Texas

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A man has been charged in the abduction of an 8-year-old girl who was snatched from a street in Fort Worth, Texas, as she walked with her mother.

Fort Worth police say the girl was found safe Sunday, about eight hours later, at a hotel in nearby Forest Hill.

Police say 51-year-old Michael Webb was arrested on an aggravated kidnapping charge. He is being held without bond.

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas (AP) — A South Texas church began a fresh chapter of worship on Sunday as it unveiled a new sanctuary a year and a half after a gunman opened fire and killed more than two dozen congregants in the deadliest mass shooting in state history.

Parishioners, elected leaders and relatives of those killed or injured at the First Baptist Church in the tiny town of Sutherland Springs gathered at the new sanctuary for its dedication. Some among the hundreds in attendance wore royal blue shirts with ”#evildidnotwin” written across the back.

DALLAS (AP) — A spate of tornadoes raked across the Southern Plains, leaving damage and causing few injuries, and parts of the region were bracing for more severe thunderstorms and possible flooding.

The National Weather Service confirmed an EF2 twister Saturday morning with winds up to 130 mph (209 kph) that destroyed at least two homes and left one person with minor injuries in southwestern Oklahoma.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A year after a high school mass shooting near Houston that remains one of the deadliest in U.S. history, Texas lawmakers are on the brink of going home without passing any new gun restrictions, or even tougher firearm storage laws that Gov. Greg Abbott backed after the tragedy.

A Republican governor pushing even a small restriction on firearms kept at home in gun-friendly Texas was a landmark shift after two decades of loosening weapons regulations.

DALLAS (AP) — Investigators who were “thwarted” during earlier investigations of child sexual abuse by priests on Wednesday searched the offices of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas to obtain evidence of sexual misconduct, according to a police commander and police records.

Investigators searched the diocesan headquarters, a storage unit it uses and the offices of a church, police Maj. Max Geron told reporters.

BAYPORT, Texas (AP) — A busy commercial waterway near Houston remains partially closed following a collision involving four vessels that caused a toxic gasoline product to leak into the water.

Authorities said at a news conference Saturday that the hull of a 755-foot (230-meter) tanker punctured storage tanks on a tug boat that was pushing two barges along the Houston Ship Channel.

One barge capsized Friday. The other was damaged.

MCALLEN, Texas (AP) — Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan visited a border city in Texas on Saturday and said he intends to accelerate planning to secure the border and bolster the administration’s ability to accomplish that without the Pentagon’s continuous help.

He also offered assurances to perhaps two dozen Border Patrol agents and other officials at the McAllen Border Patrol Station that the Pentagon would not withdraw its military support prematurely.

HOUSTON, May 8 (Xinhua): A project manager of China Mobile International Limited (CMI) said Tuesday night that energy enterprises, like companies in other industries, are facing challenging of cyber security.

Gongpeng Wei, project manager of CMI which is headquartered in Hong Kong and is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Mobile, told the 2019 Energy Industry Theme Reception, held in Houston, U.S. state of Texas during the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC), that 2018 was a year of frequent information leakage incidents.

HOUSTON (AP) — Residents seeking compensation after their Houston-area homes and businesses were flooded by two federally owned reservoirs during Hurricane Harvey say authorities knew for decades that such an inundation was inevitable but did nothing to prevent it, an attorney for the property owners said in court Monday.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — An avowed racist who orchestrated one of the most gruesome hate crimes in U.S. history was executed Wednesday in Texas for the dragging death of a black man.

John William King, who was white, received a lethal injection for the slaying nearly 21 years ago of James Byrd Jr., who was chained to the back of a truck and dragged for nearly 3 miles (5 kilometers) along a secluded road in the piney woods outside Jasper, Texas.