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DALLAS (AP) — A fire that broke out at a shopping center in Dallas on Friday morning killed more than 500 animals, most of which were small birds, authorities said.

The 579 animals in the pet shop at Plaza Latina in Northwest Dallas died from smoke inhalation, Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesperson Jason Evans said in a statement. The flames from the fire never reached the animals. Chickens, hamsters, two dogs and two cats also died, Evans said. The two-alarm fire took about two hours and as many as 45 firefighters to extinguish around 11 a.m., Evans said.

“While DFR personnel did search and attempt rescue, all animals in the shop unfortunately perished due to smoke inhalation,” Evans said.

No people were injured in the fire. The structure of the large, one-story shopping center was severely damaged, including a partially collapsed roof, Evans said.

The shopping center includes multiple small businesses and was described on its Facebook page as “a place where people can go to eat, and buy all sorts of Latin goods and services.” A post on the page in Spanish asked for prayers for the families who work there.

The cause of the fire was not immediately determined and is under investigation, Evans said.

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that a small regional electric cooperative in far West Texas is seeking to connect portions of New Mexico to Texas’ self-contained power grid. The Rio Grande Electric Cooperative, a rural electric retail company that owns thousands of miles of power lines across 18 Texas counties, is not wholly part of ERCOT, but it wants to be. Last month, the power provider petitioned the federal regulatory body overseeing the nation’s electric grid and asked regulators to determine whether connecting their customers to ERCOT, including homes and businesses in two New Mexico counties, would trigger federal regulation. Texas has maintained an energy grid largely disconnected from the rest of the country. This isolation has allowed the state to avoid federal regulation, which many lawmakers, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have touted as an economic advantage contributing to the state’s sustained economic growth.

The electric cooperative argues allowing ERCOT power to cross state lines would not trigger federal regulation because all the large electric transmission lines they own are in Texas. The electricity that crosses state lines is transmitted on smaller distribution lines like those connected to homes and small businesses across Texas. They argue that the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission does not have jurisdiction over those lines. The Rio Grande Electric Cooperative’s CEO Theresa Quiroz said in an interview that allowing the co-op to connect its remaining customers to ERCOT was “critical” to the organization’s ability to meet future power needs in its coverage area. “We have a lot of entities inquiring of us whether we have the capacity and ability to serve them,” Quiroz said. “We have an obligation to serve them. However, we can’t do it with what we have in place. At this point, we are having to turn away customers, and we don’t want to do that.” No hearings have been scheduled in the case, but the Rio Grande Electric Cooperative asked federal regulators to issue a ruling by Feb. 24.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that thegrowth of the Houston region continues to seem nearly inexorable, with two exurbs in the region appearing on a new list of the fastest-growing places in the United States. Atascocita, in northeast Harris County, was the fifth fastest-growing place in the country from 2022 to 2023, according to a new analysis from SmartAsset, the personal finance website. The community — technically a “census-designated place” rather than a city — added about 12,000 people during the span, the study found, for a year-over-year growth rate of 11%. Over the past five years, Atascocita’s population has ballooned by nearly 40%, second only to Buckeye, Ariz. Conroe, in Montgomery County, also made the top 10: It saw population growth of 6.73% from 2022 to 2023, the ninth-highest growth rate in the nation. Over the past five years, Conroe’s population has grown by almost 25%.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Keith Self, R-McKinney, voted against House Speaker Mike Johnson’s reelection to lead the lower chamber on Friday, before switching his vote for Johnson at the last minute.

Self was one of three Republicans to initially vote against Johnson during Friday’s vote — which appeared as though it would block his leadership bid. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian leaning Republican from Kentucky, cast a vote instead for U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota. Massie communicated his opposition to Johnson days ahead of Friday’s vote, but the other opposing votes had kept their plans secret. U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina voted for House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio. Self voted for Florida’s Byron Donalds.

The defections denied Johnson the 218 votes needed to secure the gavel. But Self and Norman switched votes to Johnson before the vote was declared over, allowing Johnson to retain the speakership. Continue reading After first opposing Mike Johnson, Texas Congressman Keith Self changes vote

WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Republicans say they are confident in the 2024 vote count after Donald Trump’s win, according to a new poll that finds a sharp turnaround from GOP voters’ skepticism about U.S. elections after the president-elect spent four years lying about his loss to President Joe Biden.

About 6 in 10 Republicans said they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in last year’s presidential election were counted correctly nationwide, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s a sharp rise from about 2 in 10 Republicans who were confident in an AP-NORC poll in October. And about two-thirds of Republicans in the new survey said they were confident in their state’s vote count, up from about 4 in 10 before the election.

That helped drive up the share of Americans saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the accuracy of the election to about 6 in 10. That’s higher than in October, when roughly half of Americans said they were highly confident the votes would be counted accurately.

The mood is substantially different than it was four years ago, when Trump’s supporters, fueled by his false claims of a stolen election, assaulted police and smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to interrupt the certification of Biden’s victory. Weeks later, an AP-NORC poll found that about two-thirds of Republicans said Biden was not legitimately elected president.

That belief persisted throughout Biden’s presidency and until last year’s election, as Trump continued to sow doubt about the accuracy of U.S. elections. He even did so on Election Day in the hours before it was clear he would win.

But since Trump’s victory in November, Republicans’ suspicions about election security at all levels — including confidence in their own local election officials — have ebbed substantially.

There were no indications of trouble before the election despite Trump’s attempts to lay the groundwork to challenge the accuracy of the count if he lost the vote. Nor were there any real questions over the integrity of the 2020 count, which was confirmed by a wide range of state audits,recounts and reviews, some of which were led by Republicans, including Trump’s own Department of Justice.

Threats toward local election officials soared after 2020, leading to a wave of veteran administrators leaving office. In a potential sign that those hostilities might ease, the poll found that about 7 in 10 Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that votes in the 2024 presidential election were counted accurately by their local election officials, up from about 6 in 10 in October.

That movement was almost entirely driven by Republicans: About 7 in 10 were highly confident in local officials’ counts in December, compared with about half in October.

One group’s confidence in the integrity of the election ticked down — Democrats. Their confidence in the national vote count declined from about 7 in 10 to about 6 in 10, although their certainty in the accuracy of state vote counts remained stable.

Still, the dip in Democratic confidence is nowhere near the scale of skepticism among Republicans after Trump’s defeat in 2020. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, conceded her loss to Trump the day after Election Day and there has been no organized Democratic effort to prevent the handover of the presidency to Trump, as there was among some conservatives in 2020 to try to block Biden from ascending to the presidency.