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SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Express-News reports a 26-year-old San Antonio man has been arrested and charged with participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Steven Hassel, 26, allegedly helped rip apart a barricade on the Capitol grounds, allowing a crowd of rioters to overwhelm police and surge toward and ultimately into the building. The breach by supporters of former President Donald Trump disrupted a joint session of Congress convened to count the electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election and affirm Joe Biden’s victory. FBI agents arrested Hassel in San Antonio on Tuesday. He was released on his own recognizance and ordered to appear in federal court in Washington, D.C., where the charges were filed.

Hassel is charged with obstruction of law enforcement during a civil disorder, which is a felony, and four misdemeanor offenses: entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building. Hassel was among a crowd of rioters on the East Plaza of the Capitol, near a row of bike racks that police were using as crowd control barriers, according to court documents. He allegedly grabbed one of the barriers, leaned back and pulled on it several times as police officers tried unsuccessfully to keep the barricade intact. After the barrier was breached, police formed a new line on the east steps of the Capitol. Hassel allegedly approached the new police line and waved other rioters behind him to advance on the Capitol. The crowd again overcame police and surged toward the doors of the Rotunda. Hassel stood with the crowd as it chanted and tried to enter the building, court documents say.

WSHINGTON – The Texas Tribune reports that a group of Democratic state lawmakers on Friday asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate potential violations of federal law and civil and voting rights related to Texas state leaders’ recent voter roll purge, raids of Latinos’ homes in connection to alleged election fraud, probing of voter registration organizations and ongoing scrutiny of groups that work with migrants.

“Collectively, these actions have a disproportionate impact on Latinos and other communities of color, which is sowing fear and will suppress voting,” twelve Texas senators wrote in the letter. “We urge the DOJ to investigate Texas … and to take all necessary action to protect the fundamental rights of all Texans and ensure all citizens’ freedom to vote is unencumbered.”

The request for federal authorities to intervene is the latest escalation in response to what Texas leaders have often described as efforts to secure elections.

The efforts, however, have just as often provoked condemnation and worries from civil rights groups and Democrats that the state is violating Texans’ rights and trying to scare people away from the polls.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, a large Latino civil rights organization founded in 1929, made a similar plea to the feds earlier this week. Several of the group’s elderly members were the targets last week of search warrants related to an investigation into alleged election fraud being conducted by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.

Paxton’s office has said little about that probe other than it pertains to allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting. Affidavits for warrants obtained by The Texas Tribune show that investigators were looking into allegations that a Frio County political operator had illegally harvested votes for multiple local races.

LULAC leaders have blasted the investigation as an effort to intimidate voters.

In the letter requesting a civil rights review, they wrote about Lydia Martinez, an 80-year-old grandmother with 35 years as a LULAC member who was woken up at 6 a.m. by armed authorities who interrogated her for hours and confiscated her devices, personal calendar and voter registration materials.

“These actions echo a troubling history of voter suppression and intimidation that has long targeted both Black and Latino communities, particularly in states like Texas, where demographic changes have increasingly shifted the political landscape,” the letter states. “The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy, and LULAC stands firm in its commitment to defending that right for all Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity.”

The Justice Department had received LULAC’s letter, a spokesperson confirmed Friday but declined to comment further.

In their letter Friday, the Texas Senate Democratic caucus pointed to the raids targeting LULAC members and a series of other actions that, they wrote, raised “serious concerns” that Paxton and other state leaders might be violating federal civil rights and voting laws.

The group highlighted the opening of an investigation last week by Paxton’s office into voter registration organizations following a debunked claim by a Fox News host that migrants were registering to vote outside a state drivers license office near Fort Worth.

The claim was disputed by the Department of Public Safety, a local Republican county chair and the local elections administrator — all who said no evidence supported it — but Paxton opened an investigation anyway, the lawmakers wrote.

They also said that DPS, which manages the state’s drivers license offices, has since prohibited groups from registering people to vote outside their offices — ending a decades-old practice the agency had allowed “without issue.”

“Voter registration organizations seek to improve civic engagement in a state that has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country,” the letter states. “Many of them now are concerned they will be the next to be harassed and targeted.”

The Democratic lawmakers also expressed concern that the removal of more than a million people from the state’s voter rolls might have included legitimate voters and that Texas might be violating a federal law that prohibits states from conducting such routine voter roll maintenance during a 90-day period ahead of an election — echoing a coalition of watchdog and voting rights groups that this week shared the worry.

The Senators lastly pointed to ongoing state efforts targeting nonprofits and nongovernmental entities that work with migrants and immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond.

Those examinations began after Gov. Greg Abbott in 2022 directed Paxton’s office to investigate the role of such groups “in planning and facilitating the illegal transportation of illegal immigrants across our borders.”

The reviews are one piece of Texas’ response to record migration that Abbott and other state leaders say is the fault of the “open border policies” of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president.

Through a border security initiative called Operation Lone Star, the state has deployed thousands of Texas National Guard troops and DPS troopers to patrol the border and arrest migrants on state charges. Meanwhile in courts, Paxton’s office has repeatedly challenged the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

“Although the burden to address the ongoing border crisis should not fall to Texas, the federal government has failed to take action to address this problem,” Abbott wrote to Paxton in the letter, adding he “appreciate[d]” the suits. “But as the facts on the ground continue to change,” Abbott added, “we must remain vigilant in our response to this crisis.”

In response, Paxton’s office has sought to depose the leaders of at least two organizations that provide humanitarian aid to migrants and tried to shut down two other groups.

Texas state judges have mostly rejected these Paxton initiatives, which have accused the groups of violating human smuggling laws and in one instance accused a group of violating rules that govern nonprofit’s political involvement.

But Paxton has continued fighting.

In perhaps the most high-profile case, Paxton’s office tried to shutter a migrant shelter network, Annunciation House, that it accused of violating laws prohibiting human smuggling and operating a stash house.

After an El Paso judge denied the effort, Paxton appealed directly to the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. On Friday, the state’s highest civil court scheduled oral arguments for the appeal in mid-January.

DALLAS – Spectrum News reports State Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, posted on X, formerly Twitter, calling the opening of schools before Labor Day “an awfully wasteful stress on our power grid.” “Cooling thousands of buildings – often the largest buildings in a community – during the hottest months of the year makes no sense,” Patterson said. Patterson, who is a director of energy services for an energy management company, proposed keeping schools completely closed through July and August to save public dollars on keeping the school facilities cool during the summer. Over the last couple of weeks, Texas has seen record heat and the hottest days of the year, with highs well into the 100s. While it is unclear whether he will propose this in the Texas House when they reconvene in January 2025, Patterson ended the tweet with the hashtag “bill ideas.”

Some Texans agreed with Patterson in the comments section, but others questioned if the measure will truly save taxpayer dollars. One person pointed out that many high school athletics and extracurricular programs practice ahead of the start of the school year at the beginning of August, so the buildings will still need to be air conditioned

SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Express-News reports that Charlotte Christman returned to her Houston home last month to a curious letter. Her voter registration, it said, was under suspension, and the 68-year-old would need to confirm that she still lived at her address. Christman mailed the card back and, for now, appears registered to vote this November. But after hearing Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement on Monday that state officials had removed over 1 million Texans from voter rolls, she is rethinking her story. Was she being flagged for political reasons? Why had her address been questioned in the first place? “It’s very fishy that this is happening right before a presidential election,” said Christman, who votes Democratic. Abbott’s announcement, coming just weeks before the deadline for registering to vote in the November election, has prompted confusion by voting rights groups and some Texans who say they were surprised to learn recently that they had been flagged for potential removal by their local elections offices.

But most of the people identified by the governor appeared to have died or moved and not participated in recent elections, and the figures Abbott cited aren’t out of line with totals reported annually by the secretary of state’s office, according to a review by Hearst Newspapers. Civil rights advocates have pressed for access to the underlying data behind the purges, saying they are concerned that eligible voters could be ensnared. In a letter to Secretary of State Jane Nelson on Wednesday, they specifically raised concerns that eligible voters could be getting wrongly identified as noncitizens and that ongoing removals would violate a federal “quiet period,” which prevents removals from voter rolls in the 90 days before an election. Democratic lawmakers warned on Thursday that the removals could mirror a botched 2019 effort to remove noncitizens from the rolls, and they urged supporters to check the status of their own voter registration. State Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, blasted state leadership for not sharing the underlying data.

AUSTIN – The Dallas Morning News reports that Texas electricity regulators picked 17 companies Thursday that will move forward with government-financed natural gas power plants. Public utility commissioners approved the proposals for fossil fuel power plants capable of generating enough electricity to power 2.4 million homes. If the companies prove their projects are viable, they will receive 3% loans from the taxpayer-funded Texas Energy Fund. The Texas Legislature created the fund in 2023 to finance about 10 gigawatts of electric generation capacity to shore up the ERCOT power grid. It is one of a myriad of legislative directives since the power blackouts of the 2021 winter storm killed more than 200 Texans. The fund currently includes $5 billion. Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have pledged to double funding ? a likelihood because the bill creating the energy fund was always planned to reach $10 billion.

Commissioners approved loans amounting to about $5.4 billion. Public Utility Commission spokesperson Ellie Breed said accrued earnings on the initial $5 billion of funding will let the agency fund all the projects if they are ultimately approved. “Today’s action to advance a set of applications to due diligence does not guarantee that those applicants will enter into a loan agreement,” Breed said in an email. Business interest in the program has remained high since the Public Utility Commission of Texas opened it up to proposals. The commission received 72 applications for $24.4 billion to finance 38 gigawatts of power generation. Texas’ all-time record for peak power demand is 85.6 gigawatts. Republican lawmakers, in response to the 2021 winter storm, have prioritized encouraging the construction of new, non-weather-dependent power plants. They created eligibility criteria for the program that favored natural gas-fueled power plants. Large-scale batteries, a rapidly emerging technology on the Texas grid, were prohibited from applying. The projects include proposed power plants from Irving-based Vistra Corp. as well as NRG and Calpine. The proposed sites are across Texas.

AUSTIN (AP) – A progressive business group sued Texas on Thursday over a 2021 law that restricts state investments in companies that, according to the state, “boycott” the fossil fuel industry.

The American Sustainable Business Coalition filed suit against Attorney General Ken Paxton and Comptroller Glenn Hegar, alleging that the law, Senate Bill 13, constitutes viewpoint discrimination and denies companies due process, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The group asked a federal judge in Austin to declare the statute unconstitutional and permanently block the state from enforcing it.

“Texas has long presented itself as a business-friendly state where limited state regulation facilitates the ability of businesses to conduct themselves as they see fit,” lawyers for the group wrote. “Yet in 2021, the Legislature passed SB 13 to coerce and punish businesses that have articulated, publicized, or achieved goals to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.”

Known as the “anti-ESG law” — which stands for “environmental, social and governance” — Senate Bill 13 requires state entities, including state pension funds and the enormous K-12 school endowment, to divest from companies that have reduced or cut ties with the oil and gas sector and that Texas officials deem antagonistic to the fossil fuel industry.

In approving the legislation, Republican officials looked to protect Texas oil and gas companies and to bite back at Wall Street investors pulling financial support from the industry in an effort to incorporate climate risk into their investments and respond to pressure to divest from fossil fuels, which play an outsized role in accelerating the climate crisis.

In March, Texas Permanent School Fund, Austin, cut ties with BlackRock, which managed roughly $8.5 billion of the $52.3 billion endowment and which was listed by Texas as one of the companies that should not handle state business.

The statute defines “boycott” as, “without an ordinary business purpose, refusing to deal with, terminating business activities with, or otherwise taking any action that is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with” a fossil fuel company. It also prohibits state agencies from doing business with a firm unless it affirms that it does not boycott energy companies. And it charges the state comptroller with preparing and maintaining a blacklist of companies based on “publicly available information” and “written verification” from the company.

In a statement, Hegar, the comptroller, called the lawsuit an “absurd” attempt to “force the state of Texas and Texas taxpayers to invest their own money in a manner inconsistent with their values and detrimental to their own economic well-being.”

“This left-wing group suing Texas,” he said, “is hiding their true intent: to force companies to follow a radical environmental agenda that is often contrary to the interests of their shareholders and to punish those companies that do not fall into lockstep and put politics above earnings.”

Paxton’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Texas has blacklisted more than 370 investment firms and funds, including BlackRock and funds within major banks like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. BlackRock, among other companies, pushed back on its designation as “boycotting” fossil fuels, calling the decision “not a fact-based judgment” and citing over $100 billion in investments in Texas energy companies.

“Elected and appointed public officials have a duty to act in the best interests of the people they serve,” a BlackRock spokesperson said at the time. “Politicizing state pension funds, restricting access to investments, and impacting the financial returns of retirees, is not consistent with that duty.”

In Thursday’s suit, the American Sustainable Business Coalition argued that the physical and financial risks posed by climate change are a legitimate investment and business consideration and cause for efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

The group said the Texas law was enacted to go after what Republican lawmakers saw as a “burgeoning fossil fuel discrimination movement,” and that it effectively “infringes rights of free speech and association under a scheme of politicized viewpoint discrimination” and allows Texas officials to “punish companies they believe are insufficiently supportive of the fossil fuel industry.”

The group argued that the law penalizes companies for their energy policies and membership in certain business associations, and compels them to adopt positions that align with Texas officials “as a condition” of doing business with state entities.

The suit also alleged that the law violates companies’ right to due process because vagueness in the statute “encourages arbitrary enforcement” and fails to provide blacklisted companies a fair process to contest their designation.

Texas blacklisted “the flagship investment funds” of Etho Capital and Sphere, two climate-focused firms represented by the American Sustainable Business Coalition, according to the lawsuit.

“Among ASBC’s many projects are efforts to encourage sustainable investing and sustainable business practices,” the lawsuit reads. “These are all cornerstones of the modern Texas economy. Yet, SB 13 takes aim at, and punishes, companies that speak about, aspire to, and achieve this goal.”

AUSTIN (AP) – Austin cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike Holdings on Wednesday estimated it absorbed a roughly $60 million blow to its sales pipeline last month after its botched handling of a software update triggered a technology meltdown that stranded thousands of people in airports in addition to other exasperating disruptions.

Although the massive outage spooked customers that had been expected to close deals totaling $60 million during the final few weeks of CrowdStrike’s fiscal second quarter, executives running the Austin, Texas, company predicted it will still be able to cinch those contracts before its fiscal year ends in January 2025 because customers still have faith in its cybersecurity products despite the July 19 gaffe that froze up machines running on Windows software.

“Our mission is alive and well, and I know that CrowdStrike’s very best days are ahead of us,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told analysts during a conference call covering the company’s April-July period. He also apologized for the company’s role in an outage that he said “will never be lost on me, and my commitment is to make sure this never happens again. The days following the incident were among the most challenging in my career because I deeply felt what our customers experienced.”

Kurtz’s reassuring comments, coupled with quarterly earnings that exceeded analysts’ projections, seemed to reassure investors who have been buying up CrowdStrike’s stock in recent weeks after initially dumping the shares in the wake of the havoc that the company blamed on a computer bug. The shares rose slightly in Wednesday’s extended trading, leaving the stock price 13% below its level before the tech outage — a loss of about $10 billion in market value. Earlier this month, CrowdStrike’s shares plunged nearly 25%, knocking off more than $20 billion in market value.

Even if the $60 million in deals that CrowdStrike expected to close before the tech meltdown never happen, that will be a minor price to pay compared to the massive bills those affected by the outage are facing.

Delta Air Lines, for instance, has estimated that it may owe its customers $380 million after the CrowdStrike-induced outage fouled up its computer systems so horribly that it had to cancel about 7,000 flights. Delta has threatened to sue CrowdStrike, which has insisted that the airline is using the tech outage as an excuse for its own bungling.

CrowdStrike didn’t provide an estimate of legal expenses it may face from the outage, but indicated the bills probably won’t be too burdensome.

“Our customer agreements contain provisions limiting our liability, and we maintain insurance policies intended to mitigate the potential impact of certain claims,” Burt Podbere, CrowdStrike’s chief financial officer, said during Wednesday’s conference call.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas is seeing some of the highest growth in clean energy jobs in the country, according to a new report by the Department of Energy. The number of jobs in wind, solar and other clean energy technologies in Texas increased 6% last year, behind only Idaho, which saw a 7.7% increase. Overall, the U.S. clean energy sector added 142,000 jobs last year, a 4.2% increase, more than double the growth rate for the larger economy. A nascent industry just a decade ago, clean energy now represents 42% of the jobs in the larger energy sector, according to the report. National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi heralded the report as a sign the Biden administration’s effort to expand the clean energy sector to replace manufacturing jobs lost to lower wage nations overseas was paying dividends.

“This isn’t just about steel in the ground but steel in the spine of the American middle class,” he said in a call with reporters Tuesday. Within the U.S. clean energy sector, electric vehicle jobs grew 11.4%, wind employment increased 4.6% and the solar jobs grew 5.3%. Through legislation including the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure law, President Joe Biden and Democrats have created hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives and low-interest loans to spur the rapid buildout of the country’s wind, solar, electric vehicle and battery industries. Among the notable additions, more than 15 gigawatts of power supply have been added to the Texas grid since last year, including 1.7 gigawatts of wind, 8.8 gigawatts of solar and 4.8 gigawatts of battery storage capacity. At the same time, jobs in fossil fuels are holding steady. Employment in the U.S. petroleum sector, a mainstay of the Texas economy, grew by 1.2% to more than 520,000 jobs last year. And the natural gas sector grew by 2% to more than 260,000 jobs.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that the median home price in Texas jumped 40% between 2019 and 2023, according to a new report from Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s office, the latest sign that it is becoming less and less affordable to live in most places across the state. Hegar warned on Tuesday that skyrocketing housing prices threaten the state’s economic growth, and he said a big part of the problem is not having enough homes to keep pace with demand. “My family moved here in the 1840s,” he said. “People say, ‘Oh, why’d they move here?’ Well, the same reason people are moving here in 2024. Why? For an economic opportunity for themselves and for future generations. A big piece of that economic opportunity is being able to afford and have a roof over your head.”

The new findings come as Texans say they are facing increasing barriers to homeownership and as state lawmakers search for ways to combat the soaring costs. The housing shortage is particularly acute for low- and middle-income households, the comptroller’s office found. Nearly two out of five households in Texas are cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing. Texas is one of the worst states in the country for extremely low-income renters, with a shortage of nearly 700,000 units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Across the state, incomes have not kept pace with increasing housing costs. In the Houston area, for instance, home prices increased by 128% over the past two decades, while the average income required to qualify for a mortgage increased by only 45%. On top of that, the pandemic created a “perfect storm” for rising housing prices, according to the report: Work from home policies drove people to the state, with the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area leading the country in population growth and net domestic migration between 2020 and 2023. Low interest rates and federal stimulus dollars helped drive demand, even as high construction costs and restrictive zoning laws stifled supply.