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A 2024 war among Republicans tilted the House to the right. Now more closely aligned with the Senate, Speaker Dustin Burrows has accelerated action on bail, school vouchers and social issues.

With tensions boiling over in the final days of the 2021 Texas legislative session, Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Lubbock Republican and a top House lieutenant, went out of his way to throw shade at the Senate and its leader, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, for letting too many House bills languish.

From the back microphone on the House floor, Burrows rhetorically asked then-Speaker Dade Phelan if he was aware that “less than 50% of the House bills that we sent over were passed by the Senate” — much worse than the success rate for Senate bills sent to the lower chamber. It came shortly after Patrick had flayed the House for killing several of his top conservative priorities.

Four years later, Burrows’ first session wielding the speaker’s gavel is winding down with little of the same inter-chamber acrimony. Conservative priorities that had failed in session after session in the House, from private school vouchers to stricter bail laws, have cleared the Legislature with time to spare. So have once-thorny issues, like property tax cuts, school funding and immigration, that in years past had generated bad blood between the chambers and needed overtime sessions to address.

Many of those now-imminent laws were in the sweeping agenda Patrick unveiled near the start of the session in January, marked by several issues that Gov. Greg Abbott also championed as “emergency items.” All but a handful of Patrick’s priorities — from conservative red meat to top bipartisan priorities to the lieutenant governor’s own pet issues — have made it across the finish line or are poised to do so in the closing days of the session, which ends June 2.

The lack of discord reflects the collegial relations Patrick and Burrows have worked to maintain from the start; Burrows’ apparent desire to avoid drawing Patrick’s wrath and the political damage it inflicted upon his predecessors; and the reality that the House, thanks to the turnover wrought by a bruising 2024 primary cycle, is now more conservative and more receptive than ever to Patrick’s hard-charging agenda.

ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON, May 8 (Reuters) - A top Chinese-made Pakistani fighter plane shot down at least two Indian military aircraft on Wednesday, two U.S. officials told Reuters, marking a major milestone for Beijing's advanced fighter jet.

An Indian Air Force spokesperson said he had no comment when asked about the Reuters report.

"Republicans hold a tiny majority in the House, creating an incentive for Abbott to hold off on calling an election for Turner’s seat, which would likely be filled by a Democrat."

"Three weeks after U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner’s death and just over a month before the state’s next uniform election, Gov. Greg Abbott has not yet called a special election to fill the seat representing parts of Houston, a Democratic stronghold, in Congress.

Turner, who previously served in the Texas House for nearly three decades before becoming mayor of Houston, died March 5, two months into his first term representing Texas’ 18th Congressional District. His funeral was held in Houston on March 15.

Turner was elected to Congress last year after his predecessor and political ally, former U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, died in office after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Abbott has the sole authority to call a special election to fill Turner's seat for the rest of the two-year term. State law does not specify a deadline for the governor to order a special election. If called, the election must happen within two months of the announcement.

But the Republican governor has little incentive to send another Democrat to Congress."

Emboldened by court rulings and election victories, the Christian right is outspoken as it pushes its moral views through the Texas Legislature.

Testifying this month against bills that would put more Christianity in Texas public schools, the Rev. Jody Harrison invoked the violent persecution of her Baptist forefathers by fellow Christians in colonial America.

Harrison hoped the history lesson would remind Texas senators of Baptists’ strong support for church-state separations, and that weakening those protections would hurt people of all faiths.

Instead, she was rebuked.

“The Baptist doctrine is Christ-centered,” Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, responded sharply. “Its purpose is not to go around trying to defend this or that. It is to be a disciple and a witness for Christ. That includes the Ten Commandments. That’s prayer in schools. It is not a fight for separation between church and state.”

Harrison was not allowed to reply, but in an interview said she was stunned that a lawmaker would question a core part of her faith. The exchange, she said, perfectly encapsulated why she has fought to preserve church-state separations — the same religious protections that Campbell said are a distraction from bills that might bring school kids to Christ.

“It was a wake up call,” she said. “I don’t think people — even many churches — realize that this is going on right now, and that is alarming.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz easily defeated U.S. Rep. Colin Allred on Tuesday, defying another spirited and well-funded effort to turn Texas blue and preserving his status as a leading conservative voice in American politics.

"The results tonight, this decisive victory, should shake the Democrat establishment to its core," he said in a speech to supporters at his campaign watch party in downtown Houston.

The Associated Press called his victory after 10 p.m. as Cruz was leading by more than double digits.

Shortly after, Allred told his supporters at his election night party in Dallas that he had conceded to Cruz.

"Moldovans will be asked on Sunday to decide whether EU membership should be designated a strategic goal in the country’s constitution, a move that would further distance the former Soviet republic politically from Russia. The EU referendum coincides with Moldova's presidential election, where the country’s pro-Western leader Maia Sandu is seeking a second term against a field of mostly pro-Kremlin candidates. Both votes will take place against a backdrop of Russian meddling, including evidence of vote buying and disinformation, according to Moldovan authorities. The Kremlin has denied the allegations.

The European Commission accepted Moldova's candidacy to join the EU in 2022 and opened accession negotiations in June this year. The EU has pledged almost $2 billion in economic support for Moldova to help the country accomplish the necessary reforms to achieve membership, and improve infrastructure badly in need of an upgrade.

While various opinion polls over recent months show that most Moldovans support EU membership, residents in predominantly Russian-speaking regions like the north, or Gagauzia in the south, still favor stronger ties with Russia over EU membership."

"You might expect that mortgage rates would be falling right now after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a half-point last month.

Instead, mortgage rates jumped higher. The latest data from Freddie Mac showed that the average 30-year mortgage rate had increased to 6.4%, more than a quarter-point higher than it was two weeks ago.

The news is probably an unwelcome surprise to the folks who had been hoping for lower interest rates to finally come off the sidelines and start shopping for a home.

Here’s what’s going on — and what it means for those trying to buy a home now."

BEIRUT, Oct 16 (Reuters) - The batteries inside the weaponised pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles' heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness - the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product - they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation which has struck unprecedented blows against Israel's Iran-backed Lebanese foe and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.

"Former President Donald Trump once again appears to be in the driver’s seat in this presidential election.

When looking strictly at the polls, Trump now has the edge in two states and the other five most closely watched states are toss-ups. At the end of August, Vice President Harris had leads large enough in three of the seven states for them to lean in her direction, according to an NPR analysis of polling averages at the time.

Now, Trump has taken over the lead in an average of the polls in the seven swing states for the first time since Harris got in the race."

"As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso.

No one is waiting there now.

Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days.

In McAllen, at the other end of the Texas border, two Border Patrol agents scan fields for five hours without encountering a single migrant.

It’s a return to relative calm after an unprecedented surge of immigrants through the southern border in recent years. But no one would know that listening to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump talking about border enforcement at dueling presidential campaign events. And no one would know from the rate at which Texas is spending on a border crackdown called Operation Lone Star — $11 billion since 2021."

Yes you read that correctly. 87 point. In a football game.

Seriously. I'm watching these new kickoffs and it's just silly. Like I'm not against the concept but it's so clearly almost a punt. It's it's just a hair away from it. Just make it a punt it'd be so much simpler.