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FORT WORTH(AP) — A Texas woman who prosecutors said helped a radio show host bilk elderly listeners out of millions of dollars was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison.

Debra Mae Carter, 65, received the sentence for her July 8 money laundering conviction, according to a statement by Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells.

Carter, who represented herself and pleaded innocent, was jailed in Tarrant County, according to jail records.

Sorrells said Carter was former Texas radio host William “Doc” Gallagher’s lover. Gallagher is serving three life terms for operating what the prosecutor called a Ponzi scheme.

“Gallagher’s main role in the scheme was to bring in money, Carter’s role was to make sure it was not recovered by the victims,” Sorrells said.

Gallagher, 83, and his Gallagher Financial Group advertised on Christian radio with the tagline, “See you in church on Sunday.” He promoted his investment business in books and on Christian radio broadcasts.

Gallagher was convicted in Tarrant County in 2021 after being convicted in 2019 in Dallas County on similar charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The scheme cost more than 170 investors, most of whom were retired, more than $31 million, Sorrells said.

AUSTIN (AP) — Describing Texas prisons as so hot that inmates cool off by splashing themselves with toilet water or faking suicide attempts to get moved to cooler medical areas, advocates on Tuesday asked a federal judge to declare the state prison system’s lack of air conditioning as unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

Tuesday began a multi-day hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully air condition a prison system that houses more than 130,000 inmates, but has full AC in only about a third of its 100 prison units. The rest have partial or no air-conditioning.

Inmate advocacy groups allege that temperatures inside can push above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 Celsius), and that the extreme heat has led to hundreds of inmate deaths in recent years. They want U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to require Texas to maintain temperatures in prison housing and occupied areas between 65 and 85 degrees F (18 and 29 degrees Celsius), the same temperature range required by law in county jails.

Texas is not alone in facing lawsuits over dangerously hot prisons. Cases also have been filed in Louisiana and New Mexico. One filed last week in Georgia alleged an inmate died in July 2023 after he was left in an outdoor cell for hours without water, shade or ice.

The Texas lawsuit was initially filed in 2023 by Bernie Tiede, the former mortician whose murder case inspired the movie “Bernie.” Tiede, who is serving a life sentence for killing Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow in 1996, has diabetes and hypertension and alleged his life was in danger because he was being housed in a stifling prison cell without air conditioning.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Marci Marie Simmons, who moved between three Texas prisons while serving 10 years for felony theft, described “oppressive, suffocating” conditions as temperatures rose from spring through summer. She was released in 2021.

“In summer, I was in complete survival mode. I felt like a caged animal,” said Simmons, who is now the community outreach coordinator for Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She said the organization represents about 700 current and former inmates.

Simmons testified she once watched a kitchen worker bring an egg back to her cell and cook it on the concrete floor. In 2020, a hallway thermometer in one unit reached 136 degrees when Simmons and two other inmates peeled off the tape that was meant to hide the reading, she said.

“I was shocked. It frightened me,” Simmons said.

Assistant State Attorney General Marlayne Ellis said the state would like to provide more air conditioning but is constrained by the Legislature’s budget.

And she insisted conditions in Texas prisons do not meet a standard for being cruel and unusual. The agency defended its alternative protocols for extreme heat, which include providing fans, towels and access to cooler “respite” areas. In 2018, Texas agreed to install air conditioning at a prison for older and medically vulnerable inmates.

But Simmons said access to respite areas was limited to short periods of time, coolers of ice water didn’t hold enough to serve an entire prison dorm, and up to 100 women would wait to use a single shower head that was changed from hot to cold water.

Desperate women would fake suicide attempts, or “commit some harm” to themselves to get placed in a cooler medical unit, Simmons said.

A November 2022 study by researchers at Brown, Boston and Harvard universities found that 13%, or 271, of the deaths in Texas prisons without universal air conditioning between 2001 and 2019 may be attributed to extreme heat. Prisoner advocates say those numbers are only likely to increase as the state faces more extreme weather and heat due to climate change.

According to a report by KUT Radio in Austin, autopsy reports on at least three inmates deaths in 2023 mentioned heat a possible contributing factor. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, however, has said there have been no heat-related deaths in the state’s prisons since 2012.

Since filing his lawsuit, Tiede has been moved to an air conditioned cell. But several prisoners’ rights group asked to join his legal fight and expand it to encompass all Texas prisoners.

Tiede attended Tuesday’s court hearing and was expected to testify.

CHICAGO (AP) — Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of notorious drug kingpin “El Chapo,” pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges Tuesday, days after an astonishing capture in the U.S.

Guzmán López, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, stood with feet shackled as federal prosecutors in Chicago detailed a five-count indictment that also includes money laundering, conspiracy and weapons charges. He declined a Spanish interpreter and answered most of U.S. District Judge Sharon Coleman’s questions designed to assess his health and determine whether he understood the proceedings with a simple, “Yes, your honor.”

Guzmán López and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel were arrested by U.S. authorities in the El Paso, Texas-area last week, according to the Justice Department. Both men, who face multiple charges in the U.S., oversaw the trafficking of “tens of thousands of pounds of drugs into the United States, along with related violence,” according to the FBI.

Zambada has eluded U.S. authorities for years. He was thought to be more involved in day-to-day operations of the cartel than his better-known and flashier boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in 2019 and is the father of Guzmán López, 38.

In recent years, Guzmán’s sons have led a faction of the cartel known as the little Chapos, or “Chapitos,” that has been identified as a main exporter of fentanyl to the U.S. market. Last year, U.S. prosecutors unsealed sprawling indictments against more than two dozen members of the Sinaloa cartel, Guzmán López and his brothers, in a fentanyl-trafficking investigation.

At Tuesday’s brief hearing, security was tight, with cellphones, laptops and other electronics barred from the courtroom. Guzmán López remained standing, leaning into the microphone to answer the judge, often with his arms folded behind him.

Guzmán López remained jailed in Chicago and was due back in court on Sept. 30.

Zambada pleaded not guilty last week to various drug trafficking charges and was being held without bond. He’s due back in court later this week.

The men’s mysterious capture fueled theories about how federal authorities pulled it off and prompted Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to take the unusual step of issuing a public appeal to drug cartels not to fight each other.

Zambada’s attorney, Frank Perez, alleged his client was kidnapped by Guzmán López and brought to the U.S. aboard a private plane that landed near El Paso. Perez pushed back against claims that his client was tricked into flying into the country.

But Guzmán López’s attorney Jeffrey Lichtman, who has represented other family members, rejected those ideas without going into specifics.

“There’s been massive amount of rumors and things printed in the press. I don’t know what’s real. I don’t know what’s not real,” he said. “But it shouldn’t really surprise anybody that there’s a story that seems to be changing every few minutes, which means that much of what’s being leaked to the press is inaccurate.”

He added that there “is no cooperation with the government and there never has been.”

The U.S. government had offered a reward of up to $15 million for leading to Zambada’s capture.

His detention follows arrests of other Sinaloa cartel figures, including one of his sons and another “El Chapo” son, Ovidio Guzmán López, who pleaded not guilty to drug-trafficking charges in Chicago last year. Zambada’s son pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court in San Diego in 2021 to being a leader in the Sinaloa cartel.

AUSTIN (AP) — Meta has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used biometric data of users without their permission, officials said Tuesday.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the settlement is the largest secured by a single state. In 2021, a judge approved a $650 million settlement with the company, formerly known as Facebook, over similar allegations of users in Illinois.

“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights,” Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement.

Meta said in a statement: “We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers.”

Filed in 2022, the Texas lawsuit said that Meta was in violation of a state law that prohibits capturing or selling a resident’s biometric information, such as their face or fingerprint, without their consent.

The company announced in 2021 that it was shutting down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

At the time, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade earlier but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.

Facebook in 2019 stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting people “tag” them, and instead of making that the default, asked users to choose if they wanted to use its facial recognition feature.

Texas filed a similar lawsuit against Google in 2022. Paxton’s lawsuit says the search giant collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through its products and services like Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max. That lawsuit is still pending.

The $1.4 billion is unlikely to make a dent in Meta’s business. The Menlo Park, California-based tech made a profit of $12.37 billion in the first three months of this year, Its revenue was $36.46 billion, an increase of 27% from a year earlier. Meta is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings results on Wednesday.

Meta’s stock slipped $4.06 to $461.65 Tuesday, a decline of less than 1%.

TEXAS – Bloomberg reports that crude oil pipelines connecting the busiest Texas oil fields to a critical export hub across the state are nearly out of space, threatening to cap US oil exports at a time when the world needs more. Key pipelines that transport barrels produced in the Permian Basin to the Port of Corpus Christi are more than 90% full, and companies that operate some of these lines say the congestion is likely to get worse. By the second half of 2025, the pipes could be 94% or 95% full, estimates researcher East Daley Analytics. Demand for the limited pipeline space comes at a time when the US is producing more crude oil than any other nation, with output set to hit a new record next year. The Permian region, one of the top producing shale basins in the world, accounts for nearly half of all US oil production. While output is set to keep growing, it will be difficult for that incremental output to reach international buyers without ample pipeline space.

If growth in the US’s crude exports stalls, it threatens to create pockets of oversupply domestically and exacerbate supply tightness in other regions of the world, which have come to rely on US barrels more than ever after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and OPEC+ supply curbs. Demand from China and the price of Brent crude will all play a role as well in the medium-term supply-demand balance, said Kristy Oleszek, East Daley’s director of energy analytics. To be sure, some of the oil may be rerouted to the Houston area instead, alleviating some congestion. OneOK’s Longhorn and BridgeTex pipelines in particular could offer alternative options to get barrels down to the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, a plan to expand Enbridge Inc.’s Gray Oak pipeline system will likely reduce some bottlenecks to Corpus Christi. Still, East Daley estimates even the company’s goal of increasing capacity on the line by 120,000 barrels per day won’t bring overall regional utilization below 90%. When asked about the expansion, Enbridge pointed to its upcoming earnings call on Friday that might provide more information.

AUSTIN -The Houston Chronicle reports that a state lawmaker said Monday he was considering pushing legislation to recoup some of the $800 million CenterPoint Energy spent on massive generators that sat idle as Hurricane Beryl knocked power from more than 2 million Houston area customers. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt said the company had “defrauded” rate payers, who were now strapped with growing utility bills after state regulators allowed CenterPoint to recoup the cost of the generators — plus a 6.5% profit. The utility company has already raised the average residential customer’s bill by about $1 per month — and the rate hikes could jump another $3 per month in the coming years. “It’s a big problem, because we’ve got basically these boat anchors strapped around our rate payers for a long period of time,” the Houston Republican said during a contentious hearing where CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells testified that he took “personal responsibility” for the utility’s failings, but said he would not resign.

Bettencourt said he was considering legislation that would “claw back some of this expense,” though he did not say more about what that might entail. Bettencourt accused CenterPoint of choosing to spend money on the generators rather than clearing trees that knocked out power lines, because CenterPoint can make a profit on the generators. CenterPoint has repeatedly blamed toppled trees and broken branches for leaving over 80% of its area customers without power, some for more than a week. “Vegetation management — the utility doesn’t make profit on,” Bettencourt said. “However, they make a profit on generator expenses. If you don’t make a profit on vegetation management, you may reduce those numbers.” The comments came during the first hearing of a special committee tasked with examining the state’s hurricane preparedness and utilities’ response after Beryl. The senators used much of the hearing to air their grievances with CenterPoint, which state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst said had broken the “social contract” with its customers. Senators questioned why the utility could not keep its outage map working, why it was not doing a better job removing trees and why it had sunk so much into generators that were not usable. Bettencourt and state Sen. Charles Schwertner, who chairs the panel, questioned the contract CenterPoint struck for the generators, going so far as to suggest it amounted to “fraud.” Bettencourt said the utility passed over a competing bid with a price tag that was at least 44% lower. “It doesn’t smell good at all,” Schwertner said, noting the company appears to be raking in a roughly $30 million profit on the massive generator purchase. “There’s more to this story that I hope comes out sooner rather than later.”

AUSTIN (AP) — No longer on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden on Monday delivered a speech at the LBJ Presidential Library designed to help cement his legacy.

Slightly more than a week after dropping out of this year’s election, Biden marked the 60th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act by speaking out for the rule of law and democratic principles. All the while, he warned about the threat he sees if Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House.

“No one is above the law,” Biden said.

Biden followed his denunciations of Trump with a mix of nostalgia for his early days in politics during the era of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

It’s a story he’s told before, about how he became a public defender and was cornered by Delaware leaders to run for the U.S. Senate. But it’s taken on a new resonance as he stares down the final six months of his political career.

“Because I got engaged like a Iot of you do … you get engaged and you want to change things,” he said.

The setting carried a special resonance. Biden spoke at the library dedicated to Johnson, the last president who, like him, opted against seeking reelection.

Biden also used his speech to call for changes to the Supreme Court that include term limits and an enforceable ethics code for justices, as well as a constitutional amendment that would limit presidential immunity. But his proposal is unlikely to clear a Republican House, leaving Biden to take a symbolic stand to the causes to which he had devoted his time in public office.

The Texas visit has taken on very different symbolism in the two weeks it took to reschedule it after Biden had to cancel because he got COVID-19.

The speech, originally set for July 15, was once seen by the White House as an opportunity for Biden to try to make a case for salvaging his sinking presidential campaign — delivered in the home district of Rep. Lloyd Doggett, the 15-term congressman who was the first Democratic lawmaker to publicly call for Biden to step aside.

Two weeks later, the political landscape has been reshaped. Biden is out of the race. Vice President Kamala Harris is the likely Democratic nominee. And the president is focused not on his next four years, but on the legacy of his single term and the future of democracy.

Doggett was among the group of lawmakers, civil rights advocates and others who greeted Biden after the president landed Monday in Austin. Biden and the Texas congressman shook hands and spoke briefly.

Biden called Harris in his speech an “incredible partner” who will “continue to be an inspiring leader.”

No American incumbent president has dropped out of the race as late in the process as did Biden. Johnson announced he would not seek reelection in March of 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War.

Biden has drawn a lot of comparisons to Johnson of late. Both men spoke to the nation from the Oval Office to lay out their decisions. Both faced pressure from within their own party to step aside, and both were ultimately praised for doing so.

But their reasons were very different. Johnson stepped away in the heat of the war and spoke at length about his need to focus on the conflict. Biden, 81, had every intention of running for reelection until his shaky June 27 debate performance ignited fears within his own party about his age and mental acuity, and whether he could beat Trump.

Biden has called Trump a serious threat to democracy, particularly after the ex-president’s efforts in 2020 to overturn the results of the election he lost and his continued lies about that loss. The president framed his decision to bow out of the race as motivated by the need to unite his party to protect democracy.

“I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. That’s the best way to unite our nation,” Biden said in his Oval Office address. “Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. And that includes personal ambition.”

During his presidency, Biden has often put equity and civil rights at the forefront, including with his choice for vice president. Harris is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to have the job. She could also become the first woman elected to the presidency.

Biden’s administration has worked to combat racial discrimination in the real estate market, he pardoned thousands of people convicted on federal marijuana charges that have disproportionately affected people of color and provided federal funding to reconnect city neighborhoods that were racially segregated or divided by road projects, and also invested billions in historically Black colleges and universities.

His efforts, he has said, are meant to push the country forward — and to guard against efforts to undermine the landmark legislation signed by Johnson in 1964, one of the most significant civil rights achievements in U.S. history.

The law made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It was designed to end discrimination in school, work and public facilities, and barred unequal application of voter registration requirements.

Johnson signed the act five hours after Congress approved it, saying the nation was in a “time of testing” that “we must not fail.” He added: “Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.”

Biden has said he is “determined to get as much done” as he can in his final six months in office, including signing major legislation expanding voting rights and a federal police bill named for George Floyd.

“I’ll keep defending our personal freedoms and our civil rights, from the right to vote to the right to choose,” Biden said from the Oval Office. “I’ll keep calling out hate and extremism, make it clear there is no place, no place in America for political violence or any violence ever, period.”

Later Monday, Biden traveled to Houston to pay his respects to the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died July 19 at age 74.

HOUSTON (AP) — Residents who stood in line on Monday to pay their respects to longtime U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas as her body lay in state in Houston’s City Hall remembered her as an advocate for human rights and her community.

“I don’t know of another politician that worked as hard as Sheila Jackson Lee did for our community, and I will be forever grateful to her for everything she did for our community,” said Phyllis Moss, 62, a Houston resident who was among the more than 100 people who stood in line Monday morning to enter City Hall as the building was opened to the public.

Following a trip to Austin earlier in the day, President Joe Biden stopped in Houston on Monday evening and paid his respects to Jackson Lee.

Biden placed a bouquet of flowers beside Jackson Lee’s flag-draped casket, briefly prayed over it and then put his hand on the casket before spending some time visiting with her husband and two children.

“No matter the issue — from delivering racial justice to building an economy for working people — she was unrelenting in her leadership,” Biden said in a statement after Jackson Lee’s death.

The congresswoman, who helped lead federal efforts to protect women from domestic violence and recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday, was 74 when she died on July 19 after being treated for pancreatic cancer.

Her body will lie in state in Houston’s City Hall rotunda for 10 hours.

Residents, constituents, officials and others stood in line outside in hot and humid conditions before entering City Hall and walking by her flag-draped casket. A large photo of Jackson Lee, as well as two large flower arrangements, stood next to her casket.

Some who walked by Jackson Lee’s casket stopped to pray while others took photos.

Eskender Tamrat walked by and waved an Ethiopian flag. Tamrat, who immigrated to Houston from Ethiopia, called Jackson Lee “a longtime friend of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian community.”

“She’s a great community supporter. She’s a great human rights advocate. But she’s also a global leader because she doesn’t just focus on the community in Houston or her area, but she focused on the betterment of every individual, every community,” said Tamrat, 70.

By Monday afternoon, nearly 900 people had passed through the rotunda, according to a city spokesperson.

The Democrat had represented her Houston-based district and the nation’s fourth-largest city since 1995. She previously had breast cancer and announced the pancreatic cancer diagnosis on June 2.

During a brief ceremony with local religious leaders before the rotunda was opened to the public, Mayor John Whitmire said he saw firsthand Jackson Lee’s passion and dedication for all Houston residents.

“She didn’t let a redistricting line or a boundary line interfere with her voice. We gather here this morning, sad but a celebration,” said Whitmire, who had reached out to Jackson Lee’s family about having her lie in state at City Hall.

Before being elected to Congress, Jackson Lee served on Houston’s city council from 1990 to 1994.

She was only the second person to be granted the honor of lying in state in Houston’s City Hall rotunda. The other was renowned cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey, who died in 2008.

Monday was the first of several days of events honoring Jackson Lee’s life. She also is set to be remembered at viewings and services on Tuesday and Wednesday before her funeral Thursday.

Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to attend the funeral service in Houston.

After first being elected, Jackson Lee quickly established herself as a fierce advocate for women and minorities and a leader for House Democrats on many social justice issues, from policing reform to reparations for descendants of enslaved people. She led the first rewrite of the Violence Against Women Act in nearly a decade, which included protections for Native American, transgender and immigrant women.

Jackson Lee routinely won reelection to Congress with ease. She unsuccessfully ran to be Houston’s mayor last year.

Bobbie D. Nickerson, 71, a suburban Houston resident, said Monday’s crowd at City Hall for Jackson Lee shows “how much she was loved and cared for and respected.”

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