A sport warden and his K9 colleague found virtually 381 complete shark fins and 29.2 kilos of frozen shark fins at a seafood restaurant in San Antonio, Texas.
Kevin Winters, one in all two Texas Sport Wardens who found the unlawful fins on April 13, advised CNN that the case has not but been submitted to the district lawyer’s workplace. The fins have been all taken as proof, in keeping with a Fb publish from the Texas Sport Wardens.
A number of the fins got here from blacktip sharks, that are discovered all through the Gulf of Mexico, though it isn’t clear that the sharks originated from the gulf, Winters says. He added that they weren’t capable of establish the species of all of the sharks.
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“Some have been peeled already, ready to be cooked for the soup,” he mentioned.
Shark finning – the observe of eradicating shark fins at sea and discarding the remainder of the shark – is unlawful in america, and the promoting of shark fins is unlawful in Texas. The Texas ban handed after the state “emerged as a hub for shark fins,” in keeping with marine conservation nonprofit Oceana.
Nonetheless, “the demand and the market and the commerce for [fins] is there,” Winters mentioned.
Shark fin soup is a conventional and sometimes costly delicacy served in eating places worldwide. However the persistent searching of sharks for his or her fins has led populations of some sharks to say no as a lot as 90%, in keeping with a 2018 research in Marine Coverage.
That is the primary recognized shark fin case in San Antonio, in keeping with Winters.
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“It’s fairly vital that in a metropolis that’s one-and-a-half or two hours from the coast, we’re nonetheless discovering” shark fins on the market, he mentioned.
He mentioned that these sorts of busts “don’t happen usually” – though he did as soon as uncover an excellent larger cache of 861 fins at a retailer in Houston.
Winters was aided within the inspection by his canine colleague Bailey, who’s skilled to smell out shark fin, sea turtle shells, pink snapper, dove and oysters.
“Our sharks are apex predators. Our oceans want them,” Winters mentioned. “If we begin shedding our fish and our apex predators and so forth, it could actually have an incredible impact on human beings.”
“It’s crucial now that now we have the chance to attempt to shield the useful resource as a lot as we probably can,” he added. “So we’re not speaking about sharks 10 years from now being extinct.”
Isabela Ocampo Restrepo
is an engagement fellow who works on the Audience team to find creative ways to interact with the Tribune’s readers. She previously was an audience engagement intern at the Austin American-Statesman and a social media intern for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. She was raised in Medellin, Colombia, speaks Spanish and English fluently, and is getting her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Texas Democrats are starting to sound like the little boy who cried “battleground state,” after yet another election cycle where they shouted from the rooftops that Texas should be viewed as capable of going blue and then drastically underperformed expectations.
President-elect Donald Trump won Texas by 14 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday — a surprisingly wide margin that bested his 2020 and 2016 performances in the state. Texas has for decades reliably gone for the Republican presidential nominee, but Democrats have been heartened that for the past several election cycles, the margin had been steadily narrowing.
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The party’s Senate candidate, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas, out performed Harris but still lost to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz by 9 percentage points, according to unofficial results published by The Associated Press. That’s more than three times the margin that Beto O’Rourke lost to Cruz six years ago, and a wider loss margin than a majority of polls put the race in recent months. It also came after Senate Democrats and other national party officials visited Texas and invested in Allred’s race, citing him as one of the best chances to flip a seat in the upper chamber to protect their majority — which they lost on Tuesday.
The minority party also lost ground in the Legislature where Republicans now control 88 seats in the House and 20 in the Senate. And in South Texas, Republicans made historic gains in the predominantly Hispanic region that has reliably supported Democrats, and they lost their challenge to retake a South Texas congressional seat the GOP had won in 2022.
“This to me is a complete disaster. They underperformed everywhere,” said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio. “They are disorganized. They are a party in the wilderness.”
State Democrats have been especially hopeful since 2018 — after they rode a blue wave down the ballot off of O’Rourke’s history-making Senate run. That year they flipped Texas House districts, local government seats and state appellate courts. Republicans still controlled the Legislature and occupied every statewide office, but Democrats saw that year as the beginning of a new era.
It led to high hopes in 2020, when Democrats fell far short of their goal of flipping the Texas House blue. And then again in 2022, when O’Rourke ran for governor and lost by double-digit margins to Gov. Greg Abbott. That was a midterm election where Republicans underperformed nationwide — everywhere, that is, except for Texas and Florida.
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Republicans on Tuesday night relished running up the score against their political foes. Gov. Greg Abbott’s top political adviser pointed at a potentially larger problem for Democrats going forward: How will they get donors to continue funding their campaigns after losing again?
The most important Texas news, sent weekday mornings.
“So do you think national Democratic donors will ever believe these Texas Democrat grifters again?” Dave Carney said on social media.
Soul searching
Democratic operatives were left licking their wounds Wednesday morning on numerous debriefing calls to figure out what had gone wrong Tuesday.
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Among the issues they identified: a national red wave that delivered massive wins for Trump as well as GOP control of the U.S. Senate; a lack of infrastructure and coordination between federal and local campaigns across the state that left Democrats underperforming at every level; and a refusal to acknowledge the increasing realignment of parts of the electorate that were previously the core of the Democratic base, namely working class voters and Latinos.
Ali Zaidi, a Democratic political operative who ran Mike Collier’s campaign for lieutenant governor in 2022 said many in the party are rooted in a “pre-2012” belief that an increasingly diverse Texas would lead automatically to Democratic gains. But many voters of color this cycle cast their ballots for Republicans, like Latinos in South Texas.
Zaidi said Democrats need to either adjust how they connect with Latino voters in the state or look for votes in other places.
“Campaigns are not magical things that change how people feel about the world,” he said, adding that campaigns need to meet people where they are. “If an electorate is no longer a reliable electorate for you the answer as a campaign is to find a new electorate that works for you.”
Several Democrats said the catastrophic election, not only in the state but around the country, should compel the party to do some serious soul searching on what their message should be. Matt Angle, a veteran Texas Democratic operative and director of the Lone Star Project, expressed frustration that the party focused more on what drove the base than kitchen-table issues that were actually on the minds of many voters, such as the economy.
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“One of the things that annoys me a lot of times about Democrats as progressives [is] that they say we need to decide what we stand for, and we need to then go push that on voters,” Angle said. But “we need to find out where voters are and meet them where they are.”
Chad Wilbanks, a Republican strategist and former Texas GOP executive director, said the Democratic party is out of touch with the state because they care more about “political correctness” than what voters are telling them.
“They have lost the battle of ideas,” he said. “In Texas, we want a secure border, we want to feel safe in our homes and in our schools. That’s important. [And] inflation plays a major role.”
But even if Democrats were to coalesce behind a persuasive message, the state party faces the challenge of not having the long-term infrastructure to support their candidates running for statewide office. Years of neglect in the decades since the party lost control has left much of its functions outsourced to outside groups, including activist organizations and super PACs, Angle said.
Without a leader Angle said there needed to be an “alpha” elected official to lead the effort as Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen did when he was in office, to coordinate the disparate efforts working to elect Democrats. Allred began to fill that role during the campaign, heading the first Senate-led coordinated campaign in Texas in decades, which consolidated resources up and down the ticket.
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The Texas Majority PAC, which is backed by billionaire George Soros, was among the groups that also tried to fill in this cycle and help coordinate Democratic efforts. The group spent more than $600,000 in Cameron County and $700,000 in Hidalgo County – both of which are located in the Rio Grande Valley and were flipped by Trump at the top of the ticket in a stunning upset.
Katherine Fischer, the group’s deputy executive director, said Tuesday’s results were “devastating” and not the results Democrats had wanted. But she found a silver lining in the party’s ability to hold on to the seat of U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, in Hidalgo County, through coordination with the congressman’s campaign and the local party operations.
Fischer said her group will pick apart the election and issue a report but given the margin of victory for Republicans, it’s hard to pinpoint what Democrats could have done to change the outcomes.
“You lose by 10 or 15 points or something shifts by 20 points, [and] there’s no amount of strategy that can combat that,” Fischer said. “There’s some major issues within the Democrat party writ large that we need to reckon with like how voters perceive the Democratic party and how that perception has come to differ so wildly from reality and what we do to recover that.”
Fischer said her group always envisioned its project being one dependent on multiple cycles. The PAC is focused on continuing to build out sorely needed Democratic infrastructure for years to come, she said, acknowledging there are no easy answers from this cycle.
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Democrats in Texas often bemoan the lack of investment from the top of the ticket in the state, which is largely written off as unwinnable by national groups. Tides changed this cycle, as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Majority PAC invested over $15 million in Allred’s Senate race as election day approached. National Democratic groups also invested over $1 million in protecting Vicente’s congressional seat.
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, said it’s not enough to plead for a massive influx of cash at the last minute.
“Texas needs long-term paid organizing efforts like in other battleground states, where we communicate those everyday, working people issues to disaffected voters, and I think it gives us a lot to learn from this election,” Casar said. “Because a strategy where we’re just trying to persuade a small number of voters on television cannot compete with the kind of on-the-ground organizing efforts that Republicans have put in.”
Luke Warford, a former strategist for the Texas Democrats who now runs a fund to create party infrastructure, said the party needs to invest in candidate recruitment, staff training, communications and how to successfully target voters — all things the Texas GOP excel at.
“If we do that and still lose, then we need to go back to the drawing board,” he said.
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Fischer said Democrats needed to be honest with donors about the election’s results but also communicate a long-term plan.
“I hope donors who gave to the Allred campaign or to any other project in Texas understand their dollars were not wasted and most states don’t flip over night,” she said. “They don’t flip in one cycle or two cycles, it takes time.”
Texas Democrats aren’t counting themselves out yet. They plan to be back in the spotlight in 2026 when Sen. John Cornyn’s seat is up for reelection, along with statewide elected seats like governor. “If history is right, Trump will have done enough to upset enough people,” Angle said. “You know we shouldn’t look forward with dread. We need to have real clear eyes and really accurately assess what happened this election, but to be hopeful moving forward.”
Voting FAQ: 2024 Elections
When is the next election? What dates do I need to know?
Election Day for the general election is November 5, and early voting will run from Oct. 21 to Nov. 1. The deadline to register to vote and/or change your voter registration address is Oct. 7. Applications to vote by mail must be received by your county of residence – not postmarked – by Oct. 25.
What’s on the ballot for the general election?
In addition to the president, eligible Texans have the opportunity to cast their ballots for many Texas officials running for office at the federal, state and local levels.
This includes representatives in the U.S. and Texas houses and the following elected offices:
-1 U.S Senator (Ted Cruz)
– 1 of 3 Railroad Commissioners
– 15 State Senators
– 7 State Board of Education members
– 3 members of the Texas Supreme Court
– 3 members of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
– 5 Chief Justices and various justices for Texas Courts of Appeals
Lower-level judges and local county offices will also appear on the ballot:
– Various district judges, including on criminal and family courts
– County Courts at Law
– Justices of the Peace
– District Attorneys
– County Attorneys
– Sheriffs
– Constables
– Tax Assessor-Collectors
How do I make sure I’m registered to vote?
You can check to see if you’re registered and verify your information through the Texas Secretary of State’s website. You’ll need one of the following three combinations to log in:
Your Texas driver’s license number and date of birth.
Your first and last names, date of birth and county you reside in.
Your date of birth and Voter Unique Identifier, which appears on your voter registration certificate.
What if I missed the voter registration deadline?
You must be registered to vote in a Texas county by Oct. 7 to vote in the Nov. 5 presidential election. You can still register for other elections.
If you’re registered but didn’t update your address by the deadline, you may still be able to vote at your previous voting location or on a limited ballot. (Voters are typically assigned precincts based on where they live. In most major counties, voters can vote anywhere on Election Day, but some counties require you vote within your precinct. If that is the case, you may have to return to your previous precinct. See which counties allow countywide Election Day voting here. You can usually find your precinct listed on your voter registration certificate or on when checking your registration online.)
If you moved from one county to another, you may be able to vote on a ballot limited to the elections you would qualify to vote in at both locations, such as statewide races. However, limited ballots are only available during early voting. Find your county election official here and contact them to ask about or request a limited ballot.
What can I do if I have questions about voting?
You can contact your county elections official or call the Texas Secretary of State’s helpline at 1-800-252-VOTE (8683). A coalition of voting rights groups is also helping voters navigate election concerns through the 866-OUR-VOTE (687-8683) voter-protection helpline. The coalition also has hotlines available for voters who speaker other languages or have accessibility needs.
For help in Spanish, call 888-VE-Y-VOTA or 888-839-8682.
For help in Asian languages, call 888-API-VOTE or 888-274-8683.
For help in Arabic, call 888-YALLA-US or 888-925-5287.
For help in American Sign Language through a video, call 301-818-VOTE or 301-818-8683.
For help from Disability Rights Texas, call 888-796-VOTE or 888-796-8683.