Important Takeaways:
- Sears has closed its final store in Washington, leaving it operating in only four states across the US.
- The department store, which was once the largest in the country, closed an outlet in the Southcenter Mall in Tukwila, Washington, on December 15.
- In the weeks leading up to its closure, the store, which had been there for three decades, hosted discount sales for shoppers.
- Its closure means that Sears only has eight stores remaining across California, Florida, Massachusetts and Texas.
- The department store was founded in 1892, and as recently as 2012 boasted over 4,000 stores across the US.
- But the vast majority have now shuttered since the company filed for bankruptcy in October 2018.
- The company also closed its final location in the New York area at the beginning of this year.
- Plans for the company going forward are unclear, and it is not known whether further closures are planned in 2025.
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Important Takeaways:
- A dangerous Venezuelan gang has taken over at least four apartment complexes in San Antonio, Texas, as it expands its reach in yet another America city, DailyMail.com can reveal.
- Dubbed the ‘epitome of evil’, Tren de Aragua (TdA) is known to run drug smuggling, child prostitution and human trafficking rings in South America, with its members crossing over into the US in recent years amid a wave of Venezuelan migrants.
- The tattooed mobsters have since unleashed a wave of crime across the country from Miami and Texas to Denver and New York.
- The gang’s activities in the American cities are back in the spotlight after ABC News’ Martha Raddatz claimed the instances of gang members’ presence in apartments was limited to a ‘handful’ of complexes in Aurora, Colorado.
- Just last week a small army of police officers raided an apartment complex in San Antonio and arrested 19 individuals – including four gang members.
- Law enforcement sources confirmed TdA had been operating at the Palatia Apartments for five to six months – squatting in empty units they either rented out to other migrants, used as a base to deal cocaine or, most horrifically, as prostitution dens to pimp out women and children.
- But now DailyMail.com can reveal that this apartment invasion is just the tip of the iceberg in the major southern Texas city, with at least three other rental properties also occupied by the criminal organization.
- com is not naming the three other apartment complexes to avoid jeopardizing ongoing police investigations.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a clash between a federal emergency care law and Texas’ near-total ban on abortion, declining to provide clarity over whether physicians in states with the most restrictive laws must provide abortion care in certain emergency circumstances.
- The court’s rejection of the Biden administration’s appeal leaves in place a lower court decision that blocked the federal government from enforcing guidance it issued to hospitals notifying them that they must provide emergency abortions if the health of the mother is at risk.
- The Department of Health and Human Services told health care providers in a July 2022 letter that when a state abortion law does not include an exception for the life and health of the mother, that measure is preempted by the federal emergency care law.
- The case began after Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told hospitals more than two years ago that federal law requires them to provide pregnant patients experiencing emergency medical conditions with stabilizing treatment, including abortions, regardless of state restrictions.
- In Texas, abortion is banned except when the life of the mother is at risk.
- Texas sued the Biden administration to block its mandate requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortions, alleging that the secretary exceeded his authority when issuing the guidance.
- A federal district court sided with Texas and blocked the guidance, finding that hospitals cannot be forced to provide abortions in certain medical emergencies when it would violate the state’s ban.
- They urged the Supreme Court to leave the lower court’s decision in place, writing in a filing that in Texas, a health care provider can comply with both EMTALA and state law by offering stabilizing treatment without violating its ban. In limited circumstances, they said, that can include providing an abortion when it is necessary to prevent the “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
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Important Takeaways:
Important Takeaways:
- Texas has removed 1.1 million people from voter rolls since 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office announced Monday, highlighting efforts to clean up election data and ensure legal registration.
- That includes 6,500 potential noncitizens and 457,000 deceased people, according to data the governor’s office provided.
- The review comes after Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 in 2021, which increased the penalty for lying while registering to vote to a state jail felony and requires the Secretary of State to audit random county election offices every two years.
- “What we want is our voters to say, ‘these are fair, these are transparent, my vote counts.’ As a state, we need to be the gold standard for the country, and the country, the gold standard for the world,” State Rep. Mano DeAyala, R-Houston, said.
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Important Takeaways:
- A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak.
- Authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, went further, stating bluntly why the US is failing to fully surveil, let alone contain, a virus with pandemic potential.
- “Due to fears that research might damage dairy businesses, studies like this one have been few,” the authors write in the topline summary of their study, which was posted online as a pre-print and had not been peer-reviewed.
- The finding suggests human cases of H5N1 are going undetected. Moreover, managing to find evidence of two undetected infections in a sample of just 14 workers suggests it may not be hard to find more.
- To date, the virus has infected at least 175 dairy farms in 13 states. The official tally of human cases in the dairy outbreak is 14: four in dairy farm workers and 10 in workers on poultry farms with infections linked to the dairy outbreak.
- Experts are anxious that with each new infection, the wily H5N1 virus is getting new opportunities to adapt further to humans. If the virus evolves to cause more severe disease and spread from human to human, it could spark another pandemic.
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Important Takeaways:
- The earthquake, which happened about 10 miles northeast of Hermleigh in West Texas, initially registered as a 4.8-magnitude before being upgraded to 5.1.
- Twelve minutes after the first earthquake, a second earthquake registered as a 3.8-magnitude, according to the USGS data.
- A third earthquake happened about an hour later and registered as a 2.7-magnitude.
- The 5.1-magnitude earthquake was similar in size to the 4.9 that was felt across West Texas and into parts of North Texas on Monday night. Both earthquakes were on the higher end of what Texas experiences with earthquakes, though some in recent years have exceeded a 5.0-magnitude.
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Important Takeaways:
- For more than a week, some residents of the nation’s fourth largest city were left to sleep in their cars, shuffle perilously with canes and walkers across dark rooms and corridors, and watch food and medications spoil and critical medical equipment become inoperable. At times, they cried in desperation after discovering the bodies of neighbors who succumbed to the heat following a comparatively mild Category 1 hurricane.
- At least 14 Houston-area deaths were confirmed to be hurricane-related, including seven people – ranging in age from 50 to 110 – who died from “heat exposure due to power loss,” according to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
- CenterPoint Energy told CNN in a statement it was “committed to doing a thorough review of our Hurricane Beryl response.”
- “We are engaging with community leaders, elected officials, local clergy leadership and others across the area to learn about how we can be more responsive to their needs and concerns,” the statement said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Repairing electricity infrastructure after storms usually costs customers. So could strengthening it before the next weather event.
- Many times, thousands of Texans sit in the dark for days — in either the blistering heat or frigid cold — waiting for utility crews to survey and fix the damage so electricity can start flowing again.
- Such power outages are likely to continue.
- Texas had 210 weather-related power outages — more than any other state — from 2000 to 2023, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central that used power outage data from the U.S. Department of Energy.
- Texas is the only state to have its own power grid.
- Last year, the Legislature made it possible for utility companies to create plans to strengthen their systems. In many cases, those costs would be charged to power providers that sell power, which would then likely pass the costs to customers.
- The costs to make the system more resilient will likely be passed on to Texans. But, so, too might the costs to repair damage to utility companies’ infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of an extreme weather event.
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Important Takeaways:
- With around 270,000 homes and businesses still without power in the Houston area almost a week after Hurricane Beryl hit Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday said he’s demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the area as well as answers about its preparations for upcoming storms.
- “Power companies along the Gulf Coast must be prepared to deal with hurricanes, to state the obvious,” Abbott said
- While CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 2 million customers, the slow pace of recovery has put the utility, which provides electricity to the nation’s fourth-largest city, under mounting scrutiny over whether it was sufficiently prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the searing summer heat.
- Abbott said he was sending a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas requiring it to investigate why restoration has taken so long and what must be done to fix it.
- With months of hurricane season left, Abbott said he’s giving CenterPoint until the end of the month to specify what it’ll be doing to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm.
- A post Sunday on CenterPoint’s website from its president and CEO, Jason Wells, said that over 2,100 utility poles were damaged during the storm and over 18,600 trees had to be removed from power lines, which impacted over 75% of the utility’s distribution circuits.
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Important Takeaways:
- After Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas early Monday, knocking out power to nearly 3 million homes and businesses, unleashing heavy rain and killing at least three people it moved east and later weakened to a tropical depression, the National Hurricane Center said Monday evening. The fast-moving tempest threatened to carve a harsh path over several more states in coming days.
- Texas state and local officials warned it could take several days to restore power after Beryl came ashore as a Category 1 hurricane and toppled 10 transmission lines and knocked down trees that took down power lines.
- At least two people were killed when trees fell on homes, and the National Hurricane Center said damaging winds and flash flooding would continue as Beryl pushes inland. A third person, a civilian employee of the Houston Police Department, was killed when he was trapped in flood waters under a highway overpass, Houston Mayor John Whitmire said. There were no immediate reports of widespread structural damage, however.
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