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More clouds and humidity ahead for North Texas
NORTH TEXAS — Highs Sunday hit 93°, the same as Saturday. The heat index also stayed under 100° both days.
Since the sixth Day of June, DFW has only logged 0.10″ of rain. Rain is back in the forecast this week.
Deep tropical moisture is pouring into North Texas over the next 48 hours. That is because our first tropical system of the season is rapidly developing in the Gulf of Mexico.
The forecast shows a developed tropical low in the Gulf by early Wednesday.
There is a chance for significant flooding in Texas due to this system. The heaviest rain will likely fall along the coast and into the Hill Country and south.
The best rain chances for North Texas will start on Wednesday and go to Thursday morning.
Localized flooding is a threat from these storms. Once the rain starts to push southwest of North Texas by late Thursday, the weather returns to hot and dry. Just after summer starts, North Texas is back to the typical summer weather: hot and dry.
Jeff Ray
The state of Texas recently purchased about $5 million worth of bitcoin through a BlackRock-administered exchange-traded fund, a representative for the state comptroller’s office confirmed in an email to The Dallas Morning News on Monday.
The purchase came several months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 21, a high-profile and controversial legislative effort that enabled the Texas comptroller’s office to establish a publicly funded strategic cryptocurrency reserve.
It also amounts to one of the first-ever cryptocurrency transactions by a state government amid a broader federal and state government embrace of the recently surging crypto industry. Other states, including New Hampshire and Arizona, have passed similar crypto reserve bills.
And last year, Wisconsin’s and Michigan’s pension funds also purchased crypto, although with the comptroller’s purchase Texas has now become the first state to actually fund such a reserve.
“The industry is maturing and growing — it’ll continue to become more mainstream, and I think Texas staking out a leadership position will be very beneficial to Texans over time, similar to what the oil and gas industry has done over the last century,” said Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain Council, a crypto lobbying group that championed the state legislative effort.
“I think we’re only scratching the surface,” Bratcher said.
The state made the roughly $5 million purchase through BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), a fund managed by the major asset management firm that trades in U.S. dollars but generally reflects the price of bitcoin. As of early afternoon Monday, IBIT was trading around $48, reflecting a roughly 20% loss over the past month and a 13% decrease since the beginning of the year.
Those valuations broadly align with the recently highly volatile price of bitcoin: Early this year — amid a crypto frenzy inspired largely by the new, extremely crypto-friendly Trump administration — the world’s predominant cryptocurrency soared to above $100,000 for the first time in its history, and then in early October reached an all-time high above $126,000.
Since then, though, as fears have grown about a cooling economy and a potential AI bubble that could send the stock market plummeting, valuations of cryptocurrencies have also dipped. One bitcoin traded at around $85,000 on Monday, near the digital coin’s lowest price since April.
FILE – In this April 3, 2013 photo, a 25 Bitcoin token is displayed in Sandy, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
Rick Bowmer / AP
‘Placeholder investment’
The state of Texas made its purchase late last month at a price around $87,000, according to a social media post by Bratcher, who said he first learned of the state’s purchase through a recent Zoom call that included acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock. The comptroller’s office did not respond to a question from The News asking about the specific price the state paid for its IBIT purchase.
The ETF purchase is “a placeholder investment,” said Kevin Lyons, a representative for the comptroller’s office, until the agency formally contracts with what it’s referring to as a cryptocurrency custodian. The agency is now reviewing responses from a request for information it issued and will later award an official contract, Lyons said.
While the new state law did not include a specific funding amount, Texas legislators have since allocated $10 million to the reserve. The amount represents a tiny fraction of the state’s $338 billion state budget, although the legislation’s supporters have argued it still amounts to an important measure of support for an emerging industry.
“I think with Texas leading in this way, it’s going to reap benefits for many decades to come across the state,” Bratcher said. “From a job creation perspective to a tax revenue perspective and everything in between.”
Earlier this year, addressing legislators ahead of a vote on SB 21, state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake — one of the driving forces behind the crypto push — struck a similar note, calling the reserve bill “a forward-thinking measure” that was about “recognizing digital assets not as a trend but as a strategic opportunity” and “strengthening the state’s fiscal resilience.”
Yet even if Texas’ public crypto investment remains minuscule, many economists and fiscal watchdogs have criticized SB 21 along with other recent pro-crypto legislation on multiple fronts, arguing it amounts to a lobbyist-driven effort that’s likely to benefit the crypto industry much more than the state’s residents.
And while Texas has recently embraced bitcoin mining and other facets of the industry, with even Abbott pushing to make the state a global “crypto leader,” critics have pointed out that cryptocurrency itself has long been plagued by concerns about scams, corruption and energy use.
“It’s also backwards to our values in Texas,” John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said earlier this year.
“Basically you have a conservative legislature saying, ‘We want less government,’ and yet here’s a case where you are wanting or encouraging government to speculate and possibly prop up an asset class.”
Texas A&M fans, you may now exhale. The regular season has come and gone, and there is plenty to be proud about after the 11-1 season.
The Aggies may have ended said regular season with a loss in Austin to the Texas Longhorns, but for a team that has been chasing playoff glory for decades now, there is nothing to be ashamed of.
The 11 wins that the team notched are the highest since their 11-win season back in 2012, Johnny Manziel’s Heisman Trophy-winning campaign.
With their success, the Aggies were a force to be reckoned with in the weekly AP Top 25 polls, reaching their highest rank since the 2020 season that saw them at No. 4.
The Aggies started the season ranked at No. 19 after the 8-5 season they had in Mike Elko’s first year as head coach, though the addition of wide receivers KC Concepcion and Mario Craver kept them in contention as one of the best in college football.
The Aggies were predicted to finish eighth of 16 SEC teams in the SEC media poll.
The A&M offense was as advertised through their first two games, with wins of 42-24 and 44-22 over the UTSA Roadrunners and Utah State Aggies, respectively, boosting them three spots.
Defeating a top 10 team will definitely get you props from the Associated Press, and the Aggies found themselves in the top 10 for the second straight season after their 41-40 win over No. 8 Notre Dame in South Bend.
The Aggies didn’t even have to play during Week 4 to move up one spot, as then-No. 9 Illinois took a massive loss to Indiana, plummeting them and moving A&M up one during their bye week.
Texas A&M held off a late charge by the Auburn Tigers in their conference opener to take a 16-10 win, and losses by Florida State, Penn State, and LSU, who were all ranked above them, shot the Aggies up to the doorstep of the top 5.
A 31-9 pummeling of the Mississippi State Bulldogs was enough for Texas A&M to overtake the Oklahoma Sooners in the ranks, despite Oklahoma defeating Kent State 44-0.
The Aggies defeated the Florida Gators with a sound 24-17 score, and after the Ole Miss Rebels suffered a near loss to Washington State, the Maroon and White were promoted one spot on the AP list.
The Ags marched into Baton Rouge and annihilated the LSU Tigers 49-25, and after the Miami Hurricanes’ loss to the Louisville Cardinals, A&M moved up to their highest ranking since the 1995 season, when R.C. Slocum was still calling the shots.
Mike Elko’s team stayed in third behind the No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes and No. 2 Indiana Hoosiers, continuing their perfect season, which included their comeback win over the South Carolina Gamecocks until they finally tasted defeat at the hands of the Longhorns in the regular season finale, 27-17, dropping them down to No. 7 and out of the SEC Championship game.
The Aggies will now wait to see who the College Football Playoff gives them in the first round, as they will likely host an opponent at Kyle Field.
For the first time since the 2010 season, the Texas A&M Aggies took a trip to the Texas state capitol to combat their in-state foes, the Texas Longhorns, while looking to keep their undefeated season alive through the regular season.
Unfortunately for Mike Elko’s team, that wasn’t the case after 60 minutes at DKR, as the Longhorns would come back from a 10-3 halftime deficit to outscore A&M 24-7 in the second half, and after two interceptions by quarterback Marcel Reed late in the fourth quarter, the Aggies’ first loss of the season was in the books in a 27-17 finish.
And after being at the forefront of a team known for flawless performances in the second half of 2025, Texas A&M coach Mike Elko wasn’t too fond of Friday night’s results, needless to say.
During the opening statement of his postgame press conference immediately following the loss, Elko praised the Texas team for their efficiency in the second half and expressed his dismay with his own team’s performance.
“Yeah, I mean obviously give them (Texas) credit,” Elko began. “They went out in the second half and made the plays they needed to make to win the football game. From our perspective, just very disappointed in how we played in the second half. We didn’t play Texas A&M football at all.”
After expressing the heartache of coming up short in the rivalry game for the second year in a row, Elko made it clear that his team was going to be focused on the next task at hand, competing for a national championship.
“Uh, it hurts. It should. This game means a lot,” said Elko. “We got to regroup though and we’ve got to get ready for the playoffs.”
As for actually embarking on those preparations for the College Football Playoff, Elko admitted that he wasn’t exactly in the right mindset to turn the loss into motivation moving forward.
“I don’t know that we’re thinking like that right now,” Elko said. “I think we’re just thinking about not getting the job done tonight and coming out of this weekend, maybe we’ll regroup and figure out moving forward what the positives are of 11-1 right now. It just hurts that we lost to our rival.”
For the second straight year, Texas A&M’s chances to compete for a conference championship were dashed at the hands of the Burnt Orange, and now the Ags will wait patiently through the championship weekend coming up to see what their own fate is regarding the College Football Playoff next week.
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