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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.”

TEXARKANA, Texas (KETK) — Following a drunken physical argument with her boyfriend, a Texarkana woman was arrested for driving while intoxicated and endangering her 3-month-old baby in a crash on Sunday morning.

According to the Texarkana Police Department, officers received a disturbance call at 3:30 a.m. from a man reporting that he and his 33-year-old girlfriend, Cheyenne Foster, had gotten into a physical argument after a night of “heavy drinking.”

By the time officers arrived at the home on Breckenridge Street, Foster had already left the house with their 3-month-old child and was reportedly heading toward a relative’s home in Ashdown. The police department immediately began looking for Foster, as her level of intoxication was concerning for her and the child’s safety.

The police department said Foster eventually answered her phone and told officers that she had been involved in a crash with the child in the car but refused to provide a location out of fear of being arrested.

Officers were able to locate her via phone ping after more than an hour of searching, which led them to Hush Puppy Road just south of the Red River.

The vehicle was found in a ditch, with Foster passed out in the driver’s seat and the child lying in the front passenger seat.

“The child was not in a baby carrier,” the police department said. “At the time, the temperature was about 48 degrees, the windows were down, and the baby was wearing only a diaper.”

Foster was not reported to have sustained any injuries. Still, following a check with EMS, the child was transported to a hospital by ambulance for a minor chest injury that is believed to have occurred during the crash.

Foster was arrested for driving while intoxicated with a minor passenger and child endangerment, with the additional charge of assault family violence of bodily injury, which was related to the initial incident at her home. She was booked into the Bi-State Jail with a $180,000 bond and was released on Monday.

“Please never drive impaired – and certainly not with your kids in the vehicle,” the police department said.

EL PASO (AP) — The wife of a U.S. Army sergeant was being held Tuesday at an immigration detention facility in El Paso, Texas, amid signs that the Trump administration is dialing back leniency toward immigrant family members of military personnel and veterans.

Jose Serrano, an active duty soldier who served three tours in Afghanistan, said immigration agents arrested his wife April 14 as they attended an appointment with immigration services to take steps toward her permanent residency.

“A person opened the door, escorted us through the hallway, and at the end of the hallway, my wife got arrested,” Serrano said. “Arrested without any order, any warrant … They took away my wife. They don’t tell me anything.”

Since then, El Salvador native Deisy Rivera Ortega has challenged her detention in U.S. District Court and requested an order to block her deportation to Mexico — where she does not have ties and visits by active duty U.S. troops are restricted.

Attorney Matthew James Kozik said Rivera Ortega held a valid work permit and was previously granted a withholding of removal to El Salvador.

The Department of Homeland Security said in an email that Rivera Ortega entered the U.S. illegally in 2016 and that a judge issued a final order of removal in December 2019.

“Work authorization does not confer any legal status to be in the country. Rivera-Ortega remains in ICE custody pending removal,” the agency said. The agency did not address whether Rivera Ortega might be deported to Mexico.

Rivera Ortega was being held at El Paso Service Processing Center, where Serrano says he was able to visit Sunday and talk to his wife through a plastic pane.

She applied for consideration with her husband under the “parole in place” policy that previously provided a possibly expedited pathway to permanent residency for spouses of service members.

But last April, DHS eliminated a 2022 policy that considered military service of an immediate family member to be a “significant mitigating factor” in deciding whether or not to pursue immigration enforcement. The administration’s new policy states that “military service alone does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.”

TEXAS – The battlefield is narrowing and the timeline is tightening in a congressional redistricting contest among states seeking a partisan advantage ahead of the November midterm elections.

Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment authorizing a Democratic redistricting plan that could help the party win several additional House seats in this year’s elections. Next up could be Florida, where lawmakers are to begin a special session April 28 for a Republican attempt at congressional redistricting.

Voting districts typically are redrawn once a decade, after each census. But President Donald Trump triggered an unusual round of mid-decade redistricting last year when he urged Texas Republicans to redraw House districts to give the GOP an edge in the midterm elections. California Democrats reciprocated, and redistricting efforts soon cascaded across states.

So far, Republicans believe they could win up to nine additional seats in states where they have redrawn congressional districts while Democrats think they could gain up to 10 seats elsewhere because of redistricting. But that presumes past voting patterns hold in November. And that’s uncertain, especially since the party in power typically loses seats in the midterms and Trump faces negative approval ratings in polls.

Democrats need to gain just a few seats in November to wrest control of the House from Republicans, potentially allowing them to obstruct Trump’s agenda.

Next up on redistricting: Florida

Current map: eight Democrats, 20 Republicans

Proposed map: Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has called a special legislative session to begin April 28 on congressional redistricting. Republicans haven’t yet publicly released a specific plan.

Challenges: The state constitution says districts cannot be drawn with intent to favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent.
Where new House districts were approved

New U.S. House districts have been adopted in seven states since last summer. Five took up redistricting voluntarily, one was required to by its state constitution and another did so under court order.

Texas

Current map: 13 Democrats, 25 Republicans

New map: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a revised House map into law last August that could help Republicans win five additional seats.

Challenges: The U.S. Supreme Court in December cleared the way for the new districts to be used in this year’s elections. It put on hold a lower-court ruling that blocked the new map because it was “racially gerrymandered.”

California

Current map: 43 Democrats, nine Republicans

New map: Voters in November approved revised House districts drawn by the Democratic-led Legislature that could help Democrats win five additional seats.

Challenges: The U.S. Supreme Court in February allowed the new districts to be used in this year’s elections. It denied an appeal from Republicans and the Department of Justice, which claimed the districts impermissibly favor Hispanic voters.

Missouri

Current map: two Democrats, six Republicans

New map: Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a revised House map into law last September that could help Republicans win an additional seat.

Challenges: A Cole County judge ruled the new map is in effect as election officials work to determine whether a referendum petition seeking a statewide vote complies with constitutional criteria and contains enough valid petition signatures. The Missouri Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit claiming mid-decade redistricting is illegal. It’s scheduled to hear arguments in May on claims the new districts violate compactness requirements and should be placed on hold pending the potential referendum.

North Carolina

Current map: four Democrats, 10 Republicans

New map: The Republican-led General Assembly gave final approval in October to revised districts that could help Republicans win an additional seat.

Challenges: A federal court panel in November denied a request to block the revised districts from being used in the midterm elections.

Ohio

Current map: five Democrats, 10 Republicans

New map: A bipartisan panel composed primarily of Republicans voted in October to approve revised House districts that improve Republicans’ chances of winning two additional seats.

Challenges: None. The state constitution required new districts before the 2026 election, because Republicans had approved the prior map without sufficient Democratic support after the last census.

Utah

Current map: no Democrats, four Republicans

New map: A judge in November imposed revised House districts that could help Democrats win a seat. The court ruled that lawmakers had circumvented anti-gerrymandering standards passed by voters when adopting the prior map.

Challenges: A federal court panel and the state Supreme Court, in February, each rejected Republican challenges to the judicial map selection.

Virginia

Current map: six Democrats, five Republicans

New map: Voters approved a constitutional amendment authorizing new U.S. House districts backed by Democrats that could help the party win up to four additional seats.

Challenges: The state Supreme Court allowed the referendum to proceed, but it has yet to rule whether the effort is legal. The court is considering an appeal of a Tazewell County judge’s ruling that the amendment is invalid because lawmakers violated their own rules while passing it.
Where redistricting efforts were denied

Governors, lawmakers or partisan officials pushed for congressional redistricting in numerous states. In at least five states, those efforts gained some initial traction but ultimately fell short in either the legislature or court.

Maryland
Current map: seven Democrats, one Republican

Proposed map: The Democratic-led House in February passed a redistricting plan backed by Democratic Gov. Wes Moore that could help Democrats win an additional seat.

Challenges: The legislative session ended in April without the Democratic-led Senate voting on the redistricting plan. The state Senate president said there were concerns it could backfire on Democrats.

New York

Current map: 19 Democrats, seven Republicans

Proposed map: A judge in January ordered a state commission to draw new boundaries for the only congressional district in New York City represented by a Republican, ruling it unconstitutionally dilutes the votes of Black and Hispanic residents.

Challenges: The U.S. Supreme Court in March granted Republicans’ request to halt the judge’s order, leaving the existing district lines in place for the 2026 election.

Indiana

Current map: two Democrats, seven Republicans

Proposed map: The Republican-led House passed a redistricting plan in December that would have improved Republicans’ chances of winning two additional seats.

Challenges: Despite pressure from Trump to adopt the new map, the Republican-led Senate rejected it in a bipartisan vote on Dec. 11.

Kansas

Current map: one Democrat, three Republicans

Proposed map: Some Republican lawmakers mounted an attempt to take up congressional redistricting.

Challenges: Lawmakers dropped a petition drive for a special session on congressional redistricting in November, after failing to gain enough support.

Illinois

Current map: 14 Democrats, three Republicans

Proposed map: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in October proposed a new U.S. House map that would improve Democrats’ chances of winning an additional seat.

Challenges: The Democratic-led General Assembly declined to take up redistricting, citing concerns about the effect on representation for Black residents.