HOUSTON, Texas — U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a three-decade member of Congress, has died, the 74-year-old’s family said on Friday.

“Today, with incredible grief of our loss yet deep gratitude for the life she shared with us, we announced the passing of United States Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of the 18th Congressional District of Texas,” Jackson Lee’s family wrote. “A fierce champion of the people, she was affectionately and simply known as ‘Congresswoman’ by her constituents in recognition of her near-ubiquitous presence and service to their daily lives for more than 30 years.

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Jackson Lee is the mother of Jason Lee, senior advisor to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

“Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was a trailblazer in the truest sense of the word,” Mayor Johnson said in a statement. “She defined her career through her advocacy, fighting relentlessly to create a better future for all, and her passing is a tremendous loss for residents of Texas’ 18th Congressional District and our entire country. The First Lady, myself and my entire administration are sending our love and our deepest condolences to my senior advisor, Jason Lee, and Rep. Jackson Lee’s family and loved ones during this difficult time.”

The lawmaker’s family said funeral arrangements are pending.

Early last month, Jackson Lee revealed she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and undergoing treatment, adding that she would be occasionally absent from her Congressional duties.

“I am confident that my doctors have developed the best possible plan to target my specific diseases. The road ahead will not be easy, but I stand in faith that God will strengthen me,” Jackson Lee said in a statement on June 2.

A prayer and praise vigil was held shortly after in support of her fight. Jackson Lee’s family or office didn’t disclose whether her cancer was the cause of her death.

The Democrat’s office boasted her accomplishments since she won her seat in 1994, crediting her with establishing the Juneteenth Federal Holiday and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

“However, she impacted us most as our beloved wife, sister, mother, and Bebe (grandmother),” Jackson Lee’s representatives said.

Jackson Lee is survived by her husband Elwyn Lee and their two children.

Working in her last days

Just a week prior, Jackson Lee advocated on behalf of CenterPoint Energy customers by calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the utility company’s response to Hurricane Beryl.

Jackson Lee was also months away from going for her 16th term in the U.S. House of Representatives after winning her Democratic primary.

The lawmaker fell last fall in her attempt to become the next Houston mayor in a close race against winner John Whitmire.

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The news of President Joe Biden potentially exiting the presidential race has raised questions about how his Democratic replacement would get on the November ballot across the country. State law suggests a new nominee wouldn’t have much of a problem doing so in Texas, if the party acts soon.

The two major parties have until Aug. 26 to submit the names of their presidential candidates for the Texas ballot, giving Democrats five weeks to make changes.

The Texas election code states that the Texas Secretary of State can certify a political party’s replacement nominee for president or vice president if the original nominee withdraws, dies or is declared ineligible by the 74th day before the presidential election day, which is Aug. 23 this year, if the party’s state chair submits the replacement nominee no later than 5 p.m. of the 71st day before the election day, which is Aug. 26.

This means if Biden drops out of the presidential race against Donald Trump, the Democratic Party could select a new nominee during its national convention Aug. 19-22 just in time for the nominee to appear on the Texas ballot.

Biden faces mounting pressure from fellow Democrats, including Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Austin and U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey who have called for him to withdraw from the race after he tripped over words and seemed to lose his train of thought during the June presidential debate.

For weeks, Biden has resisted such calls, but he has reportedly been listening more openly to worries from top Democrats about the risks of him staying in the race and losing, according to CNBC. The longer Biden waits to withdraw, the harder the logistics of replacing him on the ballot become, according to Votebeat.

Even though Election Day isn’t until Nov. 5, election officials across the country also have to account for state election deadlines and for voters, including members of the military, who will be voting by mail and need additional time to receive and return their ballots. For example, Maricopa County in Arizona said that its ballots need to be finalized by Aug. 22, Votbeat reported.

In Texas, counties manage the printing of their own ballots, and include the names of the candidates given to them by the secretary of state, according to Votebeat.

That office sends those names in late August, after the conventions. Military ballots go out on Sept. 21, and must be printed days ahead of that. Trudy Hancock, the election administrator in Brazos County, told Votebeat that the county’s ballots are typically finished by Sept. 10 to allow for proofing and to account for any delays.

If Biden drops out after ballots are printed, electors – the party representatives who cast their state’s votes for president in the electoral college – could vote for the person the Democratic party nominates as his replacement in states that allow it, Votebeat reported.

To win the presidency in the Electoral College, a candidate must get at least 270 votes from the 538 electors across the country. Each state gets as many electors as it has U.S. senators and representatives in Congress. In most states, including Texas, whoever wins the most votes from voters gets all the Electoral College votes for that state.

In rare instances, some electors have cast votes for someone other than their party’s official nominee, which has stirred some concerns of “faithless electors” in recent years. In Texas, a 2023 update to the state’s election code requires electors to sign an oath that they will vote for the chosen candidate.

Natalia Contreras, Jen Fifield and Jessica Hussman of Votebeat contributed to this story.

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Behind a massive IT failure that grounded flights, upended markets and disrupted the operations of corporations around the world is one cybersecurity company: Austin-based CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.

Known as a dominant supplier of software that protects businesses from ransomware attacks, CrowdStrike was thrust into the spotlight on Friday as it struggled to fix a faulty patch that led to cascading, system-wide failures, paralyzing the operations of clients ranging from banks to global retail giants to health-care systems on Friday.

CrowdStrike was founded by former executives of antivirus pioneer McAfee Inc. and has grown into the leading maker of a relatively new type of security software that’s considered among the best defenses against ransomware and other hacking threats. It controls what market research firm IDC estimates is nearly 18 percent of the $8.6 billion global market for so-called “modern” endpoint protection software, just ahead of archrival Microsoft.

The type of software CrowdStrike supplies is separate and distinct from older, more limited types of security software. Traditional antivirus software was useful in the early days of computing and the internet for its ability to hunt for signs of known malware, but it has fallen out of favor as attacks have become more sophisticated. Now, products known as “endpoint detection and response” software that CrowdStrike develops do far more, continually scanning machines for any signs of suspicious activities and automating a response.

But to do this, these programs have to be given access to inspect the very core of the computers’ operating systems for security defects. This access gives them the ability to take disrupt the very systems they are trying to protect. And it is how Microsoft Windows systems came into play in Friday’s outage.

Representatives for CrowdStrike confirmed online reports that a glitch in the company’s Falcon software was responsible for disabling potentially millions of corporate and government Windows computers around the world and causing the dreaded “blue screen of death.”

The company pegged the incident to “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” in a statement on Friday and said the outage wasn’t down to a cyberattack or security breach. Anyone using a Mac or Linux machine isn’t impacted, the company said, adding that “a fix has been deployed.”

An apparently separate incident involving Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud services also caused widespread disruption on Friday.

While cybersecurity professionals say CrowdStrike’s technology is a strong way to defend against ransomware, its cost — which in some cases can be more than $50 per machine — means that most organizations don’t install it on all of their computers. What that means, however, is that the computers that have the software installed on them are among the most important to protect, and if they go down, key services can fall with them.

One outstanding question is whether CrowdStrike’s software fix can be rolled out automatically or manually.

“You’ll have men in white vans going around to try manually fix this problem even when they put out a fix,” said Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, in an interview with Bloomberg News. “To use the laptops, they’ll have to manually intervene — that is a big job.”

There’s also the question of how the bad rollout happened to begin with.

“CrowdStrike is meant to keep these machines safe,” Woodward said. “This is the sort of thing ransomware would do, but imagine ransomware simultaneously hitting the biggest organizations in the world — container ports in the Baltics, hospitals, railway stations, they’ve all been hit at once because of this one little file.”

CrowdStrike’s customer base comprises large organizations that have a large number of remote machines to manage, he added. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”

– Jordan Robertson and Shona Ghosh for Bloomberg

Major airlines grounded, banks knocked offline in global Microsoft tech outage

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Microsoft says users worldwide may be unable to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services, in a widespread outage reportedly connected to the U.S. cybersecurity company Crowdstrike.

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