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NACOGDOCHES (KETK) – The Texas Game Wardens announced the promotion of a new Nacogdoches District Captain on Friday.

Shawna Poole, an East Texas native, is returning to her roots and moving back to the Piney Woods to serve Nacogdoches as the district’s new Game Warden Captain.

Captain Poole said her interest in a law enforcement career began at a young age with her involvement in the Nacogdoches Police Explorers.

After attending college at Stephen F. Austin State University and some time as an educator, she found her passion and graduated from the 59th Texas Game Warden Academy in 2015.

After graduation, Poole was stationed in Webb County and after spending a year down south took the opportunity to get closer to home and transferred to Freestone County, where she was serving before this promotion.

Poole was recognized in 2022 as the Hunter Education Game Warden of the Year and in 2016 she received the Director’s Citation Award.

Captain Poole’s service to the Nacogdoches District will begin August 1.

AUSTIN (KETK) — The popular social messaging app Discord has been handed a 90-day deadline to assure the protection of Texas children after Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a court order on Thursday demanding the app add safety parameters for children.

The court hearings come after the Texas attorney general’s office started an investigation into the app in Oct. 2025 due to reports that the platform is “addictive” and has allegedly exposed minors to sexual exploitation and extremist content. Paxton sued the online platform in May 2026, claiming that the tech company was deceiving users about the platform’s safety.

Nearly 500,000 reports of suspected child exploitation on Discord were submitted to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025 alone, according to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

Currently in the United States, users under 13 are prohibited from using Discord according to the company’s own policies, but Paxton claims that they have no way of actually knowing how many of the 200 million monthly active users are teenagers, or how many adults are posing as teenagers. More than 90% of users are never asked to confirm their age, the attorney general’s office said.

“Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” Attorney General Paxton said. “It wasn’t. Discord built safety measures to protect these kids. It extended these measures to children in Britain and denied them to children in Texas. That ends now. My office forced Discord to turn those protections on for every Texas child, and I will never stop fighting to keep predators away from our kids.”

According to Paxton’s office, Discord announced in February 2026 that it would roll our protections for children worldwide after facing a legal deadline in the United Kingdom. Discord, however, delayed the rollout until the second half of 2026.

After a two-day evidentiary hearing that included the testimony from four Texas parents whose children experienced abuse or exploitation, the court ordered a temporary injunction which orders Discord to extend its existing safety features in the United Kingdom to Texas within the next 90 days.

Under the order, Discord must implement the following:

“Discord must route messages from strangers into a separate request inbox.”
“Block sensitive content for Texas teens and lock that setting unless it confirms the user is an adult.”
“Close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured.”

Additionally, Discord must report its progress on the protections to the Office of the Attorney General every 30 days. The judge’s order will stand until a final judgment is reached in the trial.

AUSTIN (AP) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday that a third person has been confirmed killed by catastrophic floods this month that prompted more than 500 rescues, damaged homes and businesses, and are still making some areas inaccessible.

Abbott said a person attempting to drive through floodwaters was swept away Monday.

The governor went to the city of Cotulla, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of San Antonio, for a flyover to assess the damage of floodwaters he said have left some areas of the city still unreachable. The Nueces River reached major flood stage at 29 feet (8.8 meters), but has crested and is expected to continue to decline.

Other areas downstream will continue to see waters rise into early August, notably at the Lake Corpus Christi reservoir, Abbott said.

“Anyone living, working, commuting or just walking around areas downstream of the Nueces … needs to be aware of possible dangers,” Abbott said.

The Central Texas area was pounded by rain for several days last week. Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall Thursday, but Abbott said state officials had not received any new reports of flooded homes or businesses from that storm.

The governor has already issued a disaster declaration for 59 counties and requested federal disaster help for 33 counties.

TRINITY COUNTY (KETK) — A 33-year-old man was sentenced to 10 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Friday after being convicted on three felony charges related to child sex crimes. The Trinity County Sheriff’s Office said Timothy Michael Zawodny entered a no contest plea. He was convicted of sexual performance of a child and possession of child pornography.

A district judge ordered that Zawodny serve his 10-year sentence concurrently and register as a sex offender under Texas Law. Zawodny was arrested in February 2022 after investigators with the Texas Attorney General’s Office and Trinity County Sheriff’s Office executed a search warrant.

Sheriff Woody Wallace stated that protecting children remains one of the Sheriff’s Office’s highest priorities and thanked the investigators, prosecutors, and the Texas Attorney General’s Office for their work in bringing this case to a conclusion.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A U.S. attorney announced a federal indictment on Friday against 11 people in the smuggling deaths of seven migrants who were hiding inside a sweltering rail cargo container in Texas in May.

Six people were found dead inside the shipping container in a rail yard in Laredo, Texas, and another had been left for dead alongside the tracks along the way, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, Justin R. Simmons.

“It’s very hard to survive in an un-air conditioned, sealed container with … the temperature being what it was on that day,” Simmons said.

The group boarded the train in the Texas border town of Del Rio and headed to San Antonio, which officials believe was their intended final destination. But when smugglers opened the door, a man fell out, so the smugglers closed the door and fled. It’s unclear if he was already dead by then, Simmons said.

The remaining six people were left inside the shipping container, and the next day the train departed for Laredo, where a worker at the Union Pacific Rail Yard saw a leg sticking out and found the six bodies inside.

“One of those individuals frantically contacted their family as they were dying from the sweltering heat in that container,” Simmons said.

The migrants were from Honduras and Mexico and included a 14-year-old boy, authorities said. Six of the bodies were discovered by a Union Pacific employee. The Webb County medical examiner suspected the deaths were caused by hyperthermia, or heat stroke.

The shipping container was stacked on top of another container, could not be opened from the inside and had no ventilation or cooling system. The temperatures that day ranged from 88 to 92 degrees Fahrenheit (31 to 33 degrees Celsius), the U.S. Attorney’s office said.

The group was indicted on two charges: Conspiracy to transport aliens, resulting in death, and aiding and abetting the transportation of aliens resulting in death. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, Simmons said.

The migrants paid “generally the equivalent of $1,500 -$10,000 to individuals in Honduras, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere, to be transported into the interior of the United States,” according to the indictment.

One of the defendants was arrested May 12 in Del Rio, and eight more were arrested over several days last week in central and south Texas. Two of the 11 remain at large, including a man and a woman. Officials said four are U.S. citizens and two are permanent U.S. residents. They didn’t specify any other nationalities.

Smuggling on trains has long been a concern partly because trains headed to the United States often slow or stop in Mexico before crossing the border. That creates an opportunity for smugglers or immigrants to climb aboard or hide drugs or other contraband on a train before it enters the U.S.

ATLANTA, Ga. (AP) – The number of measles cases in the U.S. has surpassed the record-breaking tally for all of 2025, with five more months of 2026 still to come.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged 2,318 cases of measles as of Thursday, according to an agency update on Friday.

The nation had 2,289 cases in 2025, the worst year for measles in more than three decades. Now, 2026 has easily become the U.S.’s worst year for measles since 1991, as major outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah and Arizona have sickened hundreds and smaller clusters of cases sparked in other states.

In November, international health officials will meet to determine if the U.S. and Mexico have lost their measles-free status. The U.S. eliminated local measles spread in 2000 by maintaining high vaccination rates, which have fallen in recent years to below the 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks.
Measles cases are undercounted

While measles cases in the U.S. are climbing, it may be impossible to say exactly how far-reaching the spread is. Public health departments and disease researchers have long acknowledged that official counts are incomplete, because some people get sick and don’t seek out treatment — something not unique to measles.

Furthermore, experts say the spread might be greater than what’s known because the virus is one of the most contagious known to medicine and vaccination rates nationwide have declined. National vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella — which dropped to 92.5% among kindergartners in the 2024-25 school year, from 95.2% in 2019-20 — obscure even lower rates in certain communities.

In Utah, where public health officials have fought measles for more than a year, the virus has sickened more than 700 people during that time, according to the state health department. Experts relying on mathematical modeling and genetic analyses indicate that a large outbreak on the Utah-Arizona border could be around three to four times bigger than what’s currently known, state epidemiologist Dr. Leisha Nolen said.

The picture is muddier in South Carolina, which had the nation’s largest outbreak in 35 years. There, the 997 total is likely an undercount, the state health department has said, but it doesn’t know by how much.

Dr. Brannon Traxler, acting director of the state department of health, said the undercount is “impossible to know and may vary during the course of an outbreak.”

Data gaps can make it hard to reliably estimate an outbreak’s true scope. Experts say hospitalization rates can be a good barometer, but measles hospitalizations are not required to be reported in every state.

“If we really had some kind of solid gold standard for the percentage of all cases that have hospitalization or some measure of severity, then that would be another way of estimating the outbreak size that we could see if it’s consistent with these other methods,” said Damon Toth, an applied mathematician at the University of Utah’s medical school who is working on one of the Utah outbreak analyses.
Researchers are still analyzing the 2025 Texas outbreak

In Texas, researchers are still working to estimate the size of the state’s 2025 outbreak and early findings show it might have been nearly twice the size of the 762 known cases.

Rémy Pasco, a mathematical epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who is working on the analysis, said the undercounts were unsurprising. In the absence of an adequate community vaccination rate — 95% according to health experts — “there’s just not much you can do about measles once you have it,” he said.

The CDC defines an outbreak as three or more linked cases. But by the time three such cases are identified in communities with low vaccination rates and less disease surveillance, “either you missed the previous ones or you’re going to have a lot more,” he added.

Dr. Varun Shetty, Texas’ chief state epidemiologist, said there were instances where people tested positive for measles but health officials couldn’t confirm who else was in the person’s household or if they were sick.

“What we’re able to count and report is almost always an underestimate of what actually occurred, because it relies on people being willing to be able to get tested, to share information with healthcare providers and with public health,” Shetty said. “Sometimes that just doesn’t happen.”

The state health department previously reported that 182 probable measles cases went unconfirmed in March 2025 among minors in Gaines County — the epicenter of the outbreak — due to a lack of information. The confirmed case count for the western Texas county for the whole outbreak is 414.

Shetty expects to keep seeing measles cases and even outbreaks because so many people are unprotected.

“It’s really critical, not only for individual people, but for communities, to have high vaccination coverage,” he said.
Vaccination is about protecting others, physician says

Dr. Mark Roberts, retired director of the Public Health Dynamics Lab at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, worries most for the people he calls “innocent bystanders.”

Research and measles modeling by his team shows those who cannot get vaccinated — young babies, people with weak immune systems and those who rarely don’t get robust immunity from the vaccine — bear the brunt of outbreaks early on.

Some people see skipping vaccination as like deciding not to wear a seat belt in a car, Roberts said.

“Not vaccinating your kid is like saying, ‘I don’t want my car to have brakes,’” he said. “Because it’s other people that you can hit. It’s not just you in your car. It’s other people.”

HOUSTON (AP) – A Texas appeals court on Thursday dismissed an injunction that forced a Houston-area midwife to close her clinics, ruling that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ’s office relied solely on an anonymous email as evidence that she violated the state’s 2022 abortion ban.

Paxton’s office secured the injunction last year against clinics operated by Maria Margarita Rosas. She still faces criminal charge that she provided unlawful abortions and employed unlicensed individuals.

But the Texas 15th Court of Appeals, created three years ago by the Texas Legislature to handle major business and state civil cases, found that the trial court erred in granting the injunction because the judge relied only on affidavits from Paxton’s office that didn’t provide direct evidence that the violations occurred.

Justice Scott Field’s opinion said the evidence submitted to support the injunction “does not reasonably support” the claim that abortions were performed at the clinics and the lower court “abused its discretion in granting the temporary injunctive relief.”

Abortion is completely banned in Texas with very limited exceptions.

The appeals court, overseen by three Republican judges appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, did not give an opinion on whether the accusations against Rosas are valid. Instead, it focused on the injunction that forced the clinics’ closure.

A spokesperson for Paxton’s office said the attorney general will appeal the court’s decision to the Texas Supreme Court to “ensure clarity in temporary injunction procedure in this and other cases.”

In a statement, the Center for Reproductive Rights called the appeals court ruling a “significant step” toward justice for Rojas, adding that the state has unfairly targeted her.

“The state of Texas has no case,” said Jenna Hudson, the group’s senior counsel. “Maria Rojas has been an upstanding midwife who delivered babies and provided lawful care for underserved pregnant patients.”

Rojas owned and operated Clinica Waller Latinoamericana in Waller, Clinica Latinoamericana Telge in Cypress, and Latinoamericana Medical Clinic in Spring, according to the attorney general’s office.

This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.