’s nomination has faltered, that list has been revived and DeSantis is again among the choices Trump is considering, the people said. The discussions are in their early stages, one of the people said, adding that Trump has floated DeSantis’s name in casual conversations with guests at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club. Trump could decide not to choose DeSantis and select another replacement, if Hegseth’s nomination falls apart, the people said. Another potential defense-secretary candidate who has been discussed by Trump allies, according to people familiar with the matter, is Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon official and ally of Vice President-elect JD Vance. Trump is also considering Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) for the job, some of the people said. DeSantis was once seen as an acolyte of Trump but his decision to challenge the former president in the 2024 GOP primary began a conflict between them, with Trump casting DeSantis as disloyal. Trump easily prevailed in the primary and friends of the two have worked to repair the relationship.

Construction industry braces for one-two punch: Tariffs and deportations

Two decades ago, McKinney, a booming suburb on the northeastern edge of Dallas was a small town accessed by only a two-lane highway. Now, 200,000 people fill its sprawling subdivisions, with new construction everywhere. McKinney, like the country’s other fastest-growing cities, is a town built by imported labor and home to an industry hooked on imported steel and lumber. That leaves the construction industry particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and his threats to introduce new tariffs on Mexico and Canada. “We will absolutely have a labor shortage,” said George Fuller, a longtime Texas developer who is also mayor of McKinney. “Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, these industries depend on immigrant labor.” The McKinney mayor, who describes himself as a Reagan Republican, said he would prefer all workers to be documented and would like to see more materials produced in the U.S. But he said he thought a heavy-handed approach of deportations and tariffs would be a painful way to advance those goals.

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“The short-term impact, I don’t want to say devastating, but it would be a significant impact,” he said. In Texas, California, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, immigrants make up more than half of construction trade workers, according to Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Undocumented workers make up an estimated 13% of the construction industry—more than twice that of the overall workforce, according to a recent estimate from Pew Research Center. Trump, a former real-estate developer himself, has said he would support the construction industry by easing regulations and allowing more building on federal land. But many economists and builders say the loss of the immigrant workforce would drive up the cost of wages for some positions and leave others unfilled. On top of that, the president-elect’s proposed tariffs of 25% on Canada and Mexico could increase the cost of construction materials. Overall, about 7.3% of home-building materials are imported, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Softwood lumber, used to frame buildings, often comes from Canada, which now has a tariff of 14.54%. The U.S. is also the world’s top importer of the crucial housing materials iron and steel. About a quarter of America’s $43 billion in imported iron and steel came from Canada as of 2022, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

A conservative nonprofit got $80k for a Texas book-ban battle. Llano County hasn’t seen it

As Pastor John Amanchukwu spoke, his voice reverberated throughout the gala room of Sandstone Mountain Ranch, an exotic hunting preserve and event space near Llano, a small Texas Hill Country town about 80 miles northwest of Austin. “Not only should we put God first in Congress, the General Assembly, throughout this land, in the halls of government, in the halls of power," Amanchukwu boomed, "we should also put God first in our libraries.” The crowd erupted in applause. Sitting at the tables before Amanchukwu were not congregants but donors, each having spent between $100 and $1,250 per person to attend. A table for eight cost $10,000. On that crisp fall afternoon in November 2023, Amanchukwu — a North Carolinian who has embraced the label of “Book Banning Pastor” — was among several prominent conservative figures who traveled from across the country to raise money for Llano County’s legal defense in a federal book ban case.

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At least, that’s what attendees believed they were raising money for. But one year after the event, Llano County still hasn’t seen a dime of the funds collected, the American-Statesman found through public records and interviews with officials. The county's outside lawyer, well-known conservative attorney Jonathan Mitchell, also has not received any money from the fundraiser, he told the Statesman. Instead, the money went to conservative nonprofit America First Legal — which has no present role in litigating or funding the case. The nonprofit, which recorded $44.4 million in revenue in 2022, has never contacted county leadership in writing, according to public records requests. The case — which made Llano County, a rural Central Texas community of about 22,000, a national flashpoint in the culture wars — centers around the county's removal of 17 titles from its public libraries in 2021. Some were children’s books containing nudity in illustrations, including Maurice Sendak’s 1970 classic “In the Night Kitchen,” while others were works on race, gender and sexuality, ranging from “Being Jazz: My Life as a Transgender Teen” to “They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Organization.”

State Stories

Texas won't investigate maternal mortalities for the years immediately following its abortion ban

Texas officials will not investigate pregnancy-related deaths for 2022 and 2023, skipping over the years immediately following the state’s controversial abortion ban, which critics say has led to more dangerous and sometimes fatal pregnancies. The state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, which announced the decision this fall after years of trying to catch up on its count, said it was jumping ahead to provide “more contemporary” data for state lawmakers. Dr. Carla Ortique, who chairs the committee, said the Texas Department of State Health Services will still release some mortality data from 2022 and 2023, even though the committee is not providing in-depth analysis of causes and trends. Reached for comment this week, Ortique said the committee had been planning to skip forward since earlier this year.

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The move comes after the committee delayed the release of its last major review, in 2022, which showed a higher rate of life-threatening hemorrhaging among Black women during childbirth in Texas through 2020. Critics at the time accused Gov. Greg Abbott, who appoints the committee members, of pushing it off until after his reelection bid. The committee now says its 2024 review, which would be the first glimpse into impacts from the period after the fall of Roe v. Wade, will be ready sometime in 2026, the same year Abbott could run for a record-setting fourth term. The decision, first reported by The Washington Post, has caused an uproar among some Democrats and women’s health advocates. Nakeenya Wilson, a former member of the committee whose position was eliminated by the state Legislature last year, said that while ideally the committee would be up-to-date, compared to other states, it’s not “uncommon or unusual” for it to be a year or two behind. After Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, Texas moved to ban nearly all abortions except those that endanger the life of the mother. At least two pregnant Texans have died since then, which experts said could have been avoided had they had access to abortion care, according to reporting from ProPublica. Another Texas woman died under similar circumstances in 2021, just after Texas had implemented an earlier version of its ban that prohibited abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, according to ProPublica.

North Texas meth sentences are toughest in nation. Here’s why

Jose Milton Puentes and Michael Bowling committed similar crimes. Both mailed roughly a pound of methamphetamine across state lines — a federal offense. Both were caught. Both pleaded guilty. Puentes, now 43, was a first-time offender who cooperated with federal agents. Bowling, 50, had prior federal convictions for selling drugs and conspiring to smuggle immigrants. Given those differences, one might expect their sentences would be vastly different. And they were. One received 7.5 years; the other received 30 years. But here’s the twist. Puentes — the first-time offender — received the 30 years.

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His sentence, along with hundreds of others that The Dallas Morning News examined, illustrates what many view as a grave injustice in the legal system — one largely the result of one main factor: location. Bowling mailed his meth packages to various addresses in New Hampshire. Puentes mailed his meth to Fort Worth. Prison terms are often more severe than those given for some violent crimes, a News analysis of meth sentences finds. The News combed through 10 years of meth sentences handed down by federal district judges — and nowhere are those sentences as harsh as the Northern District of Texas, our yearslong investigation found. Meth sentences here are often stiffer than those imposed on rapists and other violent criminals. They are also far more severe than sentences for other, more deadlier drugs such as fentanyl. The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, which is the fourth largest in the nation, handles the third-highest volume of meth cases in the nation, behind the Southern District of California and the Western District of Texas. As such, the long sentences pushed by prosecutors and determined by federal judges in North Texas play an outsized role in fueling a prison pipeline that, based on Bureau of Prisons data, is costing U.S. taxpayers roughly $1.4 billion a year just to house meth offenders. Meth is not only the most common illegal narcotic in the U.S., it’s the single-biggest reason why people are locked up in federal prison today, federal officials acknowledge.

Mexico opposes truck ban at Bridge of the Americas

The mayor of Juarez says Mexico is sending a diplomatic note to the U.S. State Department relaying concerns from industry leaders about the proposed banning of commercial trucks at El Paso’s Bridge of the Americas port of entry. “These are matters between national governments (but) they authorized us to inform (the public) about the note,” Mayor Cruz Perez Cuellar said at a Monday news conference. “We gave our formal opinion to the U.S. government like the (Maquiladora Association), like the Transportation Association did.“

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The U.S. General Services Administration has been holding public stakeholder meetings in El Paso and is considering permanently banning commercial truck traffic from BOTA after it undergoes a multimillion-dollar remodeling in a near future. Elected officials in El Paso support the plan due to pollution concerns in South-Central El Paso residential neighborhoods and because they believe other area ports of entry – Ysleta, Marcelino Serna and Santa Teresa (New Mexico) – can absorb truck traffic from BOTA. Even before the drafting of a diplomatic note, Mexican officials had expressed opposition to the plan. “We need more bridges, more operating hours and more (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) personnel,” Thor Salayandia, board member of the Mexican Chamber of Industry, told Border Report earlier. “Ysleta has too much traffic. If they close BOTA, we will have to find (other) ways to send our exports.”

Texas, other states sue BlackRock, Vanguard for ‘conspiring’ to restrict US coal market

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading a lawsuit against BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street in federal court, alleging they are “conspiring to artificially constrict” the coal market, according to a Wednesday press release. Paxton and Texas were joined by 10 other Republican-led states in the lawsuit accusing the three largest U.S. asset managers of buying “substantial” holdings in public coal companies and then pushing those companies to reduce their output, according to the Nov. 27 lawsuit. While Paxton said in the release that the three firms “have formed a cartel to rig the coal market,” both State Street and BlackRock called the lawsuit “baseless” in separate statements to ESG Dive Monday.

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Paxton and the coalition filed the complaint in the U.S. Eastern District Court of Texas and “demanded” a jury trial, according to the filing. Texas was joined in the suit by Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, West Virginia and Wyoming. The lawsuit alleges the three asset managers violated the Sherman Act and Clayton Act — which govern antitrust law — as well as state antitrust laws from Texas, Montana and West Virginia. The states noted that the three firms’ combined individual holdings in public coal producing companies, amounts to collective influence. Additionally it noted memberships — past and present — to climate coalitions Climate Action 100+ and the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative and their requisite emissions reductions commitments. The lawsuit said taken together, the collective holdings, membership commitments and influence from the three firms “pose a substantial threat to competition in the relevant markets.” State Street departed CA100+ in February, and BlackRock transferred its membership to an international arm of the business around the same time. Vanguard was never a CA100+ member, but all three companies were Net Zero Asset Managers initiative members before Vanguard withdrew in 2022.

‘It made me feel helpless’: 20-year-old Texas woman mistakenly sterilized during C-section

Rachel Richnow thought her C-section had gone well. The surgery had no complications. Her infant son, her second child, was healthy. She went in to her doctor for a postpartum checkup, she said, and also asked about birth control. She didn’t want any more kids immediately, she told her doctor. The medical staff, Richnow said, seemed confused. Why would she need birth control, they asked her, when she’d just had her fallopian tubes removed? That’s when Richnow learned that, during her scheduled C-section, doctors at CHRISTUS St. Michael Hospital in Texarkana had also performed a salpingectomy. Both of her fallopian tubes had been removed, leaving her permanently and irreversibly sterilized.

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“It came as a shock,” Richnow, now 21, said. “It made me feel helpless, like my body wasn’t my own, like they can just put you under and do whatever they want to.” Richnow did not want to have her fallopian tubes removed, she said, and was not meaningfully informed that the procedure was going to take place during her C-section. She’s now suing St. Michael Hospital over the surprise salpingectomy. Richnow and her attorney, Houston-based lawyer Tommy Hastings, said they aren’t exactly sure how the salpingectomy happened. The salpingectomy order was added to Richnow’s chart sometime before her C-section procedure in September 2023, according to Hastings and to Richnow’s medical records. Her medical records, which The Dallas Morning News reviewed, say the fallopian tube removal was “prophylactic.” Research suggests that fallopian tube removal can help prevent ovarian cancer.

AT&T sees profit gains through 2027 and plans $20 billion buyback

Dallas-based AT&T Inc. predicted sustained profit growth over the next three years, including double-digit gains in 2027, a payoff from its investments in mobile phone and fiber-optic networks. Earnings in 2025 will be $1.97 to $2.07 a share, excluding some items, Dallas-based AT&T said in a statement issued ahead of a Tuesday meeting with Wall Street analysts at its namesake football stadium. It sees profit “accelerating to double-digit percentage growth” two years later. The new forecast excludes AT&T’s ownership of DirecTV, the pay-TV service. The company expects to complete the sale of DirecTV in the first half of 2025, finally returning to its roots as a telecom provider after years of restructuring and a focus on reducing debt.

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The faster growth in profit will allow AT&T to deliver more cash to shareholders. In addition to maintaining the $1.11 a share annual cash dividend, AT&T is authorizing $20 billion in share repurchases that it expects to complete by the end of 2027. In all, the company plans to return more than $40 billion to stockholders through dividends and share repurchases over the three years. Management led by Chief Executive Officer John Stankey also expects to reach its goal of reducing net debt to 2.5 times adjusted earnings in the first half of 2025, a ratio the company aims to maintain through 2027. AT&T has transformed since Stankey took the helm in 2020, when the company was bloated with debt from media acquisitions and under pressure to expand its wireless service and broadband capabilities. Since then, Stankey has proceed to unwind AT&T’s media business, spinning off its Warner Bros. unit in 2022 and offloading its stake in DirecTV earlier this year. Those moves allowed management to focus on being a wireless 5G and fiber connectivity company and strengthen AT&T’s balance sheet.

ABC13 anchor Jacob Rascon leaving the station where has been since 2022

KTRK/ABC13 news anchor Jacob Rascon is leaving the station, according to Mike McGuff's local media blog. His last day will be after his newscast on Dec. 13. According to McGuff, Rascon has sent a farewell email to colleagues. No word on where Rascon will land next though, when reached for comment, he confirmed he is leaving ABC13 but is not leaving Houston. Rascon, the son of former ABC13 anchor Art Rascon, spent much of his youth in the Houston area before going to college in Utah and starting a broadcast career that began at KFOX in El Paso and then continued at KNBC in Los Angeles. He went national with NBC News in October 2014 where he became part of the network's team of political correspondents covering the 2016 presidential election.

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In 2017, he gave up his network gig and returned to Houston for a slot at KPRC/2 where was a reporter who also anchored on weekend mornings. "I realized pretty quickly that I didn't really need to be there," he told the Chronicle in 2018 about his network stint. "When I was in college, I told myself, 'I'm going to work as a network correspondent someday.' And I got there. I was happy, but I didn't need it. Some people, it seems like they need it. It's like an addiction. Big story after big story after big story. And they have to be there … but at the expense of family, oftentimes. There aren't many correspondents with kids or married for that reason, probably." He moved to ABC13 in January, 2022 where his first day was his dad's last day at the station. They even anchored the 11 a.m. newscast together. “People ask us how we orchestrated being at the same station, but we didn’t," Jacob told the Chronicle in 2022. "There’s no way we could’ve planned this out. (ABC-13) wasn’t looking for a replacement for dad, they just needed another male anchor and were excited about having a three-person team, kind of like ‘Good Morning America.’ I didn’t even tell dad I was in the middle of the interview process until I realized it could work out.”

Refugees, volunteers describe The Alliance dysfunction years before closure: ‘This is not smelling right’

When Mirwais Ibrahimi arrived in Houston with his family in November 2021, the now 32-year-old Afghan was counting on aid from The Alliance, the Gulfton-based nonprofit with a legacy of helping refugees resettle in Houston. But within months of his family’s arrival, Ibrahimi said the agency struggled to meet their basic needs. Its caseworkers seldom picked up the phone, he said, and they seemed overworked. “I was expecting when I came from disaster conditions in Afghanistan to get some good help and start a new and better life,” Ibrahimi said in Dari, a form of Farsi spoken in Afghanistan. “We did not get enough from The Alliance.”

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Three years later, The Alliance shuttered its doors, suddenly ending its essential resettlement services such as housing assistance, educational and employment opportunities, English classes and access to groceries and transportation. A Houston Chronicle investigation published last month found The Alliance’s troubles, however, began at least a decade earlier. The agency had overspent its budget, under-fundraised and misused federal grants, according to organization records. After publication, former Alliance clients and volunteers both praised the organization’s decadeslong record of helping refugee families establish lives in the United States and criticized the nonprofit for its apparent mismanagement in the lead-up to its shutdown in June. Their experiences detail how The Alliance’s financial collapse cut refugees off from critical support for rent, food and medical needs, and left volunteers skeptical of the organization’s capability to offer those services. The Alliance’s current board members and staffers did not respond to requests for comment by the Chronicle. In a story published last month, board members said all of The Alliance’s money was used to operate the charity.

Tarrant County, largest without state mental health facility, asks for state to fund one

The Tarrant County Commissioners Court on Tuesday, Dec. 3, passed a resolution to request the state Legislature allocate funding to build a state mental health facility to serve county residents. The court “strongly urges the State of Texas to fund the development of a state mental health facility in Tarrant County,” said County Judge Tim O’Hare, who read the resolution text aloud before it passed unanimously. In the event that the state can or will not fund a new facility, the resolution asked lawmakers to “expand capacity at an existing state funded mental health facility with space designated specifically to serve the residents of Tarrant County, or partner with Tarrant County by providing funding to achieve a solution through a public-private partnership with a local hospital to provide services to Tarrant County residents in need of mental health care.”

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Tarrant County is Texas’ third largest, and the largest county in the state without a state mental health facility within its borders, the resolution states. The facility is also needed due to the high number of inmates in the county jail who require competency restoration, a process by which people experiencing mental health crises are returned to a state in which they comprehend their situation well enough to stand before a judge. An average of 331 county inmates are on the wait list for competency restoration at any given time, the resolution states. A state mental health facility in Tarrant County would also fill a critical gap in the continuum of care for county residents and ease pressure on the county jail, the resolution states. Before the vote, Precinct 1 Commissioner Roy Charles Brooks commended O’Hare for his leadership in getting the resolution passed and speaking with state lawmakers about it.

ERCOT meteorologist warns of elevated chance of severe weather this winter

The lead meteorologist for the Texas power grid said Tuesday there is an elevated chance for extreme winter weather similar to the storm that pushed the power grid to the brink of collapse in 2021. Chris Coleman, ERCOT’s supervisor of operational forecasting, said the elevated chance of severe winter weather comes even though he predicted warmer weather patterns for January and February. He presented his forecast after a recent ERCOT analysis showed an 80% chance the grid would see blackouts if it experienced a storm on par with the February 2021 storm that led to more than 200 deaths. “I don’t have a number to put on it, but I kind of would call this similar to a tornado watch,” Coleman said during a presentation to ERCOT’s board of directors. “We’ll call this a ‘cold extreme watch.’ Exactly when and whether or not it impacts Texas or the East Coast of the U.S. or Central Asia is yet to be determined.”

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ERCOT leadership gave multiple winter weather presentations Tuesday, with CEO Pablo Vegas’ overview focused on the grid’s state as Texas heads into the coldest months of the year. He said the threat of power emergencies is up slightly from last year because of power demand growth, likely driven by electricity-hungry data centers. That demand increase has been mitigated by large increases in the number of large-scale battery storage facilities built in Texas this year. Texas has also seen a large jump in solar power production this year. However, the renewable energy resource is less effective at providing needed power in winter. During winter months, peak electricity demand tends to occur in the early morning and late evening, as the sun rises and sets, when residential heaters and other household appliances are most often operated. ERCOT officials estimated 17% of solar capacity will produce electricity during peak demand hours this winter, compared with 76% in the summer. “We get a lot less productivity out of that resource from the winter to the summer,” Vegas said.

T.D. Jakes sues Pennsylvania man who accused him of attempted sexual assault

Dallas pastor T.D. Jakes filed a defamation lawsuit last week against a man who alleged in a YouTube talk show that Jakes groomed and attempted to sexually assault him years ago. The lawsuit was filed after Jakes experienced a “slight health incident” during a Sunday sermon, and the lawsuit appears to link the incident to the accusations. The lawsuit named Duane Youngblood, 57, of Pennsylvania as a defendant and was filed in a Pennsylvania district court on Nov. 25 and refiled Nov. 26.

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The lawsuit also lists 10 unnamed defendants who “have acted in concert and agreement with Youngblood in order to commit defamatory conduct,” according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit said the plaintiff does not yet know all of those individuals’ names or extent of involvement in the alleged defamation. Jakes is the founder and senior pastor of The Potter’s House in Dallas. A spokesperson for The Potter’s House declined to comment beyond what the church told the New York Post last week. The church said last week that Jakes is continuing to undergo medical testing and remains in good condition and that medical professionals have ruled out a stroke. The lawsuit highlighted that Youngblood is a registered sex offender. He was convicted of the sexual assault of a minor in 2008 and of corruption of minors in 2014, according to the Pennsylvania sex offender registry.

Uranium mining revival in South Texas portends nuclear renaissance in the state and nation

In the old ranchlands of South Texas, dormant uranium mines are coming back online. A collection of new ones hope to start production soon, extracting radioactive fuel from the region’s shallow aquifers. Many more may follow. These mines are the leading edge of what government and industry leaders in Texas hope will be a nuclear renaissance, as America’s latent nuclear sector begins to stir again. Texas is currently developing a host of high-tech industries that require enormous amounts of electricity, from cryptocurrency mines and artificial intelligence to hydrogen production and seawater desalination. Now, powerful interests in the state are pushing to power it with next-generation nuclear reactors.

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“We can make Texas the nuclear capital of the world,” said Reed Clay, president of the Texas Nuclear Association, former chief operating officer for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and former senior counsel to the Texas Office of Attorney General. “There’s a huge opportunity.” Clay owns a lobbying firm with heavyweight clients that include SpaceX, Dow Chemical and the Texas Blockchain Council, among many others. He launched the Texas Nuclear Association in 2022 and formed the Texas Nuclear Caucus during the 2023 state legislative session to advance bills supportive of the nuclear industry. The efforts come amid a national resurgence of interest in nuclear power, which can provide large amounts of energy without the carbon emissions that warm the planet. And it can do so with reliable consistency that wind and solar power generation lack. But it carries a small risk of catastrophic failure and requires uranium from mines that can threaten rural aquifers.

National Stories

How a Supreme Court decision on health care bans for transgender youth could impact trans people nationwide

When Tennessee banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth last year, Sarah began taking days off work to drive hundreds of miles from her home in Nashville to a North Carolina clinic that could treat her transgender son. But just a month later, a similar ban went into effect in North Carolina, sending Sarah into a panic as she realized the closest state where she could take her son would be Ohio – more than 400 miles away. To her relief, the North Carolina law made exceptions for children who were already receiving treatment. “I should just be able to go five minutes down the road and have my child taken care of and medication easily received and not have to have a 12-hour trip,” Sarah told CNN, using a pseudonym out of concern for her family’s safety.

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Parents like Sarah and transgender communities across the United States will be paying close attention Wednesday as the US Supreme Court hears arguments in US v. Skrmetti – a case that could determine whether states can ban certain forms of gender-affirming care for trans children and teens. The case, brought by the Biden administration on behalf of families of trans youth, challenges the constitutionality of Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban, which restricts puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors and enacts civil penalties for doctors who violate the law. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti argued in court documents the law ensures “minors do not receive these treatments until they can fully understand the lifelong consequences or until the science is developed to the point that Tennessee might take a different view of their efficacy.” Attorneys for the plaintiffs, however, point to major medical organizations that have said the treatments are safe and may be medically necessary.

Trump’s pick to head DEA withdraws after GOP criticism of his covid policies

Chad Chronister, the Florida sheriff tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Tuesday he would not seek the post, the second Trump pick to abandon his bid to serve in the Republican administration. Chronister, a career law enforcement officer who has spent little time on the national stage, announced his withdrawal from consideration on social media early Tuesday evening, just three days after Trump’s selection. Chronister said he planned to continue serving as the sheriff in Hillsborough County. “Over the past several days, as the gravity of this very important responsibility set in, I’ve concluded that I must respectfully withdraw from consideration,” he wrote. “There is more work to be done for the citizens of Hillsborough County and a lot of initiatives I am committed to fulfilling.”

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Some conservatives had opposed Trump’s choice of Chronister, citing the sheriff’s enforcement of public health orders during the covid pandemic. The right-wing opposition crystallized around Chronister’s arrest of a pastor who was charged with ignoring state and local public health orders by holding large church services in March 2020 — the same month the World Health Organization declared covid-19 a pandemic and Trump declared a national emergency. The criticism unfolded swiftly after Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he would tap Chronister for the role of leading the nation’s top drug enforcement agency. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) was among the critics, saying on X on Sunday that Chronister should be “disqualified” over the pastor’s arrest. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association said in a statement that it was “shocked and dismayed” by the selection, citing Chronister’s enforcement of covid mandates. Chronister did not refer to the opposition in his withdrawal announcement. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) said as governor he appointed Chronister as sheriff and said he did not know why Chronister withdrew. Scott said he had spoken to Chronister throughout the process. “He’s actually a good personal friend of mine,” Scott said. “He’s a very good sheriff, he’s been re-elected twice since I appointed him. He’s a great community leader

Fani Willis ordered to give watchdog all communications with special counsel Jack Smith

A Georgia judge ordered Fulton County District Attorney Fani Williams to hand over records related to her communications with special counsel Jack Smith and the U.S. House January 6 Committee after failing to comply with a request under the Open Records Act (ORA). The nonprofit group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against Willis in March after her office claimed it did not have any documents and communications on file between Willis and Smith or Willis and the January 6th Committee. But it turned out her office did have communications, and on Monday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered Willis to produce them within five business days. McBurney also determined in his ruling that Willis violated Georgia’s open records act by failing to respond to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit. McBurney granted judgment by default after the DA did not make any ‘meritorious defense.’ Instead, Willis claimed she was not served properly.

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How Elon Musk became ‘prophet-in-chief’ of tech's Trump-leaning conservatism

In the waning days of October, several hundred people gathered at the Life Center, a megachurch in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a town hall organized by the Trump campaign. Attendees chatted excitedly as they filed into the church’s cavernous sanctuary. But when the event began, the speaker who strutted onstage wasn’t former President Donald Trump, or one of his evangelical Christian promoters. Instead, it was Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX rocket company, Tesla electric cars and the social media platform once known as Twitter. Musk, the richest man in the world, has long approached religion with suspicion, and some in the audience were skeptical: One asked what was “keeping” him from believing in God.

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“I believe in the teachings of Christ,” replied Musk, whose jacket was adorned with a NASA logo and a mission patch of one of his rocket projects. “I believe in the Christian principles: Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek — which is very important to have forgiveness. Because if you don’t have forgiveness, then you have an endless cycle of retribution.” Musk then expounded, giving an unusual take on “turn the other cheek,” arguing that Christ’s edict should only apply if you are already “strong” and not if you are weak. “If you’re facing a sort of a predatory threat, and that threat is stronger than you and that threat doesn’t believe in Christian values, then you will just get, you know, executed,” he said, adding he does not believe the idea is prevalent “in the Middle East.” The exchange signaled a new stage in Musk’s shift from insisting science and religion cannot coexist to describing himself as a “cultural Christian.” Strange as the metamorphosis may seem, scholars and experts on the nonreligious say it is part of a broader trend among secular thought leaders and Big Tech entrepreneurs. Once seen as a bastion of liberalism, Silicon Valley leaders have increasingly echoed ideas from conservative Christianity on topics from family size to transgender rights. At times, their ideas have seemed to overtake traditional faith as a guiding force for conservatives. Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees Musk’s pivot as “the least surprising thing ever.” “He’s the prophet-in-chief of this new wave of highly religious technology that is a dominant force in the current Republican coalition,” Epstein said. “I would say that traditional Christian preachers are still a pillar, of course, of (Trump’s) administration and what it stands for, but they’ve at least been joined, if not superseded, by a different style of preacher.”

Fitch reports ‘deteriorating’ outlook for higher ed

The higher education sector is expected to face “a deteriorating credit environment,” according to a 2025 outlook report from Fitch Ratings, a major credit ratings provider. The report noted that rising pressures, including “uneven” enrollment trends, growing costs and flat state funding, are likely to financially hurt U.S. higher ed institutions—especially those with already tight budgets that heavily depend on tuition dollars. Fitch predicted modest net tuition growth, between 2 percent and 4 percent, for most colleges and universities. The report highlighted that while undergraduate enrollment over all has rebounded since the pandemic, freshman enrollment has significantly declined, particularly at four-year colleges and universities. International student enrollment has been flat for the past two years, and the report predicted that it will continue to be “fragile,” given that the group is “highly susceptible to unfavorable shifts in both geopolitical sentiment and policy.”

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Democrat Adam Gray captures California's 13th US House District, ousting Republican Rep. John Duarte

Democrat Adam Gray captured California’s 13th Congressional District on Tuesday, unseating Republican Rep. John Duarte in the final U.S. House contest to be decided this year. Gray’s win in the farm belt seat that cuts through five counties means Republicans won 220 House seats this election cycle, with Democrats holding 215 seats. Gray won by a margin of less than 200 votes, with election officials reporting Tuesday all ballots had been counted. Duarte captured the seat in 2022 when he defeated Gray by one of the closest margins in the country, 564 votes. He was often listed among the most vulnerable House Republicans given that narrow margin of victory in a district with a Democratic tilt — about 11 points over registered Republicans.

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Gray said in a statement: “We always knew that this race would be as close as they come, and we’re expecting a photo finish this year, too.” Duarte told the Turlock Journal he had called Gray to concede, adding “That’s how it goes.” “I’m a citizen legislator, and I didn’t plan on being in Congress forever,” Duarte told the newspaper, though he didn’t rule out a possible future campaign. In a tough year for Democrats nationally, the party picked up three GOP-held House seats in California. Both Gray and Duarte stressed bipartisan credentials during the campaign. Gray, a former legislator, was critical of state water management and put water and agriculture at the top of his issues list. He also said he wants improvements in infrastructure, renewable energy and education.

South Korean president faces impeachment after martial law debacle

South Korean lawmakers submitted a bill on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol after he declared martial law and reversed the move hours later, triggering a political crisis in Asia's fourth-largest economy. The surprise declaration of martial law in the major U.S. ally late on Tuesday caused a standoff with parliament, which rejected Yoon's attempt to ban political activity and censor the media, as armed troops forced their way into the National Assembly building in Seoul.

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The main opposition Democratic Party (DP) called for Yoon, who has been in office since 2022, to resign or face impeachment. Six South Korean opposition parties later submitted a bill in parliament to impeach Yoon, with voting set for Friday or Saturday. "We couldn't ignore the illegal martial law," DP lawmaker Kim Yong-min told reporters. "We can no longer let democracy collapse." There were deep divisions in Yoon's ruling People Power Party as well, as its leader called for Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun to be fired and the entire cabinet to resign. Kim has offered to resign, the defence ministry said.

Lead Stories

Fed Governor Waller says he is 'leaning toward' a December rate cut but worries about inflation

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said Monday he is anticipating an interest rate cut in December but is concerned about recent trends on inflation that could change his mind. “Based on the economic data in hand today and forecasts that show that inflation will continue on its downward path to 2 percent over the medium term, at present I lean toward supporting a cut to the policy rate at our December meeting,” Waller said in remarks before a monetary policy forum in Washington. However, he noted that the “decision will depend on whether data that we will receive before then surprises to the upside and alters my forecast for the path of inflation.” Waller cited recent data indicating that progress on inflation may be “stalling.”

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In October, the Fed’s preferred inflation indicator, the personal consumption expenditures price index, showed headline inflation moving up to 2.3% annually and core prices, which exclude the cost of food and energy, moving up to 2.8%. The Fed targets a 2% rate. Though the data was in line with Wall Street expectations, it showed an increase from the prior month and was evidence that despite the progress, the central bank’s goal has proved elusive. “Overall, I feel like an MMA fighter who keeps getting inflation in a choke hold, waiting for it to tap out yet it keeps slipping out of my grasp at the last minute,” Waller said, referring to mixed martial arts. “But let me assure you that submission is inevitable — inflation isn’t getting out of the octagon.”

Trump tariffs would cost Houston dearly, economist warns

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to slap 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada as soon as he takes office, as well as an extra 10% fee on all imports from China – the latter coming on top of tariffs Trump instituted on China in his first term and which were maintained by President Joe Biden. Those tariffs could have serious consequences for the Texas economy and for the Houston area specifically. "The impact would be quick, sudden, and sure, with inflation raging across the economy over the first several months," said economist Ed Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston. Hirs said the prices of Mexican imports would spiral everywhere from the produce departments of grocery stores to automobile dealerships. Then, there's the 4 million barrels of crude oil per day imported from Canada.

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"Generally, we count on that to run many of our refineries in the United States," Hirs said, "and that would lead to an immediate increase in the price of gasoline and diesel. It would also lead to a price increase in crude oil in West Texas as well." Mexico, Canada and China collectively accounted for more than 43% of Texas' total exports of goods last year, or roughly $192 billion. Even that understates the dependence of Texas on those three countries, because it doesn't include exports of services or foreign direct investment. Hirs said if Mexico, Canada and China respond with tariffs of their own, or by reducing their purchases of U.S. imports, it would send the U.S. into a deep recession. He pointed to how China responded to the first round of Trump tariffs. "We saw China retaliate in the first Trump years by refusing to buy U.S. grains, and as a result, it was devastation across the farm belt," Hirs said. "Farmers lost their homes, lost their fields, lost their properties. Some lost their lives." Much of that agricultural trade with China moves through the Port of Houston.

Biden's broken promise on pardoning his son Hunter is raising new questions about his legacy

President Joe Biden’s decision to go back on his word and issue a categorical pardon for his son, Hunter, just weeks before his scheduled sentencing on gun and tax convictions was a surprise that wasn’t all that surprising. Not to those who had witnessed the president’s shared anguish over his two sons after the boys survived a car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and a daughter more than a half-century ago. Or to those who heard the president regularly lament the death of his older son, Beau, from cancer or voice concerns — largely in private — about Hunter’s sobriety and health after years of deep addiction. But by choosing to put his family first, the 82-year-old president — who had pledged to restore a fractured public’s trust in the nation’s institutions and respect for the rule of law — has raised new questions about his already teetering legacy.

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“This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation,” Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis wrote in a post on X. He added that while he could sympathize with Hunter Biden’s struggles, “no one is above the law, not a President and not a President’s son.” Biden aides and allies had been resigned to the prospect of the president using his extraordinary power in the waning days of his presidency to ensure his son wouldn’t see time behind bars, especially after Donald Trump ’s win. The president’s supporters have long viewed Biden’s commitment to his family as an asset overall, even if Hunter’s personal conduct and tangled business dealings were seen as a persistent liability. But the pardon comes as Biden has become increasingly isolated since the loss to Trump by Vice President Kamala Harris, who jumped in to the race after the president’s catastrophic debate against Trump in June forced his exit from the election.

Single House race stands between Republicans and 1-seat majority

House Republicans could begin the new year grappling with a one-seat majority, a perilously slim margin for the 119th Congress as President-elect Donald Trump guns for an active first 100 days. Last-minute GOP losses and exits in favor of the new administration mean Republicans could begin that period with precious little room for dissent, and one congressional race could decide the difference between a likely one- or two-seat majority. In California’s 13th Congressional District, Rep. John Duarte, R-Calif., is fighting for his political life against Democrat Adam Gray. As of Monday afternoon, Gray leads Duarte by a few hundred votes – a margin of roughly 0.1%. California state law mandates that counties certify their election results by Dec. 5. If Democrats flip the seat, the House would have 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats heading into the New Year.

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However, three Republican lawmakers’ departures are expected to whittle that down further. Now-former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., resigned from the 118th and 119th Congresses amid consideration to be Trump’s attorney general. House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., was tapped to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., was named national security adviser. All three lawmakers represent deep-red districts, so there is little concern their seats will fall into Democrats’ hands. However, with special elections to replace Gaetz and Waltz set for April 1, and Stefanik’s not yet scheduled, the GOP may spend nearly all of their first 100 days controlling Washington’s power centers with a one-seat majority in the House. House GOP Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., brushed off concerns about the prospects of holding a one- or two-seat edge in a recent television interview on FOX Business. "That’s essentially what we’ve had over the last year, for better parts of the last year," Emmer told "The Bottom Line."

State Stories

Is Enron back? Here's what we know about the infamous company's potential return to Houston

Twenty-three years after Enron declared bankruptcy, the infamous Houston-based energy company appears to be making a return. A group representing itself as Enron, which became the center of a corporate scandal Dec. 2, 2001, following revelations of gross financial misconduct, has recently emerged in the Houston area. The company erected a billboard heralding Enron's supposed return, took out a full-page ad in Monday's print edition of the Houston Chronicle and has posted a statement on X promising a new leaf and a bright future for the company.

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"Enron Corporation today announced its relaunch as a company dedicated to solving the global energy crisis," the statement read. "With a bold new vision, Enron will leverage cutting-edge technology, human ingenuity and the spirit of adaptation to address the critical challenges of energy sustainability, accessibility and affordability." Reconciliation is a major focus of Enron's alleged revamp — so much so, the "R" in Enron now stands for "repentant," according to the company's newly-launched website. Enron Corporation denied the Chronicle's request for an interview, but documents filed with the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office indicate the College Company, an Arkansas-based LLC that described itself on LinkedIn as "a multi-facet parent company which creates and operates clothing brands in the United States," currently holds the rights to the multi-colored "E Enron" trademark seen on the billboard and Monday news release. According to trademark documents, in June the company granted the rights to the "E Enron" trademark to the Enron Corporation for $1. An individual named Charles Gaydos, who identified as the owner of the College Company and the CEO of Enron Corporation, signed on behalf of both entities. The College Company did not respond to the Chronicle's request for comment. The College Company also owns several trademarks related to a popular gag-conspiracy theory called Birds Aren't Real. The gag became popular among Gen Z users on social media around 2020, and claimed birds are not animals but government-controlled drones sent to spy on U.S. citizens. Trademark documents indicate the College Company owns the rights to the Birds Aren't Real brand for use on stickers, apparel and "promoting public awareness." What kind of business is the new Enron? Although the company's messaging appears to allude to a return to the energy sector, the exact nature of Enron's new business remains unclear. The company's Monday news release and website are loaded with vague promises including "solving the energy crisis," but little has been made public regarding the operational nuts and bolts.

Texas State Board of Ed wants power to ban ‘sexually explicit’ books from public school libraries

A new bill would give the State Board of Education the power to ban books from Texas public schools that board members deem sexually explicit. The idea would revive a portion of a state law, known as the READER Act, that required bookstores to review and rate the sexual content of all titles sold to public schools but was struck down by federal courts as unconstitutional. State Rep. Jared Patterson, a Frisco Republican, filed the bill ahead of the Legislature’s next session in January. At their November meetings, a majority of the Republican-controlled state board voted to endorse this new policy.

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The proposal, if passed by the GOP-led Legislature and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, could give the board sweeping new power over what children can find in their public school libraries as Republicans have ramped up efforts in recent years to take certain titles off the shelves. Last year, a federal court said requirements for private booksellers to enforce the READER Act violated their freedom of speech and would be too costly for the businesses to comply. Some of the 2023 law was allowed to take effect, including a section that empowered the state board to draft new library standards, which the board used to instruct school districts not to stock sexually explicit books. Currently, it’s up to school districts to comply with those standards. But under the new bill, parents could ask the state board to review certain titles, and if the board decided they were "sexually explicit," the books would have to be pulled from shelves statewide.

Delaware judge reaffirms ruling that invalidated massive Tesla pay package for Texan Elon Musk

A Delaware judge has reaffirmed her ruling that Tesla must revoke Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick on Monday denied a request by attorneys for Musk and Tesla’s corporate directors to vacate her ruling earlier this year requiring the company to rescind the unprecedented pay package. McCormick also rejected an equally unprecedented and massive fee request by plaintiff attorneys, who argued that they were entitled to legal fees in the form of Tesla stock valued at more than $5 billion. The judge said the attorneys were entitled to a fee award of $345 million. The rulings came in a lawsuit filed by a Tesla stockholder who challenged Musk’s 2018 compensation package.

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McCormick concluded in January that Musk engineered the landmark pay package in sham negotiations with directors who were not independent. The compensation package initially carried a potential maximum value of about $56 billion, but that sum has fluctuated over the years based on Tesla’s stock price. Following the original court ruling, Tesla shareholders met in June and ratified Musk’s 2018 pay package for a second time, again by an overwhelming margin. Defense attorneys then argued that the second vote makes clear that Tesla shareholders, with full knowledge of the flaws in the 2018 process that McCormick pointed out, were adamant that Musk is entitled to the pay package. They asked the judge to vacate her order directing Tesla to rescind the pay package. McCormick, who seemed skeptical of the defense arguments during an August hearing, said in Monday’s ruling that those arguments were fatally flawed. “The large and talented group of defense firms got creative with the ratification argument, but their unprecedented theories go against multiple strains of settled law,” McCormick wrote in a 103-page opinion.

Southwest Airlines will begin ending cabin service earlier. Here’s when — and why.

Southwest Airlines is about to hit passengers with another change. The carrier — the largest by passenger traffic at San Antonio International Airport and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport — is ending cabin service earlier on all flights, requiring passengers to do the usual pre-landing procedures such as ensuring seat belts are fastened and returning their seats to an upright position earlier. The move will also allow flight attendants to return to their seats and get buckled in sooner. “The change in procedures is designed to reduce the risk of in-flight turbulence injuries for our crew members and customers,” the airline said in a statement.

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Texas Children’s Hospital comments on Abbott’s funding threat over new immigration status question

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to restrict federal funding from Texas hospitals that refuse to “follow the law” after a Houston doctor asserted via social media that patients do not need to disclose their immigration status. An executive order issued by Abbott earlier this year directed Texas hospitals to ask patients if they are U.S. citizens and begin collecting information about those who are not. The order, however, does not specifically mandate patients to answer the question. “The way the country is moving, I worry that this is information that people are going to use to deport people,” Tony Pastor, a Texas Children’s Hospital cardiologist said in a viral video that garnered a response from the governor. “Technically, legally we were told today that people do not actually have to answer the question,” Pastor said.

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In a statement, Texas Children’s Hospital said it’s in full compliance with Abbott’s executive order. “While we recognize that individuals working at Texas Children’s hold their own personal views on many topics, these opinions do not necessarily reflect the official position of Texas Children’s Hospital,” the statement said. “We will continue to prioritize patient care while ensuring we are in full compliance with all laws and legal directives.” Non-citizens have been known to use emergency department services at a significantly lower rate than those born in the United States. A study cited in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health showed non-citizens do not immediately cause a disproportionate burden on the U.S. healthcare system.

ERCOT moves to keep CPS Energy's largest Braunig gas-fired unit running past its retirement date

CPS Energy is likely to be told this week it must keep operating the largest of three aging gas-powered units at its Braunig Power Station past its scheduled retirement in the spring. The future of the other two units is uncertain as the state grid operator considers deploying mobile generators to replace their capacity. For now, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas plans to ask its board Tuesday to approve an agreement with the city-owned utility to keep Braunig Unit 3 cranking in a bid to stave off grid emergencies next summer and beyond.

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“We will continue to work with ERCOT with whichever path they choose,” CPS said in a statement. If the statewide grid operator’s board approves the plan, the 400-megawatt unit is expected to be temporarily shut down in early March for inspection and what are expected to be costly repairs. ERCOT General Counsel Chad Seely told state utility regulators that ERCOT is “trying to get the unit back before the summer of 2025” when the risk of power overloading San Antonio transmission lines intensifies. In March, CPS told ERCOT — which must approve any generation source going offline — that it planned to retire all three of the roughly 60-year-old Braunig units by March 2025 because keeping them running would be too costly. The San Antonio utility has excess capacity and the units aren’t needed for its local market.

T.D. Jakes speaks to church via video week after health emergency that led to surgery

Bishop T.D. Jakes returned briefly via video to address his Dallas megachurch a week after experiencing a still-undisclosed medical incident that led to surgery. “Many of you don’t realize that you’re looking at a miracle,” he said in a live video message that was greeted with cheers from the congregation on Sunday (Dec. 1). “I faced a life-threatening calamity, was rushed to the ICU unit. I had emergency surgery. Survived this surgery.” Jakes, 67, an evangelist, author and business executive, suffered what his church initially called “a slight health incident” during the Nov. 24 worship service at The Potter’s House. At that time, about a dozen people rushed to his side after he lowered his microphone and was shaking in his seat.

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In the seven-minute video he said he would be following doctor’s orders to rest. “I told you last Sunday that I’d see you this Sunday, and so here I am,” he said, even while acknowledging that he wasn’t in the physical condition to do what he typically might do on a Sunday morning. “Physically, I can’t praise him like I want to, but somebody that’s got the strength and the dexterity and the nimbleness, just give him the glory for me and lift him up and give him a shout of praise and enthusiasm.” Jakes, whose remarks were also posted on his Instagram page, said he was not in pain and is in good spirits.

Judge dismisses $1.3B in lawsuits against Texas LNG builders

A bankruptcy judge has dismissed two lawsuits seeking total damages of $1.3 billion from the builders of Freeport LNG’s $14 billion gas export terminal, after a June 2022 explosion knocked the Freeport, Texas, facility offline for eight months, per a Nov. 21 news release. Insurers filed suit on July 5 against San Antonio-based Zachry and its joint venture partners, Japanese engineering firm Chiyoda International Corp. and CB&I of The Woodlands, Texas, claiming they caused the explosion by failing to install safeguards that could have alerted facility operators before the incident, according to the release from Houston-based Hicks Thomas, the builders’ legal representative. The judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas ruled that the contracts governing the project’s construction precluded the insurers’ lawsuit and said that they didn’t have standing to file suit against the builders, according to the release.

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Amy Kristin Sanders: Can Texas ban masked protests?

Amy Kristin Sanders is an associate professor of journalism and law at the University of Texas in Austin. She is a licensed attorney and nationally recognized First Amendment expert.) In the wake of the spring pro-Palestinian protests, some Texas lawmakers have suggested they want to ban face coverings at public gatherings. But is this constitutional? Leaving aside the public health/disability argument, the religious freedom concerns and the assertion of a Fourth Amendment right against facial recognition, I firmly believe a mask prohibition violates Texans’ First Amendment free expression rights. No, the U.S. Supreme Court has never taken a case involving face coverings at protests, so it’s not a slam-dunk case, but this country has a long history of protecting anonymous speech, both online and in real life. If you’ve taken a U.S. history class, you’ve likely encountered the Federalist Papers, written by the pseudonymous Publius. Yes, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison published their arguments in support of ratifying our Constitution — the very document containing the First Amendment — under a pen name. How’s that for originalist?

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But the Supreme Court has routinely recognized the value of anonymous association and speech. In NAACP vs. Alabama (1958), the court unanimously ruled the group had a right to protect its membership rolls because NAACP members had a right to freely associate with others without fear of retribution. Two years later in Talley vs. California, the court struck down a municipal ordinance requiring handbills to include the name of the person who published or distributed them. More recently, the court sided with Margaret McIntyre, who was fined $100 for violating an Ohio law that required campaign literature to include the name and address of the person issuing it. In his concurrence in McIntyre vs. Ohio Elections Commission, Justice Clarence Thomas chronicled how “Founding-era Americans” supported anonymous speech. Laws banning masks aren’t new. They date back to the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, a federal law that still criminalizes “going in disguise on the highway or premises of another” to deprive people of their legal rights. Many states still have them on the books, and some jurisdictions, including Texas, are trying to bring them back. It should be noted that Texas repealed its 1925 KKK-era mask ban in 1974. Several lower federal courts and some state courts have struck down mask prohibitions — including in a case where members of the KKK were asserting a right to be masked during protest — while others have upheld them. In finding mask prohibitions unconstitutional, courts have acknowledged “the importance of anonymity to a group’s ability to attract and keep members and to members’ willingness to participate in public activities.” Prohibiting anonymity is, they conclude, a direct regulation of the content of the speech, requiring the most exacting scrutiny. Anonymity is designed to protect those who are expressing unpopular opinions or non-majoritarian ideas, whether that is white supremacy or Palestinian solidarity, that might lead to retaliation — much the same way it protected Publius in 1788.

Gov. Greg Abbott swears in new director of Texas DPS

Freeman Martin was sworn in Monday as the new director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, taking over from longtime leader Steve McCraw. Martin, sworn in by Gov. Greg Abbott, became the agency’s 14th director, working his way up from his start as a Highway Patrol trooper in 1990. Martin also held several positions with the Texas Rangers, the elite investigative division of DPS, and in 2018 was appointed deputy director of DPS.

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“Freeman brings an extraordinary wealth of experience to this position, as well as the function of law enforcement itself,” Abbott said, adding Martin has shown the “flexibility and the agility to be able to respond to the constantly changing public safety threats” in Texas. Martin takes over an agency with more than 11,000 employees and a $3.5 billion biennial budget. Addressing the crowd — which included dozens of DPS troopers and officials, members of the Public Safety Commission, police chiefs from across Texas and Martin’s family — the 56-year-old said under his leadership, Texas will secure the state’s border with Mexico with the help of the federal government.

Grand Prairie school board fires Superintendent Jorge Arredondo

The Grand Prairie ISD school board voted Monday night to dismiss suspended superintendent Jorge Arredondo. The 5-2 vote came after months of controversy and legal back-and-forth. Following a nearly two-hour-long closed session, the board approved a motion to terminate Arredondo's contract "for the reasons discussed by the board in closed session and as presented in the written notice of proposed termination that we were authorized in council to send him." Voting to terminate the contract were board President Amber Moffitt, Nancy Bridges, Bryan Parra, Terry Brooks, and Emily Liles. Trustees Gloria Carrillo and David Espinosa voted not to terminate.

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There was no public discussion among members. Arredondo was hired by a unanimous vote in June to lead the district. Allegations of policy violations led to his paid suspension in September after two months on the job. He then sued the district and trustees, alleging he had been denied the chance to defend himself against their claims. In his lawsuit, he said the district violated his contractual and constitutional rights. Trustees heard from a dozen speakers prior to their closed session Monday night, most of them in support of Arredondo. Ana Coca, past president of the Grand Prairie League of United Latin American Citizens, urged the board to reinstate the superintendent. “Dr. Arredondo has the tools to make this a premiere [district],” she said. “I’ve been here more than 30 years. Please, I implore you, do the right thing today. Bring him back."

Texas public health experts brace for RFK Jr.'s impact on vaccine policy

Texas public health officials say they’re used to setting the record straight about vaccinations and other scientifically sound treatments – but some are bracing for even more challenges under President-elect Donald Trump's picks for top cabinet posts. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, has raised alarms for policy experts across the country. More recently, Trump announced Dr. Mehmet Oz as his head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Terri Burke, who leads The Immunization Partnership, said under Kennedy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration could lose funding; health and immunization guidance for school districts could weaken; and misinformation — already widespread after the pandemic — could worsen.

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“All of this could have a chilling effect on innovation and development,” she said during a Texas Vaccine Policy Symposium last month. “Will vaccine manufacturers want to produce vaccines if the market is smaller? Will academic institutions approach vaccine research and development in a challenging climate?” Much remains unclear about how Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans for the Health and Human Services secretary post will play out. Kennedy, who has repeated baseless claims that vaccines cause autism and other false information, has teased a plan called “Make America Healthy Again.” The plan’s central goal is to eliminate chronic disease. He previously told NPR that federal health authorities under his leadership would not “take vaccines away from anybody.” He also expressed doubt in existing vaccine safety research.

TCU women’s basketball comes in at No. 9 in AP poll, highest ranking in program history

TCU women’s basketball secured its highest ranking in program history Monday, jumping from No. 17 to No. 9 in the latest AP poll. The Horned Frogs have posted an 8-0 start to the season, grabbing wins over No. 13 NC State and No. 3 Notre Dame. The last time TCU defeated a top-3 opponent was in 2008, taking down No. 3 Cal 82-73. Despite being down at the half, a 31-12 fourth-quarter run from the Horned Frogs gave them the victory last week against the Fighting Irish.

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TCU Chancellor Boschini announces retirement

TCU has set a graduation date for Chancellor Victor Boschini. Boschini, who has served as chancellor since 2004, will hand over the reins to university President Daniel Pullin on June 1, 2025. Pullin will become the 11th chancellor in the university’s 151-year history. “It is almost impossible to find an aspect of campus that has not been positively impacted by Chancellor Boschini’s leadership, vision and heart,” TCU Board of Trustees Chair Kit Moncrief said in a university press release. Moncrief credited Boschini with guiding TCU’s emergence as a one of the best universities in the country, saying the university community is indebted to his transformative impact. “We are committed to building upon his legacy to ensure an even greater TCU for the future,” Moncrief said.

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The university needs an incredible leader to guide its growth, academic excellence and impact, Boschini said in the press release, adding that Pullin is the right man for the job. “He is an inspiring leader with a big vision and his unbounded energy makes him a force of nature,” Boschini said. Pullin, who joined TCU as dean of the Neeley School of Business in 2019, was instrumental in shaping the university’s strategic plan focused on student growth, athletic success, research scholarships, and and community engagement, according to the press release. He said it’s been an honor to work beside Boschini. He credited the outgoing chancellor’s “joyful, kind and respectful brand of leadership” for the university’s success. “As TCU grows into this next frontier, I’m indebted to what Victor has built and inspired and by what I know is possible for this great university,” Pullin said. The pair will continue to work together in the spring semester before Pullin takes over in June. Boschini will stay on in an emeritus role to advise on fundraising and enrollment, according to the press release.

City Stories

Dallas Morning News Editorial: Can Dallas police help deport undocumented immigrants?

What exactly is the Dallas Police Department’s approach to assisting federal authorities in cracking down on illegal immigration? You won’t get the answer listening to either our newly MAGA mayor or the most progressive member of the Dallas City Council. In recent public statements, both of them managed to distort how Dallas police manage a difficult law enforcement problem. And that’s too bad. Because there is room for debate on how DPD should handle the need to ensure that undocumented immigrants charged with violent crimes are set for deportation. Mayor Eric Johnson, speaking to Fox Business on Nov. 20, said Dallas will “of course” support President-elect Donald Trump in deporting violent immigrants who are here illegally.

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There is nothing wrong with the sentiment that violent criminals should be deported, but Johnson’s suggestion that he has the authority to direct the actions of Dallas police is incorrect. Johnson went on to make broader statements about the strain undocumented migrants put on the social system of schools, hospitals and housing. People watching Fox Business can be forgiven for thinking that Dallas is about to take a hard-line stance on immigration. After all, here was the city’s mayor making bold claims about what “we” will do. But Johnson’s authority is limited largely to the power of persuasion, and he almost totally lacks that power at Dallas City Hall, in large part because he spends his time making sweeping statements on Fox and precious little time building trust at 1500 Marilla St. Not to be outdone, council member Adam Bazaldua, who has embraced an evermore progressive posture and is an open activist for Democratic causes, hopped on social media to confuse things even more.

Dallas may spend $15 million in convention center updates for 2026 FIFA World Cup

Dallas could spend up to $15 million to get the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center ready to be the media hub for the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup despite ongoing plans to tear it down for a new one. The City Council will vote Dec. 11 on whether to approve the terms of an eight-month deal with FIFA to use the downtown convention center as the tournament’s international broadcast center, which would host the main feed used to broadcast all World Cup matches and be the home base for thousands of journalists and broadcasters covering the event. The council’s ad hoc committee on professional sports recruitment and retention on Monday approved forwarding the proposal to the full council for a decision. The costs would go towards fixing the convention center’s roof, installing cargo lifts, making sure the building has enough power and other facility infrastructure changes to accommodate one of the biggest sporting events in the world.

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National Stories

5 most shocking details from The New Yorker’s Pete Hegseth whistleblower report

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, is facing explosive allegations detailed in a never-before-reported whistleblower report detailing claims of drunken sexual misconduct during his tenure leading veteran advocacy organizations. Hegseth, who previously helmed Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) from 2013 to 2016, was accused of fostering a workplace environment rife with sexism in a seven-page report compiled by CVA employees and sent to senior management in February 2015. Over the weekend, The New Yorker profiled the allegations in an expose that raised further questions about his fitness for public office. Here are the five most shocking allegations: During a CVA event in Louisiana, Hegseth reportedly took his team to a strip club, where he became so intoxicated he had to be restrained from joining the dancers on stage. Among the most troubling claims comes from a female staffer who said she was assaulted by another man at the Louisiana strip club.

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Hegseth’s behavior reportedly took a darker turn during a CVA event in Ohio, where, according to a former employee, he shouted hateful drunken chants. On May 29, 2015, the staffer said, Hegseth and someone travelling with the group’s Defend Freedom Tour closed down the bar at the Sheraton Suites Hotel. The duo yelled “Kill All Muslims” multiple times, in what the staffer described as “a drunk and a violent manner.” Hegseth’s “despicable behavior,” he wrote, “embarrassed the entire organization.” He went on, “I personally was ashamed and… others were as well.” The staffer’s letter cited a second incident in which, he wrote, Hegseth “passed out” in the back of a party bus, then urinated in front of a hotel where C.V.A.’s team was staying. The report alleges that under Hegseth’s leadership, there was a pervasive culture of sexism and objectification. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” Hegseth is accused of treating CVA’s finances as a “personal expense account” and funding lavish parties and excursions. According to three knowledgeable sources, one of whom contributed to the whistle-blower report, Hegseth was forced to step down from the organization in part because of concerns about his mismanagement and abuse of alcohol on the job. “Congratulations on Removing Pete Hegseth” is the subject line of an e-mail, obtained by The New Yorker, that was sent to Hegseth’s successor as president of the group, Jae Pak, on January 15, 2016.

‘People feel drained’: anti-Trump Americans face temptation to tune out

In late 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected to his first White House term, many women were diligently knitting pink “pussy” hats to wear at a huge march where they protested against the election of a man who had recently boasted that he would “grab” women. There were other protests too. And across much of non-Trump-voting America, there was a sense of activism and engagement amid the shock of a Trump victory as many ordinary Americans galvanized themselves for what turned out to be one of the most chaotic presidencies in US history. Eight years later, the response of many centrist and left-leaning Americans to a Trump second term has been more muted. For many anti-Trump voters – and even some institutions – the return of Trump prompts a feeling of just wanting to ignore it all, including politics more broadly, and focus their energy elsewhere.

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In New York City, residents were once shocked that one of their own – Donald Trump, a man once close to Democratic power brokers in the city – had been elected, as a Republican, over Hillary Clinton. In the aftermath of November’s shock national election, they are more apt to say, “Well, we got whipped,” and move on to other topics. The left-leaning media outlet MSNBC has lost 47% of its audience since election day, according to Nielsen Media Research, while the Los Angeles Times and especially the Washington Post saw subscribers flee by the hundreds of thousands after the billionaire owners of each paper chose at the last minute not to make a presidential endorsement. After a year of intense energy, propelled by political events including two Trump assassination attempts and Joe Biden stepping down from his campaign, the mood in New York has deflated: call it the great tune-out of late 2024. It is, said Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the National Organization for Women NYC, “a coping method”.

Pro-immigration group launches a political arm to combat Trump’s agenda

A top immigration advocacy group on Tuesday announced the launch of a new political arm to combat Donald Trump’s agenda and help Democrats proactively message on an issue that has long challenged the party. With the latest move from Immigration Hub, a pro-immigration group that was born in 2017 in response to Trump’s first administration, advocates plan to drive major political advertising campaigns to counter the incoming president’s policy plans, which include rapidly ramping up deportations. The group’s political arm, called Catalyze/Citizens, will also work to expand Immigration Hub’s reach by countering disinformation about immigrants, including by pushing for reforms to a liability shield that allows platforms to disseminate content without being held liable for it. The group’s plans were shared first with POLITICO. The organization hopes to help turn the tide for Democrats on the vexing policy issue.

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As the party reckons with its 2024 loss, strategists note that the party’s pivot to a tougher stance on migration this cycle ultimately wasn’t enough to combat years of GOP dominance on immigration: Republicans outspent Democrats five to one on broadcast ads, according to an analysis of AdImpact data from Catalyze/Citizen’s new “Right-Wing Playbook. “The past decade has marked a dangerous shift: the mainstreaming of authoritarian ideology and the systematic spread of anti-immigrant narratives,” said Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of Immigration Hub and Catalyze/Citizens. “Catalyze/Citizens emerged from a clear conviction — we need a robust response that matches, competes and wins against the extreme right’s anti-immigrant, anti-democratic narratives.” Republicans were able to successfully frame immigration as a national threat this cycle, amplifying false narratives around immigrant crime, “invasions” and President Joe Biden’s border policies. Total spending on immigration-focused television ads across 12 battleground presidential and Senate states from January to October totaled $680.5 million, with 84 percent of this spending coming from Republicans, according to the analysis.

Unions score a major win in Wisconsin with a court ruling restoring collective bargaining rights

Wisconsin public worker and teachers unions scored a major legal victory Monday with a ruling that restores collective bargaining rights they lost under a 2011 state law that sparked weeks of protests and made the state the center of the national battle over union rights. That law, known as Act 10, effectively ended the ability of most public employees to bargain for wage increases and other issues, and forced them to pay more for health insurance and retirement benefits. Under the ruling by Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost, all public sector workers who lost their collective bargaining power would have it restored to what was in place prior to 2011. They would be treated the same as the police, firefighter and other public safety unions that were exempted under the law.

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Republicans vowed to immediately appeal the ruling, which ultimately is likely to go before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That only amplifies the importance of the April election that will determine whether the court remains controlled 4-3 by liberal justices. Former Gov. Scott Walker, who proposed the law that catapulted him onto the national political stage, decried the ruling in a post on the social media platform X as “brazen political activism.” He said it makes the state Supreme Court election “that much more important.” Supporters of the law have said it provided local governments more control over workers and the powers they needed to cut costs. Repealing the law, which allowed schools and local governments to raise money through higher employee contributions for benefits, would bankrupt those entities, backers of Act 10 have argued. Democratic opponents argue that the law has hurt schools and other government agencies by taking away the ability of employees to collectively bargain for their pay and working conditions.

‘Politics failed’: Top U.N. envoy says Gaza war followed years of weak diplomacy

In September last year, the top United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process left a meeting with Hamas leaders in Gaza thinking that he had helped avert a major escalation. The veteran Norwegian diplomat, Tor Wennesland, said he believed that Hamas had agreed to reduce recent tensions along the Israel-Gaza border in exchange for more work permits for Gazan workers. But Hamas had bluffed Mr. Wennesland, along with the Israeli leadership and much of the international community. Days later, the group’s fighters attacked Israel, setting off the deadliest year in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a misconception that Mr. Wennesland now says is emblematic of the problem with the international community’s recent approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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As he retires after a four-year tenure, Mr. Wennesland, 72, says world leaders have wrongly focused on short-term fixes, including small-scale humanitarian initiatives in Gaza, at the expense of a more ambitious push for a Palestinian state. “The feeling that Hamas had no interest in the conflict — that was the mantra, and it was wrong,” Mr. Wennesland said in a parting interview before leaving Jerusalem last weekend. “I’m somehow blaming myself for not getting that, not that I was the only one,” he added. In the half-decade before the war, he said, the international community had focused on improving the economy in Gaza, hoping that higher levels of employment and a better quality of life in the blockaded territory might prevent more flare-ups between Hamas and Israel. Foreign leaders also focused on diplomatic deals between Israel and other Arab states, believing that they might eventually and indirectly lead to peace with the Palestinians. Both approaches, Mr. Wennesland said, ultimately failed to solve the main issue driving the conflict in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank: the lack of a permanent settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.

Manchin says Biden should pardon Trump

Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) said Monday in an interview with CNN that President Biden should pardon President-elect Trump. “What I would have done differently, and my recommendation as a counsel woulda been, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and pardon Donald Trump, for all his charges?'” Manchin said of Biden’s pardoning of Hunter Biden when talking to CNN’s Manu Raju. Biden announced the pardon of his son late Sunday, arguing in a statement that the charges brought against his son, which included three felony charges on his purchase and possession of a gun in 2018, came about due to political reasons.

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“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” Biden said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution,” he added. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.” Manchin said Monday that he doesn’t “know of a father that [wouldn’t have] done the same thing” when talking about Hunter Biden’s pardon. Trump reacted negatively to the pardon via a post on Truth Social on Sunday.

Trump FBI pick Kash Patel gets lukewarm reception from GOP senators

President-elect Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to take over as FBI director — effectively firing current FBI Director Christopher Wray, who still has three years left in his 10-year term — has set off a firestorm on Capitol Hill. Several Senate Republicans have already come out in support of his nomination, such as Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Bill Hagerty (Tenn.), but other Republicans are on the fence. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a prominent moderate and member of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the FBI, said she would have to pore over Patel’s record.

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She said he’s “a nominee I will have to do a lot of work on” when asked about Patel’s more controversial proposals such as shutting down the FBI’s headquarters in Washington and firing its top ranks. “That’s why it’s so important that we have an FBI background check, a committee review with extensive questions and questionnaires and a public hearing,” Collins said. Asked about Patel’s nomination, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said his staff is “digging into some of the work that he did in various roles of the Trump administration, what he’s done after that.” Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Patel would get a rigorous vetting in the Senate, as would Trump’s other nominees. “My job is to make sure that the nominees have a thorough, fair process and ultimately our members are going to decide,” he said.

Lead Stories

President Biden pardons his son Hunter Biden

Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Sunday night, a reversal for the president, who repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence. "I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision," Biden said in his statement. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 12 for his conviction on federal gun charges. He also was set to be sentenced on Dec. 16 in a separate criminal case in which he pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges in September.

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The president issued a "full and unconditional pardon" for any offenses Hunter Biden has “committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024," according to the White House statement. A senior White House official told NBC News, which was the first to report on the pardon decision, that the president decided over the weekend to grant his son a pardon and began to inform his senior aides Sunday. The president also spoke about his son's struggles with addiction in his statement Sunday night, saying that his political opponents were trying to "break" him by going after Hunter. "No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong," Biden said in his statement. "There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough." In a separate statement, Hunter Biden said he had "admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport."

State judge overseeing Robert Roberson ‘shaken baby’ case steps aside

Deborah Oakes Evans, the retired state district judge who issued the execution warrant for Robert Roberson III earlier this year, has apparently voluntarily decided to recuse herself from the legal proceeding. According to the court filing, Evans signed the order of recusal on Nov. 25. It was not immediately clear why she opted to step aside from the case, which has garnered national and international headlines. Roberson, 58, was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for reportedly shaking his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, to death. Advocates, his lawyers and a bipartisan group of lawmakers say he is innocent and the science behind “shaken baby syndrome” is flawed.

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Roberson was scheduled to die by lethal injection in Huntsville in October but was saved after the Texas Supreme Court directed state officials to allow the death row inmate to comply with a subpoena issued by a House committee for his testimony. Roberson has maintained his innocence for more than two decades. Evans’ involvement in Roberson’s case began in 2016 when she presided over a post-conviction proceeding that was initiated that year, court documents show. She later retired from the bench in 2022 but was assigned to Roberson’s case this year after her retirement. Evans presided over the post-conviction “junk science” hearings after the first execution was stayed but ultimately rejected the arguments from Roberson’s lawyers. After weighing the testimony, the judge ruled against Roberson in February 2022, stating his attorneys failed to show shaken baby syndrome was “discredited and no longer an accepted medical diagnosis.” ”While the Applicant has shown that there is new scientific evidence not available at the time of his trial,” the judge wrote, “he has failed to show by a preponderance of evidence that had this new evidence been presented at trial, he would not have been convicted.” While the specific reason is unknown, Evans’ recusal from Roberson’s case comes after attorneys questioned her impartiality because of her friendships with jurists connected to the case and rulings in another “shaken baby syndrome” case.

In the name of American freedom, Texas agriculture commissioner wants raw milk sold in grocery stores

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller wants to see raw milk on grocery store shelves. Raw milk has not been pasteurized — the process of heating milk to a certain temperature to kill illness-causing bacteria. Miller said in an editorial on the state agency's website that he grew up on a farm drinking milk straight from the cow, and he thinks others should be able to exercise their freedom to drink raw milk by making it more widely available. In Texas, people can currently buy raw milk from farms, farmers markets and the internet, but federal law prohibits its interstate sale, the editorial says. "Raw milk isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn't be available," Miller said. "Just as we shouldn’t force people to consume something they don’t want, the government should allow people the right to choose what is best for their personal nutrition."

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Raw milk has been rising in consumer interest recently as a supposedly more natural alternative to pasteurized, homogenized milk with some health benefits. But raw milk can carry bacteria like Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria and Campylobacter, and consuming it can cause serious illness, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both agencies say pasteurization does not reduce milk's nutritional value. Last month, a child got bird flu virus after drinking raw milk from California. "While raw milk contains the same number of amino acids, antimicrobials, vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids as pasteurized milk; for some, it’s about taking the calculated risk to reap the benefits of milk in its purest form," Miller said. The commissioner — whose job it is to over see the state's agriculture, consumer protection, economic development and healthy living — acknowledged the health risks, but said they are risks worth taking. "It takes knowledge, care, and some good cowboy logic to handle raw milk safely," he said. "Just because it’s risky doesn’t mean the option should be removed from the people either. I believe in personal choice and the freedom to decide what’s best for you and your family."

Trump’s return heralds litigation peace for crypto

Regulators tried to police the crypto market using the strongest weapons they have. Now they are likely to lay down their arms. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued crypto exchanges Binance, Coinbase and Kraken last year, accusing the platforms of dealing assets that are illegal to trade without regulatory supervision. Crypto executives had refused to comply with financial rules that they said were a bad fit for digital currencies. The SEC, under the leadership of Chair Gary Gensler, mounted the legal campaign in lieu of the industry’s request to craft new crypto-specific regulations that embraced a lighter touch. Had the commission won in court, the victories would have compelled the freewheeling market to follow longstanding agency rules that protect investors who buy securities. But litigation can take many years to resolve, and with Donald Trump’s election to a second term, Gensler has run out of time before his biggest cases reach the finish line. Trump’s return to the White House will mean a new era for crypto—with fewer government hurdles. The president-elect, shedding previous skepticism of crypto, has pledged support for the digital-asset industry, whose leaders embraced his campaign. He also wants to curb the independence of agencies such as the SEC and the Federal Reserve.

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The next SEC chairman is likely to offer crypto exchanges a favorable settlement. Lawyers considered as candidates to succeed Gensler have positioned themselves as critics of his litigation. One who has been considered, former SEC General Counsel Robert Stebbins, said the agency should pause most of its crypto lawsuits while clearing a path for the firms to do business without the overhang of litigation. “To the extent there are no fraud claims involved, my sense is the commission would be likely to dismiss those cases in the future,” Stebbins said. Others candidates who are on Trump’s shortlist include former SEC commissioner Paul Atkins and ex-Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Brian Brooks. They declined to comment. Dismantling the litigation would spell the end of an adversarial approach to crypto that began in 2017, during Trump’s first term, when the market was flush with new digital assets that were being sold to the public without any restrictions. Trump was critical of crypto during his earlier tenure, once saying its value was “based on thin air.”

State Stories

'I haven't done anything wrong': Ex-Humble ISD Superintendent breaks silence after being fired

Less than a day after being fired by the Humble ISD board, former Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen said that she plans to appeal the decision in hopes of clearing her name. “I've always been a person who just believes the sort of Martin Luther King Jr., the law of the universe 'bends towards justice.’ That you just do the right things and the right things happen,” Fagen said, as she sipped from a yellow coffee cup at a cafe in her Kingwood neighborhood. “The unfortunate side of (not speaking out) is people tend to only have one set of facts that are being pushed.” Fagen hasn’t spoken out in-depth publicly since she recused herself from involvement in her spouse’s Title IX case, the first domino to fall in an 18-month debacle that cost the 48,000-student district in northeast Harris County more than $1.5 million in legal expenses. But, after reading the hearing officer’s recommendation that had “no proof,” Fagen said she wanted to tell her side of the story.

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“All I asked was for (the board) to just let me leave. I haven't done anything wrong. Just let me leave peacefully,” Fagen said. “It's best for the district, it's best for the board, it's best for me and my family, and they wouldn't do it, and I don't understand that. Why destroy my professional career and reputation when I was asking to do what was best for everyone?” Humble ISD board president Chris Parker railed against the notion that Fagen did not have a chance to tell her side of the story, in a statement emailed Saturday. "Dr. Fagen has not only had the chance to tell her side of the story but has done so multiple times already during a fair and impartial process. In other words, Dr. Fagen has neither suffered a lack of opportunity to share her side of the story, nor has she missed an opportunity to provide her version of events; rather, it appears that Dr. Fagen is disappointed that an independent adjudicator disposed of her side of the story as not credible," Parker wrote. Fagen is in the process of appealing the hearing examiner’s recommendation that she be terminated for good cause to the Texas Education Agency commissioner, although an appeal has not yet been filed, but said she no longer expects to return to her post at the helm of the Humble ISD. Instead, she is appealing to clear her name and for financial reasons, hoping for one year’s compensation and appropriate back-pay, she said.

Sources: Councilman John Courage exits crowded race for San Antonio mayor

District 9 Councilman John Courage, who was the first to announce his mayoral candidacy, is dropping out of the 2025 race to replace outgoing Mayor Ron Nirenberg, according to sources familiar with his decision. Courage, 73, announced his mayoral bid in late January, almost a year before the candidate filing period for the May 3, 2025, election opens. Three of his current council colleagues — Manny Peláez, Adriana Rocha Garcia and Melissa Cabello Havrda — are expected to file to run for the open mayor’s seat. Former Councilman Clayton Perry announced his campaign earlier this fall.

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Tech entrepreneur Beto Altamirano and former Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos are also vying for mayor. More than a dozen potential mayoral candidates have filed for a campaign treasurer with the city, which allows them to start raising money. The next mayor and City Council will serve a four-year term rather than a two-year one as a result of a city charter amendment that voters approved Nov. 5. They’ll still be capped at eight years in office, making Courage ineligible to seek another council term. Courage did not return multiple requests for comment.

Attorney General Ken Paxton investigating ad companies targeted by Elon Musk for alleged boycott

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating advertising companies over a potential effort to withhold advertising money from certain social media companies. Paxton sent a request for documents and information to World Federation of Advertisers and its subdivision, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, according to a Nov. 21 news release. WFA member companies include Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted, according to the AP. Paxton is investigating "a potential anticompetitive scheme" related to pressuring advertisers not to buy online advertising space, which would harm competition and could violate the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act of 1983, the release says. The release says the companies organized their members to potentially boycott social media platforms that they deem violate their “Brand Safety Standards."

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The release does not mention by name X, formerly known as Twitter. But in August, owner Elon Musk sued the WFA and its member companies, saying they violated antitrust laws and withheld billions of revenue dollars by orchestrating a “massive advertiser boycott," according to the AP. Days after Musk filed the suit, the WFA discontinued the brand safety initiative. Paxton said the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden "failed to enforce antitrust laws against its perceived political allies," calling it "unacceptable and un-American." “Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine," Paxton said. "Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to rig the system to harm organizations they might disagree with.”

Greg Abbott responds to Texas doctor's advice to skip citizenship question: 'There will be consequences'

After a Houston doctor went viral on TikTok for advising patients to skip a U.S. citizenship question on certain patient intake forms, Gov. Greg Abbott appeared to threaten to rescind government funding for hospitals that fail to “follow the law.” Abbott issued an executive order on Aug. 8 requiring hospitals that accept Medicaid, or Children’s Health Insurance Plan, to ask patients: “Are you a U.S. citizen?” On Nov. 11, Tony Pastor, a cardiologist at Texas Children’s Hospital and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, posted a video on TikTok telling viewers, “We were told today that people do not actually have to answer the question.” The governor lashed out at Pastor's employers in a Nov. 24 post on X, though his comments seemed to apply to all Texas hospitals that receive Medicaid funding.

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“Hey Texas Children’s Hospital & Baylor College of Medicine this doctor is putting your Medicaid & Medicare funding at risk,” Abbott said in the post. “(You) better think twice & have crystal clear records. There will be consequences for failing to follow the law in the Order.” Pastor's original post had been removed from his account as of Nov. 30. But he posted a video on TikTok on Nov. 26 in response to Abbott's X post. "When the gov of Texas threatens you on twitter because he is mad you exercised freedom of speech," Pastor captioned within the video clip. Several advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have said hospitals are legally required to ask the question — but patients are not legally obligated to answer it. The San Antonio Metropolitan Health District also released a flyer mirroring Pastor’s Nov. 11 statement. “You do not have to answer the citizenship question if you don’t want to. Your answer will not affect your care — you will not be turned away,” the flyer said. “You have a right to life-saving care, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.” Abbott did not immediately respond to Express-News' request for comment.

Former Mayor Howard Peak, who championed trails and aquifer protection, dies at 75

Former San Antonio Mayor Howard W. Peak — best known for the network of hiking and biking trails named in his honor — has died. Peak represented District 9 on the San Antonio City Council from 1993 to 1997, and was elected mayor in 1997 after running on a platform of addressing water, education and employment issues. He unseated incumbent Mayor William Thornton, who didn’t make the runoff with Peak and Kay Turner. Before entering politics, Peak was an urban planner with a master’s degree in urban studies and environmental management from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Throughout his career Peak promoted the idea that parks and natural resources were part of a city’s core responsibilities.

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“Howard Peak was a visionary mayor, a steward of our city, whose kindness and gentle style belied an intense focus that leaves a permanent legacy in San Antonio,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said on social media on Sunday. “… Rest in peace, Mayor Peak.” Peak graduated from Alamo Heights High School in 1967 and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas. He served as a city planner for City of the San Antonio, taught urban administration at Trinity University and owned a land development service company. Peak first developed the idea of putting trails near flood-prone creeks while serving on the city’s Zoning Commission. That concept later grew into a much larger trail network, now known as the Howard W. Peak Greenway Trail System, which runs roughly 100 miles. It loops around the city and connects to other paths with more than 50 trailheads. “I was doing a little bit of research about Salado Creek, and from that bit of research, I realized that we had an opportunity to have a circle of hike and bike trails around San Antonio,” Peak said in a 2013 video interview with then-City Council candidate Nirenberg. “I’m not sure there’s anything else like this, but we’re making good progress on connecting the pieces that we’re building.” Peak helped secure an 8 cent sales tax to fund the trail system in the beginning, which voters have approved several times since then.

A conservative nonprofit got $80k for a Texas book-ban battle. Llano County hasn’t seen it

As Pastor John Amanchukwu spoke, his voice reverberated throughout the gala room of Sandstone Mountain Ranch, an exotic hunting preserve and event space near Llano, a small Texas Hill Country town about 80 miles northwest of Austin. “Not only should we put God first in Congress, the General Assembly, throughout this land, in the halls of government, in the halls of power," Amanchukwu boomed, "we should also put God first in our libraries.” The crowd erupted in applause. Sitting at the tables before Amanchukwu were not congregants but donors, each having spent between $100 and $1,250 per person to attend. A table for eight cost $10,000.

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On that crisp fall afternoon in November 2023, Amanchukwu — a North Carolinian who has embraced the label of “Book Banning Pastor” — was among several prominent conservative figures who traveled from across the country to raise money for Llano County’s legal defense in a federal book ban case. At least, that’s what attendees believed they were raising money for. But one year after the event, Llano County still hasn’t seen a dime of the funds collected, the American-Statesman found through public records and interviews with officials. The county's outside lawyer, well-known conservative attorney Jonathan Mitchell, also has not received any money from the fundraiser, he told the Statesman. Instead, the money went to conservative nonprofit America First Legal — which has no present role in litigating or funding the case. The nonprofit, which recorded $44.4 million in revenue in 2022, has never contacted county leadership in writing, according to public records requests. The case — which made Llano County, a rural Central Texas community of about 22,000, a national flashpoint in the culture wars — centers around the county's removal of 17 titles from its public libraries in 2021. Some were children’s books containing nudity in illustrations, including Maurice Sendak’s 1970 classic “In the Night Kitchen,” while others were works on race, gender and sexuality, ranging from “Being Jazz: My Life as a Transgender Teen” to “They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Organization.”

Laura Bray: Just say ‘No,’ again, to school vouchers

(Laura Bray is Chair of the Kendall County Democratic Party.) After Election Day, Gov. Greg Abbott is more confident than ever that he has the votes to pass his “school choice” voucher program during next year’s session of the Texas Legislature, which gavels in on Jan. 14. It’s not “school choice” as Republicans say, but “school’s choice.” Public schools educate all students. Private schools choose whom to admit, what to teach and have no accountability. Private schools are not held to the same standards as public schools. They don’t have to demonstrate student progress by using state-mandated tools; they can discriminate against children with disabilities; they do not provide transportation; and they do not provide free or reducedprice lunch programs. A majority of Texas voters do not want vouchers, despite Republican statements that we do; 65% of voters in Gillespie County, a heavily Republican county, oppose school vouchers (Fredericksburg Standard, 10/9/2024).

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A few other important facts: The costs of a voucher program are astronomical. Arizona’s voucher program, enacted in 2022, “will likely bankrupt the state,” according to Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. Voucher costs in 2023 were over five times an initial $65 million estimate. (Source: NEA) Boerne ISD employs more than 1,500 people, three times the number of the no. 2 employer, H-EB. School vouchers will divert even more funding away from public schools, necessitating draconian cuts in school budgets ... and likely, employment. 60% of Texas counties don’t even have a private school. “For these places, public schools are often some of the last vestiges of civic life,” said state Rep. James Talarico. Texas schools already rank 42nd nationally in per-pupil spending, and yet Abbott and Republicans want to pull even more dollars away from public education, in order to give a handout to wealthy families who don’t need it. A coalition of Democrats and some Republicans in the Texas House defeated vouchers three times in the last Legislative session, knowing that such a program will further erode already anemic funding for public schools, especially rural ones with few or no private options.

Raymond, Zaffirini introduce wide-ranging legislation for 2025 session

Laredo's state representatives have filed 74 pieces of legislation as Texas Legislature returned to session in recent weeks. These state leaders include Rep. Richard Raymond in the Texas House and Sen. Judith Zaffirini, dean of the Texas Senate. Raymond has filed 36 measures, including 24 House bills, eight House joint resolutions and four House resolutions. His efforts primarily focus on taxation and public finance, while also addressing veterans’ affairs, health care, infrastructure, the environment, public safety and criminal justice, among others.

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Raymond was not immediately available for comment regarding the filings. Meanwhile, Zaffirini — the Texas Senate’s all-time leader in passing legislation, with 1,388 bills to her name — has filed 38 measures, including 34 Senate bills and four Senate joint resolutions. Her efforts strongly address education, health care and mental health, followed by public safety, election reform, government transparency and technology, among others. “Filing bills early demonstrates the commitment my staff and I have maintained throughout the interim to address the needs and priorities of families in Senate District 21,” Zaffirini said in a statement. “We look forward to filing additional bills, especially as Senate committees finalize interim reports. “As always, my staff and I invite constituents and stakeholders to participate in the legislative process and share their feedback and suggestions. Our door is always open.”

Texas’ hotbed of Taiwanese Nationalism

Dai wan wei. The sounds of the Taiwanese Hokkien language don’t resemble Mandarin Chinese, which drifts from the throat in soft wisps. Nor is Taiwanese, as it’s more simply called, like the syncopated rhythms of English, that concoction of multisyllabic consonant-and-vowel blends manipulated by the tongue and lips. Rather, the Taiwanese language originates deep from the belly, creating rumbling sonorous tones that remind me of my dad’s laughter or my mom calling me for dinner, “ki jia buan!” Although I was born in the States, Taiwanese was the first and only language I heard and spoke until I entered grade school. Delivered through my grandmother’s stern lectures, my dad’s and uncles’ incessant jokes, or my aunts’ pleas to eat, the language molded my early worldview and sense of self. But during my parents’ youth, Taiwanese was spoken only in whispers or not at all on the streets of their homeland, where locals were forced to adopt Mandarin as their official language in 1945.

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During the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek and under his Kuomintang party government, my family, among many others, was forbidden to publicly speak their mother tongue, forced to adopt Chinese culture and language, and relegated to an underclass in their own land. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when they moved to Houston, that they began to explore what it meant to be Taiwanese. Down Bellaire Boulevard, west of the Southwest Freeway, past the PlazAmericas Mall and the Fiesta Supermarket, signs start to appear in Hanzi, the written characters common to Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese speakers. Grocery stores, banks, bubble tea shops, accounting offices, and restaurants dot multiple shopping centers—Diho Square, Metropole Center, and Dun Huang Plaza—until you travel west of Beltway 8 and the signs shift to Vietnamese. Visitors might mistake this section of Houston’s modern Chinatown as being homogeneously Chinese. More precisely, though, it’s a commercial, social, and cultural hub for immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the northern Chinese provinces, and the southern province of Fujian. But Taiwanese immigrants were among the first to develop shopping centers in this area in the 1980s, according to my uncle, who has his own office there.

Texas leads the country in net migration

The latest Census data shows that Texas remains the top state for net domestic migration as the state's population continues to boom. Nearly 612,000 people moved to Texas last year, while about 478,000 moved out. The Census Bureau's state-to-state migration flow data for 2023 shows that California, New York and Florida were the top states sending people to Texas. "From our research and past other data, we have seen that people who move to Texas tend to be people of younger working age population, who usually tend to more likely have a kid and who came for better pay and more opportunity, job opportunities," Helen You at the Texas Demographic Center told KERA.

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Other top "sender" states included Louisiana, Illinois, Washington and Oregon. You said that was calculated by subtracting the number of Texans moving to other states from the number of people from those states moving to Texas. She noted that domestic migration actually increased after 2020 to 2021. "During the pandemic year, the scale of migration in the whole country kind of was low, but coming out from the pandemic, the thing we have seen is actually the migration flows have been much higher than before and even higher than some of the pre-pandemic years," You said. Meanwhile, Texans who moved out of the state primarily relocated to Colorado, Georgia and North Carolina. You said that the "outflow" states tend to change year by year. This year, Indiana was included among the top states that Texans are moving to. "Indiana has not been on the chart in the past two rounds of data, so sometimes it may just be a higher standard error here and small sample size from one year to the next," You said.

Defensive Coordinator Tim DeRuyter out at Texas Tech

Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire has made his first coordinator change to Texas Tech's coaching staff since arriving in Lubbock. Following the conclusion of the 2024 regular season, in which Texas Tech beat West Virginia 52-15, news broke that veteran defensive coordinator Tim DeRuyter is being let go from his position and will not return for the 2025 season. In addition, secondary coach Marcel Yates will also not be retained. The two came over from Oregon after the 2021 season and have been part of McGuire's staff in Lubbock for the past three years. DeRuyter's defenses in Lubbock had their moments, especially his first two seasons, but the 2024 season was too inconsistent which necessitated the change.

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Mandatory Texas vehicle safety inspections end in one month

In one month, most Texas drivers will be able to skip the state’s annual vehicle safety inspection. Beginning Jan. 1, 2025, a new law, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June 2023, will abolish the Vehicle Safety Inspection Program for non-commercial vehicles. Commercial vehicles will still be subject to the inspection requirement as usual. Having a safe vehicle will now be a personal responsibility, and while the change may save time, it won’t save money. The requirement will be replaced by a $7.50 inspection program replacement fee. Prior to the new law, an annual vehicle safety inspection cost $7.50. The Texas Department of Public Safety said the fee would be paid during the vehicle’s annual, required registration with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. Newer vehicles not yet registered will incur a $16.75 fee to cover two years of registration.

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Texas lawmaker hopes new bill will create high-speed rail line from Dallas to Austin to San Antonio

With the Texas legislative session starting in less than 50 days, one Texas lawmaker hopes a new bill will finally connect the state through a high-speed rail line. Texas Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat who represents parts of North Austin and Williamson County, filed House Bill 483, which would propose an agreement between the Texas Department of Transportation and a private partner to create this rail line that would connect Dallas to Austin to San Antonio. “Connecting these major hubs of the most trafficked road in the state of I-35 with another means to get up and down, it makes just a ton of sense,” Bucy said. There is no direct funding attached to the bill to construct the high-speed rail, just an order for TxDOT to find a vendor to start construction on what Bucy says will be a long process.

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Conversations about a rail line like this have emerged before, but nothing has ever come of it. “You look at the 80s and 90s, Texas was a leader in infrastructure, especially road infrastructure,” Bucy said. “We've really lost our focus on doing that, and as Texas continues to grow, Texans are suffering for it.” In addition to connecting these major business hubs and making commuting easier for those who work and live in two different Texas hubs, Bucy is hopeful the rail will lead to decreased crashes on the highway. “What should be six hours round trip turns into seven, eight, nine because of all the traffic, all the construction and the projects that are constantly happening on I-35, and that's going to lead to tired, frustrated, distracted drivers,” Bucy said. “This would be a safe way to move people up and down I-35.” Since filing the bill, Bucy said he’s been overwhelmed with support from commissioners and other Texas lawmakers wanting to make this high-speed rail happen. Now the major endorsement he’ll be looking for this upcoming January is Gov. Greg Abbott. “If the governor got behind it as a leader in innovation with the state, having a high-speed rail would be a next big step in that,” Bucy said.

AP poll: Texas moves up to No. 2, Aggies drop out after Lone Star Showdown

Texas moved up one spot to No. 2 in the latest Associated Press Top 25 rankings ahead of the Longhorns’ rematch with Georgia in the Southeastern Conference championship game. The latest poll released Sunday still has Oregon as the unanimous No. 1 team following the Ducks’ 49-21 win over rival Washington, but Ohio State’s 13-10 loss to Michigan caused the next five teams to each move up a spot. Penn State is No. 3, Notre Dame is No. 4 while Georgia is No. 5 after beating Georgia Tech 44-42 in eight overtimes.

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No. 3 Texas makes SEC title game, wins physical Lone Star Showdown 17-7

No. 3 Texas made a goalline stand in the fourth quarter and sophomore running back Quintrevion Wisner ran wild in a 17-7 win over No. 20 Texas A&M on Saturday at Kyle Field. With fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line and 4:40 to go in the game, Texas A&M coach Mike Elko elected to go for a touchdown rather than kick a chip-shot field goal. Texas stuffed tailback Amari Daniels for a 3-yard loss for A&M’s third turnover on downs. The big stand came after the Aggies blocked a punt and recovered it inside the Texas 20-yard line.

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City Stories

Town of Fairview residents will weigh in on controversial LDS temple construction

The Fairview Town Council will hold a workshop session Tuesday before a final decision on whether the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can build a controversial new religious temple. The LDS temple is a step closer to construction after a mediation agreement with the town. Fairview denied the Church’s original permit after residents raised concerns about its size — the church initially proposed a 65-foot building with a 174-foot spire over 43,000 square feet. After mediation, Fairview and the Church agreed to build a smaller temple. The new plan proposes a one-story, 35-foot-tall building with a 120-foot tower in the middle of the property. The temple will stretch over 30,000 square feet. Church leadership praised the deal and thanked the town.

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“Temples are sacred and holy places for Latter-day Saints and are considered to be a house of the Lord. We are grateful that town officials from Fairview were willing to discuss the concerns of the community with Church representatives and we were able to reach an agreement to move forward,” the statement read. “A new proposal is now in place that represents a mutually agreed compromise between the Church and the town and has the support of the mayor and the council…The Church looks forward to participating in this public process and presenting this new plan for a temple on the Church’s property in Fairview.” The agreement cannot be finalized until The Church submits a new permit application to the Planning and Zoning Board. Church and town leadership met for a mediation session last week, presided over by former U.S. Magistrate Jeff Kaplan. Fairview’s Mayor Henry Lessner, Fairview’s Mayor Pro Tem John Hubbard and the town’s attorney and manager represented the town’s interests.

National Stories

Sales of Bibles are booming, fueled by first-time buyers and new versions

Hallelujah! Bibles are a bright spot in books this year. Worries about the economy, conflicts abroad and uncertainty over the election pushed readers toward the publication in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of October, compared with the same period last year, according to book tracker Circana BookScan. By contrast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that period. “People are experiencing anxiety themselves, or they’re worried for their children and grandchildren,” said Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. “It’s related to artificial intelligence, election cycles…and all of that feeds a desire for assurance that we’re going to be OK.” Cely Vazquez, a 28-year-old artist and influencer who has appeared on the reality TV show “Love Island USA,” recently bought her first Bible—one from the “She Reads Truth” line—at Barnes & Noble.

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“I’ve had Bibles that my mom gave me, but I felt I needed my own to start my own journey, that it symbolized I was starting a walk with God,” she said. “I felt something was missing. It’s a combination of where we are in the world, general anxiety and the sense that meaning and comfort can be found in the Bible.” Bethany Martin, manager of the Faith & Life Bookstore in Newton, Kan., said she is selling to lots of first-time Bible buyers. “They’re looking for hope with the world the way it is, and the Bible is what they’re reaching for,” she said. Faith & Life’s website offers more than 270 Bibles, including a $95 leather-bound giant-print option and a $7.99 pocket-size New Testament. Others sell graphic novel Bibles, reference Bibles in a rainbow of color options, versions intended specifically for men and teens and early readers, audiobooks, and even one bound in goatskin, priced at $832.50. In March, President-elect Donald Trump endorsed the “God Bless the USA Bible,” which sells online for $59.99 and isn’t included in Circana BookScan figures. Oklahoma’s education department recently purchased more than 500 of those Bibles for local schools, the Tulsa World reported, referencing copies of purchase orders. The demand for Bibles is rising despite evidence that the country is growing increasingly secularized.

How Trump’s mass deportation plan can use AI to extend immigration crackdown

A signature campaign promise of President-elect Donald Trump is to initiate mass deportations of undocumented residents of the United States. At a Sept. 12 campaign stop in Tucson, Arizona, Trump promised to “begin the largest mass deportation mission in the history of our country.” Trump’s selection of Thomas Homan as “border czar” and Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, two officials seen as hard-liners on immigration, suggest that the administration’s approach to a crackdown will attempt to make good on that promise and be aggressive, though details have not been provided by the Trump transition team. Trump has said he will start mass deportation efforts with criminals, but he has also vowed to repeal Temporary Protected Status for individuals. He said in a brief post-election interview with NBC News that he has “no choice” but to pursue mass deportation after the election results, and that there is “no price tag.”

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Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said earlier this year that “No one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder,” and he vowed to “run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.” Carrying out these pledges, though, is logistically daunting. Artificial intelligence may help. While AI wasn’t widely used during the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the technology has become more accessible and widely deployed across many systems and government agencies, and President Biden’s administration began devoting DHS budget and organizational focus to it. In April, the Department of Homeland Security created the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board to help establish perimeters and protocols for the technology’s use. The 2025 DHS budget includes $5 million to open an AI Office in the DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer. According to the DHS budget memo, the office is responsible for advancing and accelerating the “responsible use” of AI by establishing standards, policies, and oversight to support the growing adoption of AI across DHS.

How to sum up 2024? The Oxford University Press word of the year is 'brain rot'

Many of us have felt it, and now it’s official: “brain rot” is the Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year. Oxford University Press said Monday that the evocative phrase “gained new prominence in 2024,” with its frequency of use increasing 230% from the year before. Oxford defines brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” The word of the year is intended to be “a word or expression that reflects a defining theme from the past 12 months.” “Brain rot” was chosen by a combination of public vote and language analysis by Oxford lexicographers. It beat five other finalists: demure, slop, dynamic pricing, romantasy and lore.

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While it may seem a modern phenomenon, the first recorded use of “brain rot” was by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 ode to the natural world, “Walden.” Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said that in its modern sense, “’brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time.” “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our choice this year,” he said. Last year’s Oxford word of the year was “rizz,” a riff on charisma, used to describe someone’s ability to attract or seduce another person. Collins Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year is “brat” – the album title that became a summer-living ideal.

GOP’s small majority adds to challenge of tax reform

House Republicans are heading into the new Congress with a lofty set of tax reform goals, an ambitious agenda made more difficult by a razor-thin majority. Republicans are on track to have a single-digit-seat edge beginning in January, one that is set to get smaller as some members resign from the House to serve in President-elect Trump’s Cabinet. That will make the heavy lift of tax reform even weightier for Republican leaders. A small but influential group of GOP lawmakers want to raise the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap and are vowing to block any bill without their demand, and deficit hawks are sure to voice their concerns about the price tag. Top Republicans say they are aware of those circumstances but are ready to take up the challenge head-on. “That’s what the whole process is gonna be, threading that needle,” Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Hill. “But failure is not an option, we’ll get it done.”

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Success, however, will require near-total agreement within the fractious Republican conference. Republicans are set to control at least 220 seats next year, with Democrats trailing at 213 seats. Two elections in California remain uncalled, with Democrats currently holding a small lead in both, according to Decision Desk HQ. That GOP majority, though, is set to narrow even further early next year, with Reps. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) set to leave the chamber to serve in Trump’s administration and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) not taking the oath of office despite withdrawing from consideration for attorney general. That ultrathin margin is set to come to fruition during the first 100 days of the Trump administration, when Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other GOP leaders are hoping to use budget reconciliation — a tool parties that control all levers of government can utilize to fast-track their priorities — to extend the tax cuts Trump enacted in 2017.

Lawmakers express doubt over Trump’s plan to replace FBI’s Christopher Wray

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he wants to replace FBI Director Christopher A. Wray with Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist who has vowed to fire the agency’s leadership and dramatically reshape its mission, was met with bipartisan concern that his appointment could undermine the agency’s independence. Republicans and Democrats alike argued that replacing Wray — who has held the job since 2017 — with Patel showcases Trump’s efforts to appoint close allies who espouse his views and have expressed support for his plans to take aim at the country’s justice system. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota) said that Trump “has the right” to make appointments and that he was not surprised the president-elect is picking “people that he believes are very loyal to himself.” But he also praised Wray, calling him “a very good man” and saying he’d had no “complaints” or “objections” about his stewardship of the agency. He noted that Trump appointed Wray to a 10-year term.

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“The message, and one that I feel very strongly about, is that there is a constitutional separation. The Founding Fathers did that for a reason. We will, you know, we accept that the president should have the people that he wants in his Cabinet and on his team. Every president wants that. We give them the benefit of the doubt,” Rounds told ABC. But, Rounds noted, presidential appointees are subject to confirmation by the Senate. “We provide advice and consent. And once again, that can be sometimes advice, sometimes it is consent,” he said. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is in line to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee once Republicans assume control of the Senate next month, criticized Wray in a post on X, saying he had “failed” at fundamental duties as FBI director. He added that Patel must “prove to Congress he will reform & restore public trust in FBI.” Trump’s selection of Patel comes as the president-elect has rolled out proposed nominations and appointments that appear aimed at putting his political allies in key positions where officials and agencies had contradicted or angered him in the past. Trump’s announcement Saturday night does not amount to a formal nomination, and Patel can’t take over the FBI unless Trump fires Wray or the FBI director steps down before the end of his 10-year term.

Trump taps Massad Boulos, another in-law, as adviser on Middle East

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that he would nominate Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman and the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany, as a senior adviser covering Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Trump has been keeping many family members in his inner circle. On Saturday, Trump announced he had tapped Charles Kushner, a New Jersey real estate developer and father-in-law to his daughter Ivanka, to be the ambassador to France. Trump announced his decision to appoint Boulos on Truth Social. In a statement that did not mention the family connection, Trump praised Boulos’s business acumen and the role he had played in his presidential campaign. Boulos served as a self-described envoy courting Arab American and Muslim voters on Trump’s behalf.

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“Massad is an accomplished lawyer and a highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the International scene,” Trump said in his post. “He has been a longtime proponent of Republican and Conservative values, an asset to my Campaign, and was instrumental in building tremendous new coalitions with the Arab American Community.” The advisory White House post doesn’t require Senate confirmation. Boulos met Trump in 2019 after his son Michael began dating Tiffany Trump. In the run-up to this year’s election, he made repeated trips to Michigan and other key swing states as he sought to build support for Trump among Arab Americans and Muslims frustrated with the Biden administration’s backing of Israel in the ongoing Middle East conflict. That outreach sought to recast Trump’s own pro-Israel policies during his first term in the White House and as a 2024 candidate. In stops across the country, Boulos encouraged voters to look past Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and policies that appeared to vilify Muslims and Arabs, and cast him as someone who could restore peace in the region. “Those massacres would not have happened if there was a strong president at the White House,” Boulos said of the bloodshed in Gaza during a stop in Arizona this fall. “The entire war wouldn’t have happened.” Boulos has said little publicly about his views on the ongoing conflict or how Trump might forge a path forward once he assumes office. Born in Lebanon, he reportedly has long-standing ties to political figures in that country.

Copyright December 09, 2024, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved