Texas Republican leaders are pushing ahead with efforts to crack down on alleged "birth tourism," even as a federal district court has blocked an effort by President Donald Trump to do the same nationwide. A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump's August executive order banning the practice last week.  The ruling last Wednesday marked the latest defeat for Trump's efforts to curtail or restrict the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants U.S. citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, regardless of the legal status of the parents. view article

The University of North Texas will establish a college of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics after receiving a $20 million gift, it announced Tuesday.  The philanthropic investment comes from Vikas Sinha, a UNT alumnus and vice president of the mainframe software division at Broadcom, a semiconductor and infrastructure manufacturer, and his wife, Anuradha. As UNT looks to strengthen its artificial intelligence education, the new college will help advance research and better prepare students for a changing workforce, university officials said in a release. “Artificial intelligence will be one of the defining technologies of our generation, and universities have an essential role to play in preparing the people who will shape its future,” Vikas Sinha said. “What excites us about UNT’s vision is that this college will go beyond teaching students how to use AI. It will prepare them to build it, understand it, question it, govern it and apply it responsibly — developing both the builders and the stewards of intelligent systems.” view article

WASHINGTON — Texas is set to receive $7.5 billion from a federal fund to reimburse states for border costs incurred when Joe Biden was president, Sen. John Cornyn told The Texas Tribune in an interview, shedding light for the first time on the Lone Star State’s haul more than a year after Congress authorized the funding.  Cornyn, a Texas Republican who was defeated in his primary this year, said Gov. Greg Abbott and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had negotiated the $7.5 billion amount. That accounts for three-quarters of the $10 billion in grant funding that is up for grabs from Mullin’s agency.  But getting that money into the hands of states has been slow going. The state border reimbursement fund was created in July 2025 in the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act, the tax-and-spending megabill supported by nearly all Republicans and uniformly opposed by Democrats. The bill authorized $13.5 billion in grant funding to state governments, a massive priority for Texas’ Republican delegation in Congress and for Cornyn, who pushed for its inclusion during negotiations over the legislation. view article

The Trump administration has said the remote West Texas region needs measures to stop illegal immigration. But a bipartisan group of elected officials is pushing to halt that plan, especially in the national park. view article

The Trump administration moved on Tuesday to roll back an environmental rule that currently blocks road construction, and by extension most logging and mining activity, on tens of millions of acres of public forest land.  The so-called "roadless rule" was introduced by the Clinton administration and went into effect in 2001. It has been a flashpoint in the U.S. fight over economic development and wild land conservation, especially in Western states, for a quarter of a century.  "Our forests can't afford another decade of inaction," U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement. "It's time to turn the page on the failed roadless rule and return our forests to health and productivity." view article

A northeast Tennessee school board this week became at least the third in the state to approve the display of the Ten Commandments in its public schools since a new GOP-backed law giving districts the option took effect July 1.   With little debate, the Washington County Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday in favor of the text’s display in a “prominent” place in each of its 15 schools, alongside the preamble to the U.S. Constitution and an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, in accordance with the new state law.   Last month, the Wilson County Board of Education voted to post the same documents in common areas of its schools. In anticipation of the then-bill becoming law, the Rutherford County Schools in April also voted to approve displaying the documents in all of the county’s K-12 public schools.   On Wednesday, only one member of the Washington County Board expressed reservations about the measure, but said he felt compelled to cast a “yes” vote after an “overwhelming response” from constituents in favor of it, including “a couple personal visits to my front door.”   Vince Walters, another board member, said he had no reservations. view article

The White House tried but failed to block funding for preschool for poor children. Instead, it will seek to strip away standards on health, literacy — and brushing teeth. view article

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

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