Greg Abbott on Thursday pardoned Daniel Perry, who has been serving a 25-year sentence since 2023 murder conviction
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas issued a full pardon on Thursday to a former US army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.
Abbott announced the pardon just minutes after the Texas board of pardons and paroles disclosed it had made a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored. Perry has been held in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his conviction in 2023.
In They Came for the Schools, Mike Hixenbaugh looks at how a conservative agenda caused conflict in his Texas school system
Mike Hixenbaugh had been a journalist for years, reporting on a variety of topics ranging from education policy to healthcare, the military and other subjects, when one day he discovered a potential story literally in his front yard. It was the summer of 2020, and in response to a local Facebook thread spreading false information about antifa operating in his neighborhood, Hixenbaugh and his wife, who is Black, put up a Black Lives Matter lawn sign in their front yard. The response was prompt: “Every weekend for two months after my wife put the sign up, someone drove their four-wheeler into our yard and did donuts in it, churning up deep divots in the grass.”
At that point, Hixenbaugh realized that something had been happening in his quiet Dallas suburb of Southlake, something that was probably very big – unraveling just what was afoot would be the journalistic work of years, and would ultimately result in his new book, They Came for the Schools.
NYT: Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity California draws more electricity from the sun than any other state. It also has a timing problem: Solar power is plentiful during the day but disappears by evening, just as people get home from work and electricity demand spikes. To fill the gap, power companies typically burn more fossil fuels like natural gas.
That's now changing. Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark.
Those batteries play a pivotal role in California's electric grid, partially replacing fossil fuels in the evening. Between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 30, for example, batteries supplied more than one-fifth of California's electricity and, for a few minutes, pumped out 7,046 megawatts of electricity, akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors.
Across the country, power companies are increasingly using giant batteries the size of shipping containers to address renewable energy's biggest weakness: the fact that the wind and sun aren't always available. ... Over the past three years, battery storage capacity on the nation's grids has grown tenfold, to 16,000 megawatts. This year, it is expected to nearly double again, with the biggest growth in Texas, California and Arizona.
Most grid batteries use lithium-ion technology, similar to batteries in smartphones or electric cars. As the electric vehicle industry has expanded over the past decade, battery costs have fallen by 80 percent, making them competitive for large-scale power storage. Government mandates and subsidies have also spurred growth. ...
Texas is quickly catching up to California in solar power, and batteries increasingly help with evening peaks. On April 28, the sun was setting just as wind power was unexpectedly low and many coal and gas plants were offline for repairs. Batteries jumped in, supplying 4 percent of Texas's electricity at one point, enough to power a million homes. Last summer, batteries helped avert evening blackouts by providing additional power during record heat.
The US Supreme Court yesterday denied a request to block a Texas law that requires age-verification systems on porn websites. The Supreme Court denial leaves in place, at least for now, an appeals court ruling that said Texas can enforce the law.
"The application for stay presented to Justice [Samuel] Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied," the one-sentence order issued yesterday said.
Pornhub disabled its website in Texas after the appeals court ruling in March. Pornhub and other websites owned by the same company have also gone dark in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia in protest of similar laws.
The U.S.D.A. announced last month that dairy cattle in Texas and Kansas had tested positive for the bird flu virus, called H5N1. It has since reported cases in dozens of herds in eight states.
The company’s directors are asking shareholders to again approve the multibillion-dollar compensation plan and to move the company’s registration to Texas, from Delaware.
A digital form of protest could become the go-to response for the world’s largest porn website as it faces increased regulations: Not letting people access the site.
In March, PornHub blocked access to visitors connecting to its website from Texas. It marked the second time in the past 12 months that the porn giant shut off its website to protest new requirements in online age verification.
The Texas law, which was signed in June 2023, requires several types of adult websites to verify the age of their visitors by either collecting visitors’ information from a government ID or relying on a third party to verify age through the collection of multiple streams of data, such as education and employment status.
PornHub has long argued that these age verification methods do not keep minors safer and that they place undue onus on websites to collect and secure sensitive information.
The fact remains, however, that these types of laws are growing in popularity.
Today, Lock and Code revisits a prior episode from 2023 with guest Alec Muffett, discussing online age verification proposals, how they could weaken security and privacy on the internet, and whether these efforts are oafishly trying to solve a societal problem with a technological solution.
“The battle cry of these people have has always been—either directly or mocked as being—’Could somebody think of the children?’” Muffett said. “And I’m thinking about the children because I want my daughter to grow up with an untracked, secure private internet when she’s an adult. I want her to be able to have a private conversation. I want her to be able to browse sites without giving over any information or linking it to her identity.”
Muffett continued:
“I’m trying to protect that for her. I’d like to see more people grasping for that.”
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