Tesla Inc. officially began operating a robotaxi service in Austin a year ago. Now, leadership at the Texas Department of Transportation thinks its fleet could start to surge.  view article

(The Hill) – The number of flu cases at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas continues to rise in the wake of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s banishment of the influenza vaccine mandate for service members.  The Air Force confirmed 275 cases as of Wednesday, up from 160 just last week, a figure Rep. Joaquin Castro (R-Texas) said the service had relayed to his office. In addition, four people have been hospitalized as of Tuesday, ABC News reported.  view article

Americans aren’t having enough children to maintain the country’s population, a decline driven by factors like the high cost of living.  High costs of housing and child care have weighed on people’s decision of whether to have kids at all or have as many kids as they’d like, Gregory said. Anxiety around climate change has also been a factor, she said; people might not want to bring children into a world they believe is going to be worse.  On the bright side, the nation’s falling birth rate has been fueled by a significant drop in teenage births. That’s true in Texas, which remains above the national average in teen births; the state doesn’t require sex education, makes it difficult for teenagers to access effective contraception and has the strictest abortion ban in the country.  It’s possible economic concerns about declining birth rates are overblown, Gregory said. For those future workers who aren’t being born, they are being replaced. “Women are taking the place of their unborn children in the workforce, you could say,” Gregory said. view article

Republicans are grappling with a stunning Democratic upset: a swing of 30+ points away from the G.O.P. in a deeply conservative part of the state. While the race was local, political operatives are already gaming out the impact on the midterms, how it could scramble the fundraising race, and what it portends for the Hispanic vote in the age of ICE. view article

Paxton alleges TexAM illegally operated as an unlicensed university while using branding that created confusion with Texas A&M University. view article

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."  view article

A Mississippi school district has been ordered to desegregate its schools after what the Justice Department called a five-decade-long legal battle. The Cleveland School District, about two hours northwest of Jackson, was told that it must consolidate its schools in order to provide real desegregation for students in the city of about 12,000. view article