QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Maybe we would go to Wrigley field, eat a hot dog, drink a pint of beer. You know, go to the movies. Maybe I can go see my step brothers and sister and stepmom, and you know, eat dinner at the White House.”
—Ernesto Trump on YouTube, according to the San Antonio Express-News. The 34-year old Odessa man, né Ernesto Baeza Acosta, claims to be the son of President Donald Trump. A judge recently approved his request to legally change of his surname to better reflect his purported lineage.
BIG NEWS
Big Four
Houston’s city council voted on Wednesday to sue the state of Texas over Senate Bill 4, joining forces with the next three biggest cities in the state to fight what critics say is a discriminatory “show me your papers” provision targeting Hispanics. The council voted 10-6 to join San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, El Paso County, Maverick County, and the tiny border town of El Cenizo in a consolidated lawsuit, according to the Houston Chronicle. One councilman abstained. The council’s vote had the support of Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, both of whom have been critical of SB 4. “This is not an issue of our choosing,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said, according to the Chronicle. “But when it ends up on your plate, you have to address it.” The vote followed more than five hours of public testimony about the sanctuary cities law on Tuesday. Although most of the residents who packed the chambers supported the city joining the litigation, the controversial law drew some heated exchanges. A San Antonio federal court will hold an initial hearing for the case on Monday to decide whether to issue a preliminary injunction on the law, which is set to go into effect on September 1.
MEANWHILE, IN TEXAS
Hi, Cindy
Tropical Storm Cindy is here. As expected, she made landfall near the Texas and Louisiana border early Thursday morning, and though she’s expected to weaken while making her way over land, Cindy has already caused some damage in Texas and is expected to bring heavy rains to coastal cities, including Galveston and Houston. According to the Houston Chronicle, Galveston and other cities sitting directly on the coast saw gusts of wind surpassing forty miles per hour, toppling tree limbs. About 800 homes and businesses were temporarily without power in Galveston Wednesday night, and the Houston area is expected to get between one and three inches of rain during the heaviest portion of the storm Thursday morning. Cindy is Texas’s first test of this hurricane season, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted last month would be particularly rough.
Census Says
New federal census data is in, and there are few surprises for Texas, beyond the usual jaw-dropping population growth numbers. As of July 2016, the population here came in at just under 27.9 million, an increase from 25.1 million in 2010. More than 1.4 million of that 2.7 million increase are Hispanic Texans (the state’s white population only jumped by about 444,000). Thankfully, the Texas Tribune is here to do the math for us and help add some perspective to those gaudy numbers. “Put another way,” the Tribune writes, “since 2010, Texas has gained more than three times as many Hispanic residents than whites.” The state will configure its congressional district map after the 2020 census, with population demographics likely to play a huge role in how that map takes shape.
Nurse Hatchet
A renewed push to keep San Antonio’s infamous “angel of death” behind bars continued on Wednesday, when a San Antonio grand jury indicted former nurse Genene Jones on a second new murder charge in the death of two-year-old Rosemary Vega more than thirty years earlier, Peter Elkind reported for Texas Monthly. Elkin first wrote about Jones for the magazine in 1983. The nurse was convicted in 1984 for the murder of a baby in Kerrville, but prosecutors have long suspected her of being behind the deaths of more than a dozen babies. With Jones heading toward a 2018 release from prison, prosecutors scrambled for the past year to keep her behind bars, culminating in Jones’s indictment last month in the alleged murder of another baby, Joshua Sawyer. Now she has another new case. According to Elkind, Jones has always maintained her innocence.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Some links are paywalled or subscription-only.
A father and son from Corpus Christi were found dead in the New Mexico desert Corpus Christi Caller-Times
This guy put up a billboard in Boerne to criticize ABC News for supposedly being biased against Trump Dallas Morning News
The Crystal City corruption trial is every bit as salacious as expected San Antonio Express-News
Two Dallasites were apprehended following a high speed chase after allegedly stealing nearly $2,000 worth of makeup from a Walmart in Ennis Waxahachie Daily Light
According to the internet, this dog looks like Ted Cruz Austin American-Statesman
