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Two prominent Texas Republicans said this week that they voted for a Democrat, James Talarico, over Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race for an open Senate seat.
Wayne Thorburn, a former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas, told the Texas Tribune that he voted for Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans but could not support Paxton. And Neil Bush, son of the late president George H.W. Bush, wrote on Facebook that he voted for Talarico because of “deep concern about Ken Paxton’s record and genuine admiration for the character and principles I see in James Talarico.”
“Like so many people, I think I’m looking at the character aspects of this race,” Thorburn told the Texas Tribune. “That, to me, is really important. And James appears to be — I’ve never met him, but from what I’ve seen and read, and everything I know about him — he seems to be a man of individual character.”
Paxton has had trouble uniting Republicans since he defeated Sen. John Cornyn in the primary runoff in May. Talarico has attacked Paxton for being indicted for securities fraud and for being impeached in 2023 by the Texas House of Representatives, among other scandals. Thorburn said he would have voted for Cornyn but would not support Paxton. (A judge dismissed the fraud case against Paxton after he completed a pretrial diversion program without admitting guilt; Paxton was acquitted by the state Senate after his impeachment.)
Paxton, in turn, has attacked Talarico for his past calls for Americans to eat less meat and emit fewer greenhouse gases to fight climate change.
“Oil. Beef. A way of life,” one recent Paxton ad says. “But radical James Talarico wants to set it ablaze.”
Chiricahua had been a protected national monument for more than 100 years before it became a national park Tuesday.
The different labels are primarily a legal distinction. National parks can only be named with congressional approval, and that gives them more permanent legal protection that can only be undone by Congress.
Meanwhile, the permanence of monuments is under intense debate. Presidents can unilaterally declare national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which does not mention whether presidents can also rescind or change previously declared monuments. The Trump administration has argued that it can — and shrank the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments by about 90 percent in July.
Otherwise, little is changed for Chiricahua.
“This law is mainly a name change. There’s no additional funding, and there is no boundary expansion,” said Sanober Mirza, Arizona senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group.
The annual budget for the site for this year remains unchanged as well, Mirza said.
The national park designation probably will lead to an increase in visits, Mirza said, thanks to the immediate buzz from news coverage of its creation, and because many want to check all 64 parks off their bucket list.
Electronic Arts is closing down BioWare, one of the most influential video game studios that created the Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age series.
EA announced Wednesday that it would close the studio and its Edmonton office and discontinue development of the next Mass Effect game, which was announced in 2020. The publisher said it would concentrate investment on fewer large-scale projects, part of an ongoing contraction of big budget video games in recent years.
Founded in 1995 by three doctors, BioWare helped established a template for modern role-playing games: sprawling narratives shaped by player decisions and relationships with other characters. Its games, including “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” in 2003, made conversations, moral choices and romance central to the experience. Its approach to romance became a defining influence on the genre.
Because its games allowed players to customize their identities, BioWare’s appeal reached beyond the traditionally male audiences of its genres. A 2017 analysis by research firm Quantic Foundry found that women accounted for 48 percent of surveyed fans of “Dragon Age: Inquisition,” compared with a 26 percent average for the Western role-playing games it examined.
The studio’s commercial success included 2014’s “Dragon Age: Inquisition,” which sold more than 12 million copies and won multiple awards. BioWare struggled to sustain that success, releasing a poorly received multiplayer game “Anthem,” and then 2024’s “Dragon Age: The Veilguard,” which reportedly failed to meet sales goals.
The Mass Effect trilogy, which began in 2007, married the wordy dialogue trees of role-playing games with run-and-gun gameplay, a formula that many other studios have attempted to copy, but few ever match its scale.
“BioWare has been a massive part of CDPR history. … Not a great day in the games industry,” said Michal Nowakowski, co-CEO of CD Projekt Red, creators of the Witcher and Cyberpunk game series.
Minnesota congressional candidate Eric Pratt’s campaign appeared to have clear instructions for its website: Keep President Donald Trump out of it.
That guidance accidentally became public this week as the Republican’s website featured the line: “The President is not popular, so all messaging should be focused on local politics and needs.” It appeared on a page laying out Pratt’s platform, which is focused on affordability, government accountability and public safety. Screenshots of the page spread on social media before the campaign removed the line about Trump.
The line came from an internal staff note and was accidentally published to Pratt’s website, his campaign said Wednesday.
Beneath the mistake is a reflection of the political terrain for Republicans this year. The party in power already tends to face an uphill climb during midterms, and this year some GOP candidates have been forced to balance their loyalty to Trump with Americans’ disapproval of him. Across the country, a number of Republican candidates have deleted references to the president from their websites.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates Pratt’s race in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District as “Likely Democratic.” Pratt, a state senator, is facing former state senator Matt Little, a progressive Democrat. The seat was vacated by Democratic Rep. Angie Craig, who lost the primary race for Minnesota’s open Senate seat.
The D.C. man accused of shooting a Georgia National Guard memberresponding to a fight outside a hookah bar in Southeast Washington late Sunday evening will face several federal charges, prosecutors said.
The U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. said Wednesday it is charging Jerrell Jackson, 41, with unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition, assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm during a crime of violence or dangerous offense.
Jackson is accused of firing a 9mm handgun while fleeing from several National Guard members who responded to an altercation around 11 p.m. Sunday outside Cafe 8, a popular late-night destination that has come under frequent scrutiny from D.C. officials. The city has since ordered an emergency closure of the bar.
Prosecutors wrote in their complaint that Jackson first fired into a neighboring smoke shop as he fled, then ran into an alleyway. D.C. police said Jackson refused commands from the Guard members to drop his weapon. Jackson then turned around and fired at the National Guard members pursuing him, prosecutors said.
A National Guard member was struck in the leg, authorities said. A spokesman for the Guard said Monday he had been released from the hospital.
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings hit new lows in a pair of polls released Wednesday, highlighting the political challenge for Republicans two weeks before the midterm elections.
Just 36 percent of likely voters said that they approved of Trump’s performance in a new national pollfrom the New York Times and Siena University released on Wednesday. Trump fared even worse in a CNN poll, where 32 percent of U.S. adults said they approved of his handling of the presidency.
The surveys are consistent with a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released on Sunday, which found that Trump’s approval ratings hit a new low amid voter backlash to inflation.
The poor results across the board spell trouble for Republicans. The news outlets use different methods to conduct their polls, yet all found the same conclusion.
The New York Times and CNN polls found that Democrats stand to benefit in this political environment. In the New York Times poll, likely voters said that they preferred the Democratic candidate over the Republican in their congressional districts by 11 percentage points. In the CNN poll, the Democrats had a 10 point advantage.
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