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      At Least Four Dead as Storms Batter Houston Area

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      Buildings were damaged in Houston and school officials canceled classes in the city on Friday, citing the destruction.Glass and debris covered the streets in Houston as heavy rains swept through the state.KBTVFour people were killed and more than one million people were without power as intense thunderstorms swept through Texas on Thursday evening, bringing heavy rain, destructive winds and dangerous flooding to portions of the state that had already been inundated this month.There were reports of blown-out windows, shredded building facades and downed power lines in Houston as a powerful storm tore through the downtown area. Four people were killed by falling trees, said Mary Benton, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office. At least one of the victims was inside a vehicle she added. The public school district in Houston said all schools would be closed Friday.Ahead of the storm, the National Weather Service in Houston warned people to take cover and brace for winds up to 80 miles per hour.Forecasters had also issued a tornado warning for the area as well as a special marine warning for the area including the Galveston Bay.More than one million customers were without power across Texas, most of them in the Houston area, according to Poweroutage.us. CenterPoint Energy, the provider in southeast Texas, said it had received reports of downed power lines and advised customers that its call centers were overwhelmed.

      Share of customers without power by county

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      Source: PowerOutage.us
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       Counties shown are those with at least 1 percent of customers without power.
      By The New York Times

      Local news broadcasts reported considerable damage in downtown Houston, where a club emerged from the storm missing a brick wall, metal sign posts appeared twisted by the force of the winds and blown out windows.Forecasters issued a string of flash flood warnings across the state earlier in the afternoon, warning Texans in those areas to seek higher ground and avoid driving through flooded roadways.Images and videos circulating on social media emerging from east-central Texas on Thursday showed vehicles that appeared to struggle driving through flooded roads in College Station, Texas, which was under a flash flood warning through the evening.One video posted in the evening showed strong winds whipping large panel structures at Minute Maid Park, where the Houston Astros were playing the Oakland Athletics.The Weather Prediction Center said earlier Thursday that more than 12 million people across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi faced the threat of excessive rainfall that could produce flash flooding and warned of potential heavy rains and flooding north of the Houston area on Thursday night.Lina Hidalgo, the top executive of Harris County, which includes Houston, said earlier on social media that rain was expected to move through Harris County “fairly quickly” on Thursday night.“But the worst case scenario is that heavy rain could hit the East Fork of the San Jacinto River, impacting residents and eventually causing more flooding as we get into the weekend,” she said.Portions of Harris County, including areas near the San Jacinto River, were already been hit with major flooding earlier this month. The flooding prompted Ms. Hidalgo to issue a disaster declaration that would bring federal aid to Harris County residents who were affected by the storms. More

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      East Texas, Already Soaked, Prepares for a ‘Nightmare Scenario’ of More Rain

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      Some places in Texas have seen a year’s worth of rainfall since January.In a densely forested region of East Texas called the Piney Woods, rivers are still in moderate to major flood stage after recent weeks of heavy rainfall. Now, the region is preparing for what forecasters are calling a “nightmare scenario” with another round of excessive rain, which could lead to more considerable flooding on Thursday into Friday morning.“It’s just an insane amount of rain,” said Jimmy Fowler, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Houston, “that just seems to keep falling over the same area.”This week’s forecast calls for an additional three to five inches of rain in the same part of Texas, southeast of Dallas and northeast of Houston, where “considerable rainfall amounts have occurred this month,” forecasters said.“Over the last 14 days, portions of eastern Texas have received five to 10 inches of rain, with localized amounts as high as 15 to 20 inches,” Marc Chenard, a senior forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center, an arm of the National Weather Service, said Tuesday afternoon. “This is 400 to 600 percent the normal rain for this two-week period.”

      Where streams and rivers flooded

      Minor

      Moderate

      Major

      Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
      Notes:

       Minor flooding is defined as causing minimal or no property damage.
      Moderate flooding
      could lead to inundation of structures and roads, causing some evacuations.
      Major flooding could lead to extensive inundation of structures and roads, causing
      significant evacuations.
      By Bea Malsky

      This week, some isolated areas could see six to 10 more inches, Mr. Chenard added. And it will fall on saturated ground. Since January, some towns, like Huntsville, Texas, have already exceeded the 51 inches of rainfall they would typically receive in an entire year.While some of the river gauges that are in flood stage now are still short of the record-high levels seen during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the past few weeks have been a compounding onslaught of heavy rainfall, especially across the Piney Woods region, Mr. Fowler said.Because the ground is so saturated, Mr. Fowler said, it would most likely only take a storm producing one to three inches of rain in an hour to cause flash flooding.Wednesday is supposed to be relatively dry, but it won’t be enough time to dry out the ground before Thursday’s rain. If anything, the water that evaporates will just add to the moisture in the air, helping fuel the rainfall on Thursday.Forecasters with the Weather Prediction Center warned that if the forecast computer weather models continued to show the “bullseye” of excessive rain lingering over the already flooded region, then they would most likely increase the probability of flash flooding to a higher level.Confidence is high among forecasters that rain will drench the region again Thursday. However, there were a few outliers in the computer models Wednesday that showed the rain farther north, which would be good news for the waterlogged Piney Woods.The flood concern will move east across the South as the multiple waves of storms move over Louisiana from Thursday into Friday. By the start of the weekend, East Texas may begin to dry out, but rounds of rain will pound Southern Mississippi and Alabama, which have also been stuck in a similar rainy pattern recently. More

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      A White-Collar Indictment Shatters Representative Henry Cuellar’s Blue-Collar Image

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      Representative Henry Cuellar started from humble origins, but records show he welcomed the trappings of power afforded by his position.Over the years, Representative Henry Cuellar often harked back to the small house in Laredo, Texas. It was there that his parents, one-time migrant workers who spoke no English, raised him and his seven siblings to value hard work and beware the dangers of debt.The references in speeches, campaign advertisements and interviews were intended to forge affinity with the largely Hispanic residents of his hometown. They demonstrated that “I am one of you,” as his campaign website put it in 2004, when he first won election to Congress as a Democrat representing Laredo, one of the poorest cities in the country.By 2013, those hardscrabble beginnings seemed a distant memory.Mr. Cuellar had become the hub of a bustling small enterprise that blurred the lines between his political operation, his businesses and his family, affording him trappings of affluence even as he sometimes strained to make ends meet.He had recently purchased a penthouse apartment in Washington’s bustling Navy Yard neighborhood near Nationals Park and a pair of properties in Laredo, including a 6,000-square-foot house with a pool and cabana in a gated community on a street called Estate Drive. He took on an increasing amount of debt, and his net worth declined.A new source of cash soon revealed itself, federal prosecutors are now saying.Starting in 2014, Mr. Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, accepted at least $598,000 over seven years from a Mexican bank and an oil company owned by the Azerbaijani government, according to prosecutors.The Cuellars were charged earlier this month with accepting bribes, money laundering and violating foreign lobbying laws by trying to influence the government on behalf of their foreign paymasters. They pleaded not guilty and were released after each paid a bond of $100,000.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Blocks New U.S. Rule Limiting Credit Card Late Fees

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      Set to take effect on Tuesday, the rule would save households $10 billion a year in “junk fees,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said.In March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that a new federal rule would cap fees on late credit card payments at $8 a month, estimating that the change would save American households $10 billion a year.On Friday, a federal judge in Fort Worth temporarily blocked the rule, siding with bank and credit card company lobbyists who contend in a lawsuit that it is unconstitutional.The rule was scheduled to take effect on Tuesday. Now, the lobbyists can continue their legal fight in U.S. District Court before Judge Mark T. Pittman, who granted the preliminary injunction.The consumer bureau’s new rule would limit issuers to an $8 fee unless they could show that more money was needed to cover their collection costs. The bureau estimated that the rule would apply to more than 95 percent of all outstanding credit card balances.The Federal Reserve previously aimed to significantly limit credit card late fees in 2010. But a loophole in its rule, which permitted adjustments for inflation, allowed banks and credit card companies to charge an average of $32 a month in late fees, according to the consumer bureau.In announcing the new rule, Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director, said it would end “the era of big credit card companies hiding behind the excuse of inflation when they hike fees on borrowers and boost their own bottom lines.” President Biden backed the rule, saying, “The American people are tired of being played for suckers.”Two days later, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the American Bankers Association and the Consumer Bankers Association — whose boards of directors include executives from Bank of America, Capital One, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase — in suing Mr. Chopra and his bureau. Three Texas business associations are also plaintiffs. More

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      in US Politics

      Unsuccessful Biden challenger is first Democrat to call for Henry Cuellar’s resignation

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      The Minnesota congressman who unsuccessfully challenged Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary became the first member of their party to call on fellow US House representative Henry Cuellar to resign after federal bribery charges were unveiled against the Texas politician on Friday.In a post on X, Dean Phillips urged Cuellar to step down, along with other politicians faced with pending criminal cases – including Biden’s presidential predecessor and Republican rival Donald Trump as well as Democratic US senator Bob Menendez.“While the bar for federal indictment is high, trust in our government is low,” Phillips’ post on X said. “That’s why office holders and candidates under indictment should resign or end their campaigns, including [senator] Bob Menendez, Donald Trump & [congressman] Henry Cuellar.”The remarks from Phillips came after federal prosecutors alleged on Friday that Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, accepted about $600,000 in bribes in exchange for influencing policy in favor of Azerbaijan as well as a Mexican bank between December 2014 and November 2021.Imelda Cuellar used “sham consulting contracts”, front companies and intermediaries to launder the money, prosecutors contended. And in return for the bribes, Henry Cuellar – who has represented a swath of Texas’s border with Mexico in Congress since 2005 – steered US foreign policy to Azerbaijan’s advantage while pressuring unnamed “high-ranking” federal government executives to implement measures benefiting the bank.In a statement, Henry Cuellar maintained his and his wife’s innocence. “I want to be clear that both my wife and I are innocent of these allegations,” the congressman’s statement said. “Everything I have done in Congress has been to serve the people of south Texas.”Friday’s announcement from prosecutors prompted the House Democratic minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, to say that Cuellar would step down as the ranking member of a homeland security subcommittee while the case against him proceeded. Jeffries cited the party’s rules in the House.However, Jeffries made it a point to describe Cuellar as “a valued member of the House Democratic caucus” who was “entitled to his day in court and the presumption of innocence throughout the legal process”.Phillips did not concur, in his estimation lumping in Cuellar with Menendez and Trump as politicians who did not deserve to hold elected office as they grappled with criminal charges.Menendez has pleaded not guilty to federal corruption charges – he has said he doesn’t plan to run for re-election as a Democrat but hasn’t ruled out an independent candidacy.Trump has pleaded not guilty to nearly 90 felonies for trying to subvert the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, improper retention of classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments to an adult film actor that prosecutors allege were improperly covered up.The former president’s trial centering on the hush money concluded its third week on Friday. He is the Republican party’s presumptive nominee for November’s presidential race.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne indicted politician who recently did not leave his position on his own terms was George Santos, who was expelled from the US House amid fraud-related charges.Phillips mounted a long-shot bid to deny Biden from winning a second consecutive Democratic nomination seemingly against the advice of most of his party colleagues.Biden dominated the contest, and Phillips dropped out after losing his home state.His cause was not helped when a political operative working for the Phillips campaign – without permission from the candidate or his advisers – admitted being behind a artificial intelligence-created robocall that spoofed Biden’s voice on the eve of the primary’s start and urged Democrats in New Hampshire to avoid voting.Phillips was first elected to Congress to represent a wealthier suburban area outside Minneapolis in 2019 but gave up seeking re-election to his seat in November to pursue his challenge to Biden. More

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      Congressman Henry Cuellar in court accused of receiving $600,000 in bribes

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      The US justice department on Friday accused the Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, of accepting about $600,000 in bribes in exchange for influencing policy in favor of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.The Cuellars had made their first appearance before a federal magistrate judge in Houston by the afternoon, but it was not clear how they pleaded. Earlier, the congressman, who has represented a swath of Texas’s border with Mexico in the US House since 2005, issued a statement denying unspecified “allegations” against him.“I want to be clear that both my wife and I are innocent of these allegations. Everything I have done in Congress has been to serve the people of South Texas,” Cuellar said.He added that “I’m running for re-election and will win this November,” when Democrats are hoping to regain the majority in the House of Representatives.The justice department said that between December 2014 and November 2021, the Cuellars received bribes from an unspecified bank headquartered in Mexico City as well as an oil and gas company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan.Imelda Cuellar then allegedly used “sham consulting contracts”, front companies and intermediaries to launder the money.In return, the congressman influenced US foreign policy to Azerbaijan’s advantage and pressured unnamed “high-ranking” officials in the executive branch to take actions in favor of the bank.A statement from the House Democratic minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said that under the party’s rules in the chamber, Cuellar would step down as the ranking member of a homeland security subcommittee while he faces these charges.Jeffries added that Cuellar “admirably devoted his career to public service … is a valued member of the House Democratic caucus” and was “entitled to his day in court and the presumption of innocence throughout the legal process”.Two years ago, the FBI raided Cuellar’s Laredo, Texas, home and campaign office as part of an investigation into US businessmen and their links with Azerbaijan. Cuellar said he was cooperating with their inquiry, and months later, an attorney for the lawmaker told Fox News that he was not a target of the investigation that led to the raid.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn his statement on Friday, the congressman said that “before I took any action, I proactively sought legal advice from the House Ethics Committee, who gave me more than one written opinion, along with an additional opinion from a national law firm. The actions I took in Congress were consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues and in the interest of the American people.”Cuellar added that he had requested to meet with “the Washington DC prosecutors to explain the facts and they refused to discuss the case with us or to hear our side”.Federal charges could complicate the re-election of 68-year-old Cuellar, who is seeking an 11th term in office. A moderate Democrat, he supported a bipartisan Senate bill that would have tightened immigration policy, and is the party’s sole House lawmaker opposed to passing federal legislation to guarantee abortion access.After the 2022 raid on his home and office, Cuellar narrowly won the Democratic primary against his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, then easily beat the Republican Cassy Garcia in the general election. More

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      Severe Weather Expected to Bring Tornadoes and Flooding to Great Plains

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      Forecasters on Saturday said that “dangerous supercell thunderstorms” were possible that could produce strong tornadoes.The threat of tornadoes loomed across parts of the Central U.S. as warnings were posted in parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas amid severe thunderstorms and high winds throughout the Great Plains on Saturday.The severe weather followed a day in which tornadoes tore through parts of Nebraska and Iowa, leveling dozens of homes on Friday.Tornadoes Friday and SaturdayLocations of tornado sightings or damage reported by trained spotters. More

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      Prosecutor to appeal against Texas woman’s acquittal over voting error

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      A Texas prosecutor will appeal against a court ruling tossing out a five-year prison sentence for a woman who unintentionally tried to vote while ineligible in the 2016 election, an unexpected move that continues one of the most closely watched voting prosecutions in the US.Last month, the second court of appeals, which is based in Fort Worth, threw out the 2018 conviction of Crystal Mason, a Black woman who submitted a provisional ballot in 2016 that ultimately went uncounted. Mason was on supervised release for a federal felony at the time she voted and has said she had no idea she was ineligible. The panel said prosecutors had failed to prove Mason actually knew she was ineligible.But the Tarrant county district attorney, Phil Sorrells, a Republican, announced on Thursday he was appealing to the Texas court of criminal appeals, the highest criminal court in Texas.“The trial court’s guilty verdict should be affirmed. Voting is a cornerstone of our democracy. This office will protect the ballot box from fraudsters who think our laws don’t apply to them,” Sorrells said in a statement. “The second court of appeals’ publication of its opinion creates the very real risk that future sufficiency cases will likewise be wrongly analyzed and decided.”When election workers were unable to find Mason’s name on the voter rolls on election day in 2016, they offered her the chance to cast a provisional ballot. The key piece of evidence used to convict her was testimony from election workers saying they believed she had read an affidavit warning that someone cannot vote until they complete “any term of incarceration, parole, supervision, parole or probation”.Mason says she did not read the affidavit and that no one ever told her she could not vote. It is undisputed that she was never told she could not vote.“It is disappointing that the State has chosen to request further review of Ms Mason’s case, but we are confident that justice will ultimately prevail. The court of appeals’ decision was well reasoned and correct. It is time to give Ms Mason peace with her family,” Thomas Buser-Clancy, an attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an email.Mason has already had to serve an additional 10 months in federal prison while she appeals the state conviction. She remains free on an appeal bond and is living in Fort Worth.“I’m truly saddened at this moment that the state in this upcoming election is still sending a message,” Mason said in a text message. “I just don’t understand. My heart is very very heavy right now.” More