Category Archives: Texas

Winds and dry conditions fuel multiple Texas wildfires as hundreds evacuate

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Gusty conditions were expected to complicate containment efforts and ‘support wildfire activity’ in the Eastland Complex fire

Low humidity and gusty winds fueled multiple wildfires on Friday in Texas, burning homes and other buildings and prompting hundreds to evacuate .

Fueled by strong winds through dangerously dry brush and grass fields, the wildfires merged to form what fire officials call a “complex” that was burning near Eastland, about 120 miles (195 km) west of Dallas. As of Friday morning, fires in the area had burned roughly 52,700 acres (21,300 hectares), according to Texas A&M forest service, including the 45,383-acre (18,365-hectare) Eastland Complex fire that was only 4% contained.

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Beto O’Rourke calls Texas governor Greg Abbott an ‘authoritarian’ and ‘thug’

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The Democratic gubernatorial candidate compared his Republican opponent to the Russian president Vladimir Putin

Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, has likened his Republican opponent to the Russian president Vladimir Putin, calling Greg Abbott an “authoritarian” and a “thug”.

As governor, Abbott has presided over draconian laws on issues including abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and voting rights. In February 2021, on his watch, a failure of the state energy grid during cold weather contributed to hundreds of deaths.

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Success for progressives in Texas while Trump ally suffers major blow

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Attorney general Ken Paxton heads to nomination runoff against Jeb Bush’s son while progressive Jessica Cisneros celebrates runoff

Progressive Democrats notched victories in two of Texas’s congressional primary races on Tuesday while Ken Paxton, one of the most prominent Republicans in the state and Donald Trump ally, suffered a major blow.

In the most closely watched congressional primary, Jessica Cisneros, a progressive Democrat, forced a runoff against Henry Cuellar, a nine-term congressman who is one of the most conservative Democrats in the US House. (Texas races go to a runoff if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.)

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Lawsuit aims to stop Texas investigating parents seeking care for trans children

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Lawsuit filed after state’s governor and attorney general called medically necessary gender-affirming care ‘child abuse’

America’s largest civil rights non-profit has filed a lawsuit asking a Texas state court to block officials from investigating parents who seek medically necessary gender-affirming care for their children.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of Texas and Lambda Legal, named the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, as a defendant, along with the Texas department of family and protective services (DFPS) and its commissioner, Jaime Masters.

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Austin: 19 officers charged with aggravated assault over 2020 protests

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Police tactics used against protesters following murder of George Floyd widely condemned

A Texas grand jury has indicted 19 Austin police officers on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, for actions during 2020 protests over racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd.

The president of the Austin Police Association, Ken Casaday, confirmed 19 officers faced charges.

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Wanted lost species: blind salamander, tap-dancing spider and ‘fat’ catfish

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A Texas-based group has drawn up a new list of as part of its quest to find species lost to science and possibly extinct

A blind salamander, a tap-dancing spider and a “fat” catfish that has been likened to the Michelin man are among a list of vanished species that one US-based conservation group is aiming to rediscover in the wild and help protect.

The Texas-based group, called Re:wild, has drawn up a new list of the “25 most wanted lost species” as part of its quest to find species lost to science and possibly extinct.

This article was amended on 9 February 2022 to clarify that a fungus is not a type of plant.

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Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aide

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  • Trump makes promise at rally in Texas on Saturday
  • John Dean: ‘Failure to confront tyrant encourages bad behavior’

Donald Trump’s promise to pardon supporters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was “the stuff of dictators”, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel warned.

Trump made the promise at a rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.

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MI5 investigated Texas synagogue hostage-taker in 2020

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UK intelligence officers concluded Malik Faisal Akram posed no threat, which allowed him to travel to US and buy gun

The British man who took hostages at a Texas synagogue had been under investigation by MI5 as a possible Islamist terrorist threat as recently as 2020, Whitehall sources acknowledged on Tuesday morning.

British intelligence closed the investigation, however, after officers had concluded Malik Faisal Akram from Blackburn posed no threat, and as a result he was able to freely travel to the US and purchase a gun.

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Joe Biden says Texas synagogue siege was an ‘act of terror’ – video

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The US president said the 10-hour hostage standoff in a Texas synagogue, which ended with an FBI Swat team rushing into the building and the captor's death, was 'an act of terror'. Authorities identified the hostage-taker as a 44-year-old British national, Malik Faisal Akram, who was killed on Saturday night after the last hostages ran out of Congregation Beth Israel at about 9pm. Late on Sunday, police in Manchester in the UK announced that two teenagers were in custody in connection with the standoff

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‘An act of terror’: Biden condemns Texas synagogue siege while FBI names Briton as hostage-taker

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All four hostages survived unharmed while Malik Faisal Akram, 44, was killed when FBI stormed synagogue after 11-hour standoff

US president Joe Biden has condemned a tense 11-hour hostage standoff at a synagogue in Texas on Saturday as “an act of terror”, as the FBI named the armed assailant as Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British national.

Akram was pronounced dead after the FBI stormed the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in the Dallas suburb of Colleyville on Saturday evening. All four hostages survived the siege and were unharmed, according to local police.

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Texas synagogue siege: all four hostages released following 10-hour standoff

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Officials say suspect was killed hours after taking the people, including a rabbi, captive during services that were being livestreamed

All four hostages have been released and the hostage-taker reportedly killed after he took them captive at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during services that were being livestreamed.

“Prayers answered. All hostages are out alive and safe,” the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, tweeted on Saturday night, more than 10 hours after the four people were taken hostage at Congregation Beth Israel.

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Texas scientists’ new Covid-19 vaccine is cheaper, easier to make and patent-free

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Dr Maria Bottazzi says their vaccine, called Corbevax, is unique because they do not intend to patent it

A new Covid-19 vaccine is being developed by Texas scientists using a decades-old conventional method that will make the production and distribution cheaper and more accessible for countries most affected by the pandemic and where new variants are likely to originate due to low inoculation rates.

The team, led by Drs Peter Hotez and Maria Bottazzi from the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, has been developing vaccine prototypes for Sars and Mers since 2011, which they reconstructed to create the new Covid vaccine, dubbed Corbevax, or “the world’s Covid-19 vaccine”.

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Trump’s border wall and the slow decay of American soil | Carlos Sanchez

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The ‘big, beautiful wall’ has kept US citizens away from the no man’s land it created – and in effect ceded territory to Mexico

Several miles south of the small town of San Juan, Texas, beyond acres of onion fields, orange groves and other cash crops sits a historic cemetery and the site of the beginning of a slow decay of American soil.

I hadn’t been to this area for more than a year because of the pandemic, and I was startled at how different this remote part of Texas had become. The most obvious change is the steel 18ft-high bollard fencing, among the last vestiges of Donald Trump’s glorious border wall with Mexico.

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Sarah Weddington: tributes paid to lawyer who argued and won Roe v Wade

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‘Remarkable woman’ Weddington hailed for role in 1973 case that established right to abortion

Tributes were paid to Sarah Weddington after the attorney who argued and won the landmark Roe v Wade case at the supreme court, establishing the right to abortion, died aged 76.

Susan Hays, a former student of Weddington’s and a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced on Twitter that Weddington died on Sunday morning “after a series of health issues”.

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Sarah Weddington, attorney who won Roe v Wade abortion case, dies aged 76

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Texan lawyer and Linda Coffee won landmark 1973 case, safeguarding right now under threat from US supreme court

Sarah Weddington, an attorney who argued and won the Roe v Wade supreme court case which established the right to abortion in the US, has died aged 76.

Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it.

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‘A lot of abuse for little pay’: how US farming profits from exploitation and brutality

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Two dozen conspirators forced workers to pay fees for travel and housing while forcing them to work for little to no pay

In June, a farm worker from Mexico, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, was transported through a trafficking network from Monterey to work on farms in Georgia.

They paid the traffickers 20,000 pesos, about $950, loaned from their mother, taking frequent trips back and forth to Monterey, before being told it was safe to leave. Then they were finally transported across the border.

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Sotomayor decries abortion ruling but court’s conservatives show their muscle

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The highest court in the US has been defied by a group of extremist Republicans openly flouting the court’s own rulings

Sonia Sotomayor, the liberal-leaning justice on the US supreme court, put it plainly. For almost three months, lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature of Texas had “substantially suspended a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body”.

“The court should have put an end to this madness months ago,” Sotomayor said.

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The new anti-woke academics say the universities are ‘broken’. But they aren’t giving up their tenured day jobs | Julia Carrie Wong

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The anti-woke institution has no campus, no course catalog, no students, no accreditation. It does have a website

When the brand-new president of the “University of Austin” announced the establishment of a brand-new institution “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth” last week, he painted a bleak picture of American academia.

“So much is broken in America,” wrote Pano Kanelos, the former president of a small liberal arts college in Maryland in a post on the Substack of the noted New York Times self-canceller Bari Weiss. “But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.”

Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.

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Astroworld: nine-year-old boy dies, becoming 10th victim of music festival crush

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Ezra Blount had been in a coma after suffering serious injuries in the tragedy at a Travis Scott concert on 5 November

A nine-year-old Dallas boy has become the youngest person to die from injuries sustained during a crowd surge at the Astroworld music festival in Houston.

Ezra Blount of Dallas died on Sunday at Texas children’s hospital in Houston, family attorney Ben Crump said.

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Astroworld: Travis Scott and Drake sued over deadly Texas concert crush

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Lawsuits brought by some of those injured, including 23-year-old Texas resident Kristian Paredes

The rappers Travis Scott and Drake have been sued for having “incited mayhem” after eight people were killed and dozens injured in a crush during a Texas concert, a law firm has confirmed.

Thomas J Henry Law tweeted a story published by the Daily Mail on the lawsuit, confirming on Sunday that it had filed “one of the first lawsuits in Travis Scott Astroworld festival tragedy”.

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