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AUSTIN (AP) — Texas state regulators found nearly two dozen deficiencies in the emergency operations plan submitted in Camp Mystic’s bid to reopen less than a year after 27 children and counselors were killed in a devastating flood.

Camp Mystic’s owners have applied for a license to reopen the all-girls Christian camp in late May in part of the campus that did not flood. That has angered families of the girls killed, some of whom have filed lawsuits against the camp, and prompted several prominent state officials to call for the license to be denied or delayed pending the outcome of ongoing investigations.

The 11-page letter from the Department of State Health Services notes deficiencies that include problems with flood warning evacuation plans, use of an emergency warning and public address system, monitoring safety alerts and training campers on safety.

It was sent to the camp about a week after a three-day court hearing in the family lawsuits when several camp operators and staff acknowledged they missed official flood warnings, lacked a detailed evacuation plan and waited too long to try to get the children out. One of the camp’s owners, Richard Eastland, also died.

The letter notes that Camp Mystic is allowed to revise the emergency plan. Camp Mystic officials said they would work with the agency to address the problems cited.

“Our priority remains the safety and well-being of our campers, and we hope to continue the nearly century-long mission and ministry of Camp Mystic to provide a Christian camping experience for girls that allows them to grow physically, mentally and spiritually,” the camp said.

The camp’s emergency plan was submitted as part of strict new guidelines imposed by state lawmakers after the deadly flood.

DSHS spokesperson Lara Anton said many camps have received deficiency notices ahead of summer opening.

“This is part of the licensing application review process, and most youth camps have received a notice of deficiency letter for their emergency plan due to the statutory changes and increased emergency plan requirements,” Anton said.

Texas lawmakers have scheduled two days of hearings next week on what happened during the flood that ripped through the Guadalupe River and killed more than 130 people in all. Several lawmakers and the Texas Rangers, the state police elite investigations unit, visited the camp site this week.

NACOGDOCHES (KETK) — A Nacogdoches County jury has convicted Ronnie Farrell Jernigan Jr. of capital murder in the shooting deaths of his girlfriend and her mother, ending a case that previously resulted in a hung jury.

According to the Nacogdoches County District Attorney’s Office, jurors on April 23, found Jernigan guilty on two counts of capital murder in the deaths of 48-year-old Laquice Sanford and her 73-year-old mother, Laura Jean Sanford. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Police were first called to a home on Stone Street in October 2023 after a neighbor discovered Laura Jean’s body on the front porch. Investigators said she had been shot in the back of the head, with her head resting in the basket of a bicycle parked nearby.

Officers then entered the residence and found Laquice dead inside. Authorities said she had been shot in the face at close range.

Jernigan, identified as Laquice’s boyfriend, was later located at his mother’s home. He initially denied being at the residence or seeing the victims that day, investigators said.

Surveillance footage from nearby businesses showed Jernigan riding the same bicycle found at the scene and wearing a hat later recovered inside the home near Laquice’s body, according to prosecutors.

During questioning, Jernigan told detectives he had previously purchased a firearm but claimed he had returned it. A neighbor later discovered a gun in a vacant yard behind his mother’s house. Ballistics testing confirmed the weapon was used in both killings and matched the firearm previously sold to Jernigan, authorities said.

Investigators also found gunshot residue on Jernigan’s hands and DNA from one of the victims on his clothing. Cellphone data placed him at the home at the time of the shootings, prosecutors said.

The case had previously gone to trial in October 2025 but ended in a hung jury. A retrial concluded this week with a guilty verdict after jurors also heard accusations of Jernigan’s prior abuse of Laquice and a previous partner.

In a statement, the district attorney’s office thanked jurors for their “diligence and careful consideration,” adding that the sentence ensures Jernigan “will never be released from prison and protects the public from further violence.” Prosecutors also said the case underscores the dangers of domestic violence and its potential consequences.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — It was 1972 and Apollo astronauts Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Eugene Cernan had just stepped onto the moon’s surface to begin collecting rock and soil samples.

The mission would mark the end of an era for the American space program, but Schmitt already was looking to the future. His voice crackling over a high-frequency radio signal that day, he shared his thoughts with Cernan and those listening in at Mission Control.

“Well, I tell you Gene, I think the next generation ought to accept this as a challenge. Let’s see them leave footsteps like these someday,” Schmitt said.

Schmitt, 90, is one of the four Apollo moonwalkers still alive today. A field geologist, he was the first scientist to set foot on the moon and his expertise helped answer questions about the origin of that big rock up there and what it tells us about the solar system.

Schmitt felt the thrill again when the Artemis II crew rocketed into space on a historic lunar flyby. Pure excitement and the potential for so much more. And he’s hopeful as new generations get back to the moon and beyond.

Interviewed by The Associated Press, the former U.S. senator from New Mexico spoke about everything from the importance of having a lunar base to tapping new energy sources and whether we’re alone in the universe. Dark matter and quantum entanglement also were mentioned, with Schmitt saying many discoveries are yet to come.

“You’ve just got to remember,” he said, “what used to be called supernatural probably should be called unknown physics.”

This interview has been edited for brevity.

Q: What about having a lunar base?

Well, I think a lunar base makes a lot of sense and it always has for a lot of reasons. One is geopolitical. Probably the most important one is a geopolitical presence in deep space — and in preparation for going on to Mars.

The moon has resources that are going to reduce the cost of actually going to Mars and it gains experience. One of the things people keep forgetting about is you’ve gone through several generations and the new generation has to gain experience — psychologically as well as practically about how you work in deep space. And they’re doing that. That was probably the most important part of Artemis II, is it gave the ground people, Mission Control and others, the experience now to really have the risk as real rather than as part of a simulation.

Q: What was your mission during Apollo 17?

I had a lot of understanding of what other crews had learned, what had been learned from some of the early sample analyses and so we were trying to put sort of the frosting on the cake of answering questions in a very complex geologic area called Taurus-Littrow.

Taurus-Littrow actually is deeper than the Grand Canyon and so it has a three-dimensional aspect to it that we hadn’t had on other missions. And plus having a field geologist like myself on board meant that we should be more efficient at gathering samples that had a meaningful aspect to our further understanding of the origin of the moon, its relationship to the Earth and, it turns out, also its relationship to the history of the sun.

Q: So we’re building upon our knowledge of the universe around us?

Well there’s no question that the moon has a history to tell us.

It’s been recording the history of the solar system ever since the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. That is really what the moon gives us — that library of knowledge, of potential knowledge about how the solar system evolved and then what the sun has been doing in that 4.5 billion years.

In the recent work that I’ve been doing in that layer of debris, the regolith, we find that the sun became even more active than it had been about the same time as we had an explosion of life in the oceans on Earth, and so the oceans may have been and almost certainly were warming to that more active sun and life likes warmth. So it multiplied not only in quantity but in diversity. The mammals started to appear soon after that, life started to move up onto the continents that had formed so things were really starting to move about a half-billion years ago.

Q: Tell us about the moon rocks

This is a sample of a basalt lava and we have a lot of basalt lavas here in New Mexico. This is different in that it is rich in titanium, more rich than most terrestrial basalts. And that titanium turns out to be very important in terms of the resources that are available on the moon. It has a property of concentrating some of those resources, particularly hydrogen and helium.

There’s an isotope called helium-3 and that is going to be, I think, ultimately very, very important in the production of energy. It’s going to be extremely useful in quantum computing, in cancer therapy and other things here on Earth. We just don’t have much on Earth, so the moon is going to be a our reservoir, our source of this very important isotope of helium-3.

Q: How important will this isotope be in the future?

Helium-3 offers a possibility of having nuclear energy without nuclear waste. We’ve known that for decades, and so the moon now offers that opportunity to begin to substitute a nuclear form of energy that doesn’t produce nuclear waste for what we have today.

Q: Is it just as much an energy race as a space race?

There’s no question about it. China is interested in it, we’re interested in it. And that’s probably one of the big technological drivers of this new race to the moon, a new space race, a Cold War that’s on now primarily involving China and I think helium-3 is a big actor in that right now.

Q: What was it like in the Taurus-Littrow Valley?

First of all, we were in a valley deeper than the Grand Canyon. The mountains on either side were as high as the Grand Canyon from the bottom. Secondly, you’re in one-sixth gravity so that means you can walk much more easily than you could here on Earth. Now we were covered by a pressure suit but still walking around was like being a kid again … if you fell you didn’t fall very hard and you certainly didn’t cry about it. But the moon is really a very easy place to work so as long as you have the right equipment surrounding you. You have to have that atmosphere of course to breathe.

Q: Any downsides to working in a weightless environment?

For me, it was a very comfortable environment to be in and you get a little bit lazy. For example, if you’re taking notes with a pad of paper and a pen or pencil and somebody says would you take the SCS switch to off, well you just let go and it floats there and you go over to the switch and come back and start to dictate those notes again.

You’ve got to be careful though because you’re brain gets lazy. When I got on the carrier after splashdown, I was taking my first drink of water and I just let go of the cup and of course it broke on the floor. Human beings tend to take advantage of their environment very quickly and the brain does get a little bit lazy like that. It took about three days to get comfortable again back here on Earth.

Q: So we’ll have no problem living on the moon?

No, I think living on the moon is going to be very good. Now long term civilization on the moon, there’s still some major issues. The radiation issue has to be dealt with and we can. There are ways to do that. Going to Mars is another issue and that’s why you’ll almost certainly need fusion rockets to cut that time frame.

Q: We’ve heard a lot lately about UFOs. What are your thoughts on that?

Well there are billions of sunlike stars out there and so you just have to imagine that life may have originated on some other planet, although the conditions for life to originate here on Earth are really unique. Everything sort of fit together and creation for us sort of leads to you thinking of an infinitely intelligent being that made it all happen. But the technical potential statistically is very high that you could have had the similar kind of conditions develop elsewhere in the universe.

Now are they visiting us? My feeling is if they’re really so advanced they could be here, they’d communicate better than they have and so I just don’t know. But it’s plausible. Let’s put it that way. Unlikely maybe, but plausible.

Q: Would you take the opportunity to go back to the moon or to Mars?

Oh surely. Teresa, my wife, would like very much to go with me — that would be one condition. But I think a trip to Mars is going to be fantastic for those people.

So youth is extremely important and the education of those youth particularly in mathematics is extraordinarily important, and NASA now has a younger agency than they had grown to be during the shuttle era.

Look what has happened since Apollo. The commercial sector has developed new technologies, new ways of doing things and NASA is now trying to integrate those into a new approach to deep space exploration.

HUNTSVILLE (AP) – When he was 19, James Broadnax jotted down rap lyrics, thoughts and even job leads in a notebook that would become evidence at his capital murder trial.

Prosecutors selected lyrics with alleged references to gang affiliation and shootings to convince jurors that instead of life in prison, Broadnax, who is Black, should be put to death after his conviction — a move his lawyers argue biased the almost all-white jury.

Broadnax isn’t the only defendant or even the only person on Texas’ death row whose rap lyrics have been introduced to a jury. Rap lyrics have featured in hundreds of court cases in more than 40 states over the past 50 years, though judges often exclude other forms of creative expression from being used as evidence, researchers have found. Treating rap lyrics as diary entries minimizes their artistic value while playing on negative racial stereotypes to influence jurors, experts say.

“It denies rap music the status of art. It is characterized as autobiography,” said Erik Nielson, co-author of the book “Rap on Trial.” “It really does speak to underlying assumptions that some people have about young men of color — and that’s almost exclusively who this practice targets — that they aren’t sophisticated enough to engage in various literary devices. That there isn’t metaphor here.”

Rap lyrics are commonly used in racketeering or gang-related cases. Prosecutors try to establish the defendant’s involvement in an underlying crime by introducing lyrics as evidence, Nielson said. If someone is charged with a shooting, for example, prosecutors look for lyrics that mention a shooting.

“If the lyrics were written before the alleged crime, the prosecutors will say this is evidence of motive,” Nielson said. “If they’re written afterward, they’re characterized as a straight-up confession.”

Rap lyrics introduced in court as autobiographical

Broadnax and his cousin were charged with murder for the 2008 shooting deaths of two men outside a suburban Dallas music studio. After more than a decade on death row, he is scheduled to be executed April 30.

In their pending appeal asking the U.S. Supreme Court to halt Broadnax’s execution, his attorneys argue that a judge should have considered the potential for racial bias and instructed the jury that his lyrics should not be viewed as autobiographical.

“The emphasis on the rap lyrics was a key element in this racially charged narrative,” Broadnax’s attorneys wrote. “Worse, the record in this case confirms that the jury delivered a death sentence based on the racial stereotypes invoked by the rap lyrics.”

Kemba, a rapper featured in the documentary “As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial,” told The Associated Press that introducing rap lyrics is particularly effective with juries because of innate prejudices — and because prosecutors want convictions.

“There’s a lot of people that don’t see rap or Black music as artistic expression,” he said. “And when you’re in a court case, there’s already an assumption that you’ve done something (wrong).”

The defendants in these cases are “almost exclusively young men of color, often with very limited resources,” and many can’t afford a private attorney, Nielson said.

But some high-profile rappers have had their songs introduced in court, like Young Thug, whose lyrics were used as evidence at his trial on gang and racketeering charges. He pleaded guilty to those charges and was released from custody in 2024.

Stereotypes about rap emerge

“The criminalization and the targeting of hip-hop has been going on for all 50 years of the culture,” said Nielson, who noted the use of rap lyrics in court ramped up in the early 1990s.

The monitoring of Black artistic expression dates back to the antebellum South, he said, though that intensified as rap music became more critical of power structures, like N.W.A.’s 1989 song “F— the Police,” which condemns police brutality.

In 2022, The New York Times’ Jaeah Lee looked for non-rap examples of lyrics used at trial from 1950 onward and found only four. Three cases were thrown out and one led to a conviction that was overturned. In that same time period, Nielson found roughly 700 examples of rap lyrics used in court cases, including lyrics that someone rapped but didn’t even write.

Another study conducted by University of Nevada assistant professor Adam Dunbar examined stereotypes of rap. He presented people with lyrics, saying they were from rap, country or metal music. When it came to rap, respondents overwhelmingly considered the lyrics to be autobiographical.

“But if they’re given the same lyrics and told that those are country or heavy metal lyrics, they say, ‘No, it’s just art,’” said J.M. Harper, director of “As We Speak.”

Some rappers have begun directly attesting to the fictional nature of their music. The year before he was fatally stabbed in 2021, Drakeo the Ruler released the song “Fictional” from behind bars because his lyrics were being treated as nonfiction. In 2023, 21 Savage described his raps as “fiction as hell.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that they are doing this for fear of prosecution,” Nielson said.
Rules of evidence can be open to judge’s interpretation

A number of A-list rappers, including Travis Scott, T.I. and Killer Mike, have filed briefs at the Supreme Court in support of Broadnax, cautioning against considering rap lyrics autobiographical.

Prosecutors in the case said Texas law allows evidence relevant to a defendant’s reputation at sentencing and contend the court shouldn’t consider the argument against the lyrics because Broadnax failed to raise concerns in previous appeals. State courts have ruled against other appeals by Broadnax’s attorneys.

“At the end of the day, the most important thing is not the prosecutors,” rapper LL Cool J told the AP in 2024, adding that judges should better block rap lyrics from trials. “The question is: Why is it even admissible?”

Lucius T. Outlaw III, a professor at Howard University School of Law who filed the amicus brief on behalf of Nielson and Killer Mike, said judges enforce rules of evidence specific to each state.

One judge might view rap lyrics as relevant; another may disagree. One might worry about triggering “anti-rap, which is anti-Black, bias,” he said, “where another judge will say, ‘I don’t see that prejudice.’”

“Guidelines about what is relevant when it comes to artistic expression and what is overly prejudicial is so needed,” he said.

Jeff Bellin, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, said current rules tell judges to exclude evidence if it has low value as proof and a danger of creating bias.

“The safeguard should be judges, but they are often not aware of the social issues, or the context, when it comes to rap lyrics,” he said.

New legislation seeks protection for lyrics

Bellin said legislating around the issue is difficult because lawmakers don’t want to create rules that would exclude evidence truly relevant to any case.

In the past five years, at least 27 bills have been introduced federally and in a half-dozen states to limit the use of a defendant’s creative expressions, including rap lyrics, in criminal proceedings, according to an AP analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural.

On April 9, Maryland became the third state to pass legislation, creating “guardrails and a test for judges to impose anytime prosecutors want to use artistic expression, not just rap,” Outlaw said, noting it requires a factual connection between the potential evidence and the charges.

“It’s not the cure-all, but it’s a huge, important step,” he said.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) – A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release from immigration custody of the family of a man charged in a fatal 2025 firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado, against demonstrators supporting Israeli hostages in Gaza.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery in San Antonio said Hayam El Gamal and her five children can be released from a family immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, as long as El Gamal and her oldest child, who is 18, wear electronic monitoring. Biery denied the government’s request to stay his ruling so it could appeal. One of the family’s lawyers, Eric Lee, posted on X that they were released later in the day.

El Gamal was born in Saudi Arabia and is an Egyptian national. She and her family have been in immigration detention since June after her husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was accused of throwing two Molotov cocktails at people demonstrating for awareness of Israeli hostages in Gaza. An 82-year-old woman who was injured in the attack later died. El Gamal has said she was shocked by the attack.

Soliman is an Egyptian national who federal authorities say was living in the U.S. illegally. He is being prosecuted in both state and federal court for the attack, which prosecutors say injured a total of 13 people. Investigators say he planned the attack for a year and was driven by a desire “to kill all Zionist people.” He has pleaded not guilty to state charges, including a murder charge, and federal hate crimes charges.

After the attack, the Trump administration claimed the family was being rushed out of the country. The White House said in social media posts that they “COULD BE DEPORTED AS EARLY AS TONIGHT” and that six one-way tickets had been purchased for them, with their “final boarding call coming soon.”

Biery decided to release the family even though an immigration appeals court had dismissed their case to stay and issued a deportation order for them. That came after a federal magistrate judge recommended on Monday that they should be released.

Lawyers for the family claim the deportation order was directed by the “political leadership” in Washington, which the government’s lawyer, Anne Marie Cordova, denied. People who have final deportation orders are normally subject to mandatory detention.

In a statement, acting assistant Homeland Security Secretary Lauren Bis criticized Biery’s ruling.

“Despite receiving full due process and a final order of removal, this activist judge appointed by Bill Clinton is releasing this terrorist’s family onto American streets,” Bis said.

Biery had barred the family from being deported until he could hold Thursday’s hearing. One of the family’s lawyers, Chris Godshall-Bennett, told Biery they will also ask the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans to stop the family from being deported while they seek asylum and permission to remain in the United States.

Another federal judge blocked their immediate removal after the attack. Since then, the family has tried several times to be released on bond and return to Colorado while their asylum application is considered.

The magistrate judge recommended this week that they be released after their attorneys argued they have not been treated fairly in immigration proceedings.

LUFKINS – The City’s Click2Gov online payment system will be unavailable this weekend due to a scheduled software upgrade by its vendor. The system is expected to be down for most or all of the day Saturday at least. Joshua Gentry, IT digital content manager for the City of Lufkin, stated the city appreciates citizens’ patience while this upgrade is completed.

BALDWIN COUNTY, Ala. (WKRG) — After nearly 30 years, human remains found in Alabama have been identified as those of James Carol Jackson, a man from Groveton, Texas, whose death has been ruled a homicide.

The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama said Jackson was identified using forensic genealogy in April 2026. The Trinity County Sheriff’s Office in Texas confirmed that Jackson was from Groveton.

Officials said in January 1994, a person was walking in the wooded area off of State Highway 225 when they spotted skeletal remains. Found with those remains were a trucker hat, a western shirt, an inhaler, a digital watch, prescription glasses, a mechanical pencil and pen set, as well as a torch tip.

Officials believe the homicide happened in 1988 or 1989, after he arrived in the area around 1987, when he was 50 years old.

Jackson drove a 1978 to 1981 Chevrolet Camaro that the sheriff’s office has not been able to locate.

He was a welder, and in 1987, he told his family he was going to Alabama for work.

At the time, I-65 was being expanded, and officials believe he may have come to the area to help work on the project.

Officials also said he stopped communicating with his family about 12 months after leaving Texas.

It is believed that he may have been living off Highway 225 and may have frequented the Tensaw Lodge.

Family described him as a non-violent, easy-going guy.

Anyone who may have any information on the case can submit a tip through the sheriff’s office website or through Crimestoppers.

AUSTIN (AP) – Three congressional candidates are accused of betting on the outcome of their own elections on the prediction market Kalshi, which said Wednesday that it fined and suspended the three men from their platform for five years.

It is the latest high-profile case of alleged insider trading on prediction markets including Kalshi and Polymarket, which have brought bipartisan scrutiny from Congress and calls for stricter regulations of the websites where people can put money on just about anything.

Kalshi’s disciplinary documents named Mark Moran, who is running as an independent in Virginia’s U.S. Senate race; Ezekiel Enriquez, who ran in a Texas Republican primary for a U.S. House seat; and Matt Klein, a Democratic state senator running for a U.S. House seat in Minnesota.

Klein and Enriquez both placed bets less than $100 related to their “own candidacy,” Kalshi said. Moran said on social media that he “traded $100 on myself.”

Moran refused to reach an agreement with Kalshi and was fined the most at more than $6,200, while Klein and Enriquez did reach agreements and face penalties of over $530 and $780, respectively, the company said. All were suspended from Kalshi for five years. The agreements are with the company, and not with a government oversight or law enforcement agency.

Far from denying the allegations, Moran took to social media on Wednesday to say that he placed the bets because he wanted to draw attention to the issue.

“We live in a Country destroyed by vice, which Kalshi directly contribute to,” Moran wrote on X, saying the goal of the trade was to “highlight how this company is destroying young men.”

Klein also confirmed Kalshi’s findings in a post on social media on Wednesday. The $50 wager he placed in October was the first time he had used a predictions market, he said in a statement on X, and he was “curious about how it worked.”

“This was a mistake and I apologize,” he wrote, saying that the experience made it clear that the markets need more regulation.

Enriquez, known as Zeke, lost his House race in the beginning of March with less than two percent of the vote. Contact information for Enriquez was not immediately found to request comment.

HOUSTON (AP) — A Houston city ordinance that limited police officers’ cooperation with federal immigration agents was amended on Wednesday after Texas’ governor threatened to take away millions of dollars in public safety grants.

Houston, as well as Austin and Dallas — three of the state’s biggest cities and Democratic strongholds — are being confronted by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott with threats of losing public safety dollars over policies that dictate how law enforcement interacts with federal immigration authorities. The three cities are being threatened with the loss of about $200 million in public safety funding, including tens of millions expected to cover security at World Cup matches this summer in Dallas and Houston.

Two weeks ago, Houston City Council passed the ordinance, which eliminated a requirement that Houston police officers wait 30 minutes for agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pick up someone with a nonjudicial administrative warrant. If ICE agents didn’t show up in time, police officers took a detained person’s information and then released them.

But Abbott warned city officials that the new ordinance and its limitation on cooperating with ICE agents violated the terms of $110 million in state grants Houston had received for police and security during the World Cup games the city is hosting in June.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had also filed a lawsuit against Mayor John Whitmire and members of the city council over the ordinance, accusing them of violating a 2017 state law that prevents cities from adopting policies that limit the enforcement of immigration laws and which also banned “sanctuary city” policies in the state. There is no strict definition for sanctuary policies or sanctuary cities, but the terms generally describe limited cooperation with ICE.

After more than two hours of discussion during its weekly meeting, Houston City Council voted 13-4 to make changes to the ordinance. Whitmire said he had consulted with Abbott’s office about making changes that would prevent Houston from losing its funding.

The amended ordinance deletes language that highlighted that administrative warrants — versus warrants signed by a judge — that ICE agents use to take individuals into custody are not enough for officers to arrest or detain an individual.

“We have no alternative for Houston to survive, prepare for (the World Cup), patrol these neighborhoods,” Whitmire said. “We’ve got to have today the restoration of the $114 million.”

Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor expects any policy Houston police adopt has to comply with the city’s certification that it will fully cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security.

“This vote is a step in the right direction after Houston leaders put public safety at risk with reckless policies that undermined law enforcement,” Mahaleris said in a statement.

Council member Abbie Kamin, one of three members who had pushed for the ordinance, voted against amending it, saying that doing so was giving in to bullying tactics from state leaders.

“If we rollover now to a bully, what will he come for next?” Kamin said.

Council members Edward Pollard and Alejandra Salinas, who also pushed for the ordinance, said they remained hopeful the changes approved Wednesday would not violate individuals’ constitutional rights and wouldn’t result in people being held on nonjudicial warrants.

Nikki Luellen, an advocate for criminal justice reform for the ACLU of Texas, called the amended ordinance “a greenlight for deeper collaboration between ICE and the Houston Police Department.”

Martha Castex-Tatum was one of several council members who had supported the ordinance but voted in favor of amending it in order to protect the city’s finances.

“For some people, this may feel like surrender. It’s not. It’s real stewardship,” Castex-Tatum said.

Dallas officials have said they are committed to ensuring public safety and would respond to Abbott’s threat by Thursday.

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a moderate Democrat, said the local policy complies with state law. He said Abbott’s threat to cut nearly $3 million in Austin would cut trauma aid for police officers and sexual assault victims.

“We don’t have the time and will not play into this political theater,” said Watson.

Austin officials have since indicated they could try to negotiate with Abbott.

The debate in Houston and other Texas cities comes amid the federal government’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Whitmire and other local leaders in many of Texas’ left-leaning urban areas have tried to not get the federal government’s attention amid the aggressive immigration crackdown by President Donald Trump’s administration.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 17 million people along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts are at the highest risk of being affected by flooding, with New York and New Orleans standing out, according to one of the most comprehensive studies ever of flood risk.

Researchers at the University of Alabama used 16 different factors including the geographic hazards, the population and infrastructure exposed and the vulnerability of people living there. They then brought in past damages from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s database and applied three different artificial intelligence tools to figure out flood risks from Texas to Maine, calculating that 17.5 million people were at “very high” risk and an additional 17 million were at “high” risk, the next level.

The authors looked at all sizes of flooding and examined separately what FEMA considers the most extreme, which are the top 1% of events. The study found 4.3 million people along the coasts to be at the highest level of risk of extreme flooding, but 20.5 million to be at high risk, the second highest level.

They found a lot of vulnerability, highlighting eight different cities from Houston, which flooded in 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, to New York, which was inundated in 2012’s Superstorm Sandy.

Wednesday’s study in the journal Science Advances found that New York City has 4.75 million people at the two highest risk levels for all flooding, with more than 200,000 buildings likely to be damaged.

And while the number of people at risk in New Orleans is far lower, about 380,000, it involves 99% of the city’s population. That doesn’t mean 99% of the people will be affected in the next hurricane or nontropical flood, but that they might be depending on the storm’s individual path and rain pattern, said study co-author Wanyun Shao, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama.

“Just look at the magnitude,” Shao said. “Those numbers are shocking, are alarming.”
The elderly and poor are most at risk

“When the next big storm hits New York City, when the next Hurricane Katrina -like hurricane makes landfall in New Orleans, people will get hurt, especially those socially vulnerable populations,” Shao said referring to the poor, the elderly, children and the uneducated.

Shao and outside experts said the numbers stunned them even though they were familiar with the worsening effects of climate change.

“New York is known to be susceptible to floods and it has the largest population. But the fact that New York has nearly an order of magnitude more flood-exposed population than any other city is surprising,” said Alex de Sherbinin, a geographer who directs Columbia University’s Center for Integrated Earth System Information. He wasn’t part of the study.

Flood problems are becoming more frequent in New York and New Orleans because of human-caused climate change, the study said.
Other cities are also threatened

Jacksonville has 679,000 people at high or very high risk of flooding, while Houston is just behind at just under 600,000. Other cities highlighted include Miami, Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, Mobile, Alabama.

Shao and outside experts said what separates her study from others is the sheer comprehensiveness of all the factors it considers, including sinking land and pavement that doesn’t allow water to seep into the ground, as well as incorporating human social vulnerability such as poverty and age.

“This could be applied to other places in the world, such as Manila,” said University of Virginia engineering professor Venkataraman Lakshmi, who heads the hydrology section of the American Geophysical Union, referring to the capital of the Philippines. He wasn’t part of the study, but said the flooding problems it highlights will get more frequent and intense due to human-caused climate change.

Columbia University’s Marco Tedesco, who wasn’t part of the study, said “it reinforces the crucial concept that future flood disasters are not just about water—they are about where people live, how cities are built, and who is least protected.”
Actions can lessen the risk

De Sherbinin said, “the analysis of the flood risk factors is important for local planners, emergency managers, and even highway crews and utility providers. We all know that low lying areas are more flood prone, but the data they have assembled provide more insights into flood risk, particularly for flash floods.”

Study lead author Hemal Dey, a geospatial scientist, said he hopes local officials look at not just building more dams and levees, but more natural infrastructure such as wetlands, grasslands, rain gardens and estuaries.

“The research is solid confirmation of what emergency managers have been saying for years. Realtors will hate it,’’ said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA director who wasn’t part of the study. “The harder question is what we’re actually going to do about it.”