njm1314

"Republicans hold a tiny majority in the House, creating an incentive for Abbott to hold off on calling an election for Turner’s seat, which would likely be filled by a Democrat."

"Three weeks after U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner’s death and just over a month before the state’s next uniform election, Gov. Greg Abbott has not yet called a special election to fill the seat representing parts of Houston, a Democratic stronghold, in Congress.

Turner, who previously served in the Texas House for nearly three decades before becoming mayor of Houston, died March 5, two months into his first term representing Texas’ 18th Congressional District. His funeral was held in Houston on March 15.

Turner was elected to Congress last year after his predecessor and political ally, former U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, died in office after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Abbott has the sole authority to call a special election to fill Turner's seat for the rest of the two-year term. State law does not specify a deadline for the governor to order a special election. If called, the election must happen within two months of the announcement.

But the Republican governor has little incentive to send another Democrat to Congress."

Emboldened by court rulings and election victories, the Christian right is outspoken as it pushes its moral views through the Texas Legislature.

Testifying this month against bills that would put more Christianity in Texas public schools, the Rev. Jody Harrison invoked the violent persecution of her Baptist forefathers by fellow Christians in colonial America.

Harrison hoped the history lesson would remind Texas senators of Baptists’ strong support for church-state separations, and that weakening those protections would hurt people of all faiths.

Instead, she was rebuked.

“The Baptist doctrine is Christ-centered,” Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, responded sharply. “Its purpose is not to go around trying to defend this or that. It is to be a disciple and a witness for Christ. That includes the Ten Commandments. That’s prayer in schools. It is not a fight for separation between church and state.”

Harrison was not allowed to reply, but in an interview said she was stunned that a lawmaker would question a core part of her faith. The exchange, she said, perfectly encapsulated why she has fought to preserve church-state separations — the same religious protections that Campbell said are a distraction from bills that might bring school kids to Christ.

“It was a wake up call,” she said. “I don’t think people — even many churches — realize that this is going on right now, and that is alarming.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz easily defeated U.S. Rep. Colin Allred on Tuesday, defying another spirited and well-funded effort to turn Texas blue and preserving his status as a leading conservative voice in American politics.

"The results tonight, this decisive victory, should shake the Democrat establishment to its core," he said in a speech to supporters at his campaign watch party in downtown Houston.

The Associated Press called his victory after 10 p.m. as Cruz was leading by more than double digits.

Shortly after, Allred told his supporters at his election night party in Dallas that he had conceded to Cruz.

"Moldovans will be asked on Sunday to decide whether EU membership should be designated a strategic goal in the country’s constitution, a move that would further distance the former Soviet republic politically from Russia. The EU referendum coincides with Moldova's presidential election, where the country’s pro-Western leader Maia Sandu is seeking a second term against a field of mostly pro-Kremlin candidates. Both votes will take place against a backdrop of Russian meddling, including evidence of vote buying and disinformation, according to Moldovan authorities. The Kremlin has denied the allegations.

The European Commission accepted Moldova's candidacy to join the EU in 2022 and opened accession negotiations in June this year. The EU has pledged almost $2 billion in economic support for Moldova to help the country accomplish the necessary reforms to achieve membership, and improve infrastructure badly in need of an upgrade.

While various opinion polls over recent months show that most Moldovans support EU membership, residents in predominantly Russian-speaking regions like the north, or Gagauzia in the south, still favor stronger ties with Russia over EU membership."

"You might expect that mortgage rates would be falling right now after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a half-point last month.

Instead, mortgage rates jumped higher. The latest data from Freddie Mac showed that the average 30-year mortgage rate had increased to 6.4%, more than a quarter-point higher than it was two weeks ago.

The news is probably an unwelcome surprise to the folks who had been hoping for lower interest rates to finally come off the sidelines and start shopping for a home.

Here’s what’s going on — and what it means for those trying to buy a home now."

BEIRUT, Oct 16 (Reuters) - The batteries inside the weaponised pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles' heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness - the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product - they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation which has struck unprecedented blows against Israel's Iran-backed Lebanese foe and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.

"Former President Donald Trump once again appears to be in the driver’s seat in this presidential election.

When looking strictly at the polls, Trump now has the edge in two states and the other five most closely watched states are toss-ups. At the end of August, Vice President Harris had leads large enough in three of the seven states for them to lean in her direction, according to an NPR analysis of polling averages at the time.

Now, Trump has taken over the lead in an average of the polls in the seven swing states for the first time since Harris got in the race."

"As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso.

No one is waiting there now.

Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days.

In McAllen, at the other end of the Texas border, two Border Patrol agents scan fields for five hours without encountering a single migrant.

It’s a return to relative calm after an unprecedented surge of immigrants through the southern border in recent years. But no one would know that listening to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump talking about border enforcement at dueling presidential campaign events. And no one would know from the rate at which Texas is spending on a border crackdown called Operation Lone Star — $11 billion since 2021."

Seriously. I'm watching these new kickoffs and it's just silly. Like I'm not against the concept but it's so clearly almost a punt. It's it's just a hair away from it. Just make it a punt it'd be so much simpler.

Allred’s sharp divergence from Beto O’Rourke’s more active campaign style has stirred dissent among some Democrats. His allies say it’s working.

Six years after Beto O'Rourke’s electrifying Senate campaign set the standard for Texas Democrats seeking statewide office, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred is taking a completely different approach in his own bid to oust U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

Allred, a third-term Dallas congressman, has been far less visible on the campaign trail, opting for events with smaller and more curated audiences in the major cities and select suburbs, rather than the casual town hall-style rallies O'Rourke held in every corner of the state. And instead of O’Rourke’s unapologetic liberal stands which activated legions of young voters, Allred has adopted a more calibrated message aimed at winning over moderates. He’s running ads that portray him as "tough" on the border and willing to work across the aisle, while keeping his distance from his party's standard-bearers, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Allred's sharp divergence from O'Rourke's more active and freewheeling style has stirred dissent and even signs of panic among a segment of Texas Democratic activists who say Allred should be holding more rallies, small-dollar fundraisers and other publicly accessible events. The more buttoned-up approach, they argue, is unlikely to inspire the sort of grassroots energy that helped O'Rourke build a juggernaut volunteer turnout operation and come within three points of ending Texas Democrats’ statewide drought

"English-learning students’ scores on a state test designed to measure their mastery of the language fell sharply and have stayed low since 2018 — a drop that bilingual educators say might have less to do with students’ skills and more with sweeping design changes and the automated computer scoring system that were introduced that year.

English learners who used to speak to a teacher at their school as part of the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System now sit in front of a computer and respond to prompts through a microphone. The Texas Education Agency uses software programmed to recognize and evaluate students’ speech.

Students’ scores dropped after the new test was introduced, a Texas Tribune analysis shows. In the previous four years, about half of all students in grades 4-12 who took the test got the highest score on the test’s speaking portion, which was required to be considered fully fluent in English. Since 2018, only about 10% of test takers have gotten the top score in speaking each year."

"It was early 2022, and Kiany Casillas was in a panic. It had been two years since she and her newborn daughter had followed her husband from California to the Texas Panhandle, and during that time, she had enrolled at Texas Tech University Health Science Center to pursue a career as a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner.

Casillas is considered the perfect student for Texas Tech’s online program because she lives in the rural city of Dalhart, an hour and a half northwest of Amarillo, and is willing to work there when she graduates. However, a year had passed, and Casillas and the school had yet to find a supervisor for her necessary clinical hours, and the deadline was fast approaching.

“I was anxious, nervous, and baffled. How can I help people if nobody is willing to help me? You know, I was just kind of sad,” Casillas said.

Supervised clinical hours are considered an essential part of the mental health field. They allow students to learn on the job while the supervisor, known as a preceptor in the medical field, assumes the risk of liability. However, only a limited number of mental health providers seem willing to take on this responsibility."