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FORT WORTH – The Fort Worth Star-Telegram says U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s Democratic opponent in the November election trails by 3 percentage points, according to a new poll. U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, a Dallas Democrat challenging the longtime Republican for his U.S. Senate seat, has the support of 44% of likely Texas voters, according to a University of Houston and Texas Southern University poll released Thursday. Cruz has the support of 47% of likely voters, the poll found. The margins are closer than some other recent polls, which have put Cruz ahead with a double-digit lead. Other polls have also had the two candidates separated by 3 to 4 percentage points, according to 538. Cruz was last on the ballot in 2018 when he defeated Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a former El Paso congressman, with 50.9% of votes to O’Rourke’s 48.3%. The University of Houston and Texas Southern University poll surveyed 1,484 likely voters between June 20 and July 1 and has a 2.5% margin of error.

The poll also asked Texans their thoughts on the matchup between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the presumptive nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties. Forty-nine percent of likely Texas voters said they planned to voter for Trump, a Republican, and 40% said they’d support Biden, a Democrat. The poll notes that about two-thirds of its fieldwork was done before the June 27 debate between Biden and Trump. Biden’s performance has led some in his own party to call for the president to step aside. Eight Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives had asked Biden to drop out of the race as of Wednesday afternoon. That includes Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett, an Austin Democrat, who was the first Democrat in Congress to publicly request that Biden withdraw, according to the Associated Press. Biden has said he’s staying in the race. Trump defeated Biden Texas in 2020 with 52.1% of votes to Biden’s 46.5%.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Jason Wells’ home in Houston lost power for two days thanks to Hurricane Beryl, but the CenterPoint Energy CEO didn’t notice it much. He’s been working a lot. Plus, he has a backup generator. Hurricane Beryl knocked 2.26 million CenterPoint customers offline, and with about half of those restored four days later, Wells is in the eye of a storm. Hot and sweaty residents of the Houston area are enraged, officials are asking more and more pointed questions and 12,000 utility crew members are fanned across the region installing new poles and power lines. “I think we could do a better job of communicating expectations with our customers, and I personally own that,” Wells said.

In his first media comments since the storm, Wells talked positively about the restoration efforts, acknowledged the company should and will do more to let the public know what’s going on and said more investment is planned to harden Houston’s defenses from its most common threats of wind and rain. Here are key points Wells made during an exclusive 30-minute interview about the recovery, why it was necessary to restore power to so many customers to begin with, and the criticism the company has faced as it makes repairs. “I understand how frustrating it is to be without power, especially in this heat. I understand what a difficult situation this is for our customers, but I am proud of the progress we have made. Restoring 1.1 million customers within effectively 48 hours of the storm’s passing is faster than what many of our peers have seen in the past 10 named storms.” Wells notes that fewer than 1 million customers lost power in the May wind event, and many likely stayed off longer than the vast majority of those impacted Beryl will be. Unlike the wind event, however, which caught the region off-guard, CenterPoint had days to plan for the hurricane and prepare for a possible major restoration job. Believing the storm would stay mostly to the Houston metro region’s west, CenterPoint mobilized about 3,000 contractors last week. Over the weekend, as Beryl crept north and appeared ready for a direct hit on the region, CenterPoint called in more resources to be ready. About 10,000 contractors came in to augment CenterPoint’s own 2,000-person crew.

DALLAS (AP) – A security breach in 2022 compromised the data of nearly all of AT&T’s cellular customers, customers of mobile virtual network operators using AT&T’s wireless network, as well landline customers who interacted with those cellular numbers.

Shelley Duvall, the intrepid, Texas-born movie star whose wide-eyed, winsome presence was a mainstay in the films of Robert Altman and who co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” has died. She was 75.

Duvall died Thursday in her sleep at home in Blanco, Texas, her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, announced. The cause was complications from diabetes, said her friend, the publicist Gary Springer.

“My dear, sweet, wonderful life, partner, and friend left us last night,” Gilroy said in a statement. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away beautiful Shelley.”

Duvall was attending junior college in Texas when Altman’s crew members, preparing to film “Brewster McCloud,” encountered her at a Houston party in 1970. They introduced the 20-year-old to the director, who cast her in “Brewster McCloud” and made her his protege.

Duvall would go on to appear in Altman films including “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville,” “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.”

“He offers me damn good roles,” Duvall told The New York Times in 1977. “None of them have been alike. He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’”

Duvall, gaunt and gawky, was no conventional Hollywood starlet. But she had a beguilingly frank manner and exuded a singular naturalism. The film critic Pauline Kael called her the “female Buster Keaton.”

At her peak, Duvall was a regular star in some of the defining movies of the 1970s. In “The Shining” (1980), she played Wendy Torrance, who watches in horror as her husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson), goes crazy while their family is isolated in the Overlook Hotel. It was Duvall’s screaming face that made up half of the film’s most iconic image, along with Jack’s axe coming through the door.

Kubrick, a famous perfectionist, was notoriously hard on Duvall in making “The Shining.” His methods of pushing her through countless takes in the most anguished scenes took a toll on the actor. One scene was reportedly performed in 127 takes. The entire shoot took 13 months. Duvall, in a 1981 interview with People magazine, said she was crying “12 hours a day for weeks on end” during the film’s production.

“I will never give that much again,” said Duvall. “If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”

Duvall disappeared from movies almost as quickly as she arrived in them. By the 1990s, she began retiring from acting and retreated from public life.

“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime, they turn on you?” Duvall told the Times earlier this year. “You would never believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”

Duvall, the oldest of four, was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on July 7, 1949. Her father, Robert, was a cattle auctioneer before working in law and her mother, Bobbie, was a real estate agent.

Duvall married the artist Bernard Sampson in 1970. They divorced four years later. Duvall was in a long-term relationship with the musician Paul Simon in the late ’70s after meeting during the making of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.” (Duvall played the rock critic who keeps declaring things “transplendent.”) She also dated Ringo Starr. During the making of the 1990 Disney Channel movie “Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Duvall met the musician Dan Gilroy, of the group Breakfast Club, with whom she remained until her death.

Duvall’s run in the 1970s was remarkably versatile. In the rugged Western “ McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971), she played the mail-order bride Ida. She was a groupie in “Nashville” (1975) and Olive Oyl, opposite Robin Williams, in “Popeye” (1980). In “3 Women,” co-starring Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule, Duvall played Millie Lammoreaux, a Palm Springs health spa worker, and won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival.

In the 1980s, Duvall produced and hosted a number of children’s TV series, among them “Faerie Tale Theatre,” “Tall Tales & Legends” and “Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories.”

Duvall moved back to Texas in the mid-1990s. Around 2002, after making the comedy “Manna from Heaven,” she retreated from Hollywood completely. Her whereabouts became a favorite topic of internet sleuths. A favorite but incorrect theory was that it was residual trauma from the grueling shoot for “The Shining.” Another was that the damage to her home after the 1994 Northridge earthquake was the last straw.

To those living in Texas Hill Country, where Duvall lived for some 30 years, she was neither in “hiding” nor a recluse. But her circumstances were a mystery to both the media and many of her old Hollywood friends. That changed in 2016, when producers for the “Dr. Phil” show tracked her down and aired a controversial hourlong interview with her in which she spoke about her mental health issues. “I’m very sick. I need help,” Duvall said on the program, which was widely criticized for being exploitative.

“I found out the kind of person he is the hard way,” Duvall told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.

THR journalist Seth Abramovitch wrote at the time that he went on a pilgrimage to find her because “it didn’t feel right for McGraw’s insensitive sideshow to be the final word on her legacy.”

Duvall attempted to restart her career, dipping her toe in with the indie horror “The Forest Hills” that filmed in 2022 and premiered quietly in early 2023.

“Acting again — it’s so much fun,” Duvall told People at the time. “It enriches your life.”

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AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr contributed to this report

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This story corrects the first mention of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.”

HOUSTON (AP) — About half a million Houston-area homes and businesses will still be without electricity next week, the city’s largest utility said Thursday, stoking the frustration of hot and weary residents and leading a top state official to call the pace of recovery from Hurricane Beryl “not acceptable.”

Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses since Beryl made landfall in Texas on Monday. And the company expects to get hundreds of thousands of more customers back online by Sunday. But many more will wait much longer.

“We know that we still have a lot of work to do,” Ryan said during a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s utility regulation agency. “We will not stop the work until it is done.”

Ryan said that the prolonged outages into next week would be concentrated along the Gulf Coast, close to where Beryl came ashore.

During a news conference Thursday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick pushed CenterPoint to work faster to relieve residents who have been without power for days and have been forced to seek air conditioning in community cooling centers and meals from food and water distribution points.

Compounding their discomfort was a new band of rainstorms that swept through the Houston area Thursday. The rain provided brief relief from the heat before temperatures were expected to creep back above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) over the weekend.

“Folks, that is not acceptable,” that half a million customers could still be without power a week after the storm, said Patrick, who is acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Asia on an economic development trip.

Patrick and Abbott have both promised that the state will investigate the storm response. Texas has dealt with several major storms over the past two decades.

“We are always going to have big storms in this area. … We have to be sure they were prepared as they should have been,” Patrick said. “It’s a terrible situation for people who are in this heat.”

Patrick and Abbott also sparred with the White House over the timing of requests for federal declarations for the area, whether they would delay help for storm cleanup and other emergency expenses.

The Category 1 hurricane — the weakest type — knocked out power to around 2.7 million customers after it made landfall, according to PowerOutage.us.

Residents have been frustrated that such a relatively weak storm could cause such disruption at the height of summer.

Some have criticized the utility and state and city officials as not ready for the storm, the slow restoration process, and that CenterPoint’s online map has been woefully inaccurate, sometimes showing entire neighborhoods as restored when they were still without power.

The company acknowledged that most of the 12,000 workers it brought in to help the recovery were not in the Houston area when the storm arrived. Initial forecasts had the storm blowing ashore much farther south along the Gulf Coast, near the Texas-Mexico border, before it headed toward Houston.

Ryan said the vast majority of outages were caused by falling trees and tree limbs, and workers had to conduct damage surveys on more than 8,500 miles of power lines.

Beryl has been blamed for at least nine U.S. deaths and 11 in the Caribbean.

The storm’s lingering impact for many in Texas, however, was the wallop to the power supply that left much of the nation’s fourth-largest city sweltering.

Mallary Cohee said her duplex in New Caney, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Houston, has been without power since Monday. She said her “little country neighborhood” is a “hot mess” of downed trees, so she’s staying at a Houston hotel.

Cohee said she initially felt she could withstand the lack of air conditioning because she she managed to get by without it in summer while serving a two-year prison sentence.

“I thought, ‘I can do this. I can ride it. If I can do time with no heat, no AC in there, I could possibly make it,’” Cohee said. “But it’s a whole different ballgame when you don’t even have a fan to plug in.”

Clean water was also becoming an issue. More than 160 boil water notices were in effect across the area, and more than 100 wastewater treatment plants were offline Thursday, said Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

The Texas Hospital Association said a “vast majority” of hospitals in the area are dealing with some kind of issue caused by Beryl, including water and wind damage, power and internet connection problems, staffing shortages or transportation problems.

Carrie Kroll, the association’s vice president of advocacy, public policy and political strategy, said hospitals are getting an “extremely high” number of people coming to emergency departments with symptoms of heat stroke and injuries from cleaning up debris.

By Wednesday night, hospitals had already sent more than 100 patients who couldn’t be released to homes with no power to a Houston sports and event complex with an area set up to hold up to 250, Office of Emergency Management spokesman Brent Taylor said.

___ Lathan, who reported from Austin, Texas, is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

HOUSTON (AP) — About 500,000 customers still won’t have electricity into next week as wide outages from Hurricane Beryl persist and frustration mounts over the pace of restoration, an official with Houston’s biggest power utility said Thursday.

Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses since Beryl made landfall on Monday. The company expects to get hundreds of thousands of more customers back online in the coming days, but others will wait much longer, he said.

“We know that we still have a lot of work to do,” Ryan said during a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s utility regulation agency. “We will not stop the work until it is done.”

Ryan predicted that the prolonged outages into next week would be concentrated along the Texas coast, closer to where Beryl came ashore.

During a news conference on Thursday in Houston, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said it is “not acceptable” that half a million customers could still be without power a week after the storm. Patrick, who is acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Asia on an economic development trip, promised a state investigation into the storm response. Abbott has also called for an investigation.

“We are always going to have big storms in this area. … We have to be sure they were prepared as they should have been,” Patrick said. “It’s a terrible situation for people who are in this heat.”

Ryan predicted that the prolonged outages into next week would be concentrated along the Texas coast, closer to where Beryl came ashore.

The Category 1 hurricane — the weakest type — knocked out power to around 2.7 million customers after it made landfall in Texas on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us.

CenterPoint Energy has struggled to restore power to affected customers, who have grown frustrated that such a relatively weak storm could cause such disruption at the height of summer.

Area residents have complained that the utility and state and city officials were not ready for the storm, that the restoration process has been slow and that CenterPoint’s online map that is supposed to show where power in back on has been woefully inaccurate, sometimes showing entire neighborhoods as restored when they were still without power.

The company acknowledged that most of the 12,000 workers it brought in to help the recovery were not in the Houston area when the storm arrived. Initial forecasts had the storm blowing ashore much farther south along the Gulf Coast, near the Texas-Mexico border, before it headed toward Houston.

Ryan said the vast majority of outages were caused by falling trees and tree limbs, and workers had to conduct damage surveys on more than 8,500 miles of power lines.

Beryl has has been blamed for at least eight U.S. deaths — one each in Louisiana and Vermont, and six in Texas. Earlier, 11 died in the Caribbean.

The storm’s lingering impact for many in Texas, however, was the wallop to the power supply that left much of the nation’s fourth-largest city sweltering days later in hot and humid conditions that the National Weather Service deemed potentially dangerous.

“Maybe they thought it wasn’t going to be so bad, but it’s had a tremendous effect. They needed to be better prepared,” construction worker Carlos Rodriguez, 39, said Wednesday as he gathered apples, oranges and ready-to-eat meal packs at a food distribution center. His family, with two daughters ages 3 and 7, was struggling, he said.

“We have no power, we’re going to bed late and I’m using a fan made out of a piece of cardboard to give my kids some relief,” Rodriguez said.

Hospitals were sending patients who could not be released to homes with no power to a sports and event complex where an area was set up to hold as many as 250 people. As of late Wednesday afternoon, about 40 patients had arrived and about 70 to 75 others were on their way, Office of Emergency Management spokesman Brent Taylor said.

Meanwhile, Houston Mayor John Whitmire bluntly called on the utility to do a better job.

“That’s the consensus of Houstonians. That’s mine,” Whitmire said.