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Think about the lives lost.Think about the teachers.Think about the children.They were family, friends, and loved ones.And a gun killed them all.It was only last week that we posted a similar prompt in response to the racist massacre in Buffalo. Like all of our student forums, this one will be moderated.

Students might find their own ways to respond, perhaps through writing or art. It may also be helpful to look at how victims of other tragedies have been memorialized, in ways big and small. For example: The 26 playgrounds built to remember the children of Sandy Hook; the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing, with its “field of chairs,” including 19 smaller ones for the children who lost their lives; and the New York Times Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Here are more examples, from the El Paso Times. In what ways can your students or school respond, individually or collectively?

Above all, we want you to know we are listening. If it helps your students to share their thoughts and feelings publicly, we have a space for that. And if teachers or parents have thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns or suggestions, please post them here.

The authors of the 2018 Times article described how the Parkland shooting moved students around the country to become more involved in activism. Do you think something similar will happen in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas? Why or why not? How do you think school shootings are shaping the generation of students who are in school right now?Invite your students to weigh in here.

Democrats moved quickly to clear the way for votes on legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers. Republicans, even as they expressed horror about the shooting, did not signal that they would drop their longstanding opposition to gun safety measures. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas pointed the blame at Uvalde’s lack of mental health care, even though the suspect had no record of problems.

Which efforts might be the most effective? Students might also take a look at the forum on guns we posted during the 2016 election as part of our Civil Conversation Challenge in which we invited teenagers to have productive, respectful conversations on several issues dividing Americans. We received more than 700 responses to the questions we posed about gun rights, the Second Amendment and more.

This article takes on three of the most prominent rumors that have spread via online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit and explains why they are false. What rumors are your students seeing in their feeds, and what steps can they take to find out the truth? From double-checking via sites like Snopes to learning habits like lateral reading, this article (and related lesson plan) has suggestions.

While the town of Uvalde grapples with the aftermath of the shooting, community members, local leaders and organizations have mobilized. Two local funeral homes said in social media posts that they would not charge families of victims for their funeral services. Volunteers have lined up to give blood for the shooting victims.

Stovall said in an interview that he is unique in squarely backing Trump even before he won the Republican nomination in 2016 — bucking, among others, the state’s dominant figure in national GOP politics, Sen. Ted Cruz.

“There’s been resistance even from our own party on helping him out, and they don’t want to elect somebody in this district that’s going to be a hindrance.”

Smith, who is retiring after 16 terms, has not made an endorsement in the race. “Half of them I’ve never heard of before,” he said in an interview, adding that Trump remains popular among his constituents: “They appreciate what the president has done. They appreciate the tax cut, and they appreciate the president’s efforts to enforce immigration laws.”

Having a unique message, he said, is less of a factor: “Of the real contenders, there just hasn’t been a lot of distance from Trump on any real issues.” Cruz’s shadow looms over the 21st district primary thanks to his aggressive backing of Chip Roy, a former top aide to Cruz and other high-profile Texas officials.

The move was reminiscent of 2003 when outnumbered Democrats twice broke quorum to stop Republican efforts to redraw voting maps. House Democrats first left the state en masse for Ardmore, Okla., only to return several days later.

But as the night wore on in the House, the GOP's chances wobbled. About two hours before the midnight deadline, Democrats began filing out of the chamber in greater and greater numbers, denying Republicans the quorum necessary to hold a final vote.

The Texas Senate had approved the measure in a vote before sunrise, after Republicans used a bare-knuckle procedural move to suspend the rules and take up the measure in the middle of the night during the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

Ultimately, neither effort worked as the Democrats eventually returned to the Capitol and Republicans passed the bill.

Under revisions during closed-door negotiations, Republicans added language that could make it easier for a judge to overturn an election and pushed back the start of Sunday voting, when many Black churchgoers head to the polls.

Texas is the last big battleground in the GOP's nationwide efforts to tighten voting laws, driven by former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Georgia and Florida have also passed new voting restrictions, and President Biden on Saturday unfavorably compared Texas' bill to election changes in those states as "an assault on democracy."

The vote in the Texas Senate came just a short time after a final version of the bill had been made public Saturday.

Holder cited a GOP legal challenge to drive-through voting sites in a Texas county and an order from the Texas Republican governor limiting ballot drop boxes.

He also pointed to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's proclamation to limit mail-in ballot drop box locations to one site per county as "cheating."

In the final days before the presidential election, state Republicans and Democrats in battleground states have been battling in the courts, bringing some cases to the US Supreme Court, seeking last minute approval to change election rules amid the coronavirus pandemic, especially regarding whether mail-in votes can arrive after Election Day and still be counted.

It is seeing that the Republican Party wants to limit the number of people who want to vote. Democrats are trying to get as many people to vote and have as many votes counted as is possible,"

"I think we want to make sure that we get our ballots in and our votes in so we don't leave it to the court to make any decisions here," he said.

The order, first issued in October, significantly affects the Democratic stronghold of Harris County, the state's most populous county.

"That is cheating. I defy Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, to explain a good logical reason why you would have one drop box in Harris County -- 4 million people, bigger than I think the state of Rhode Island -- why you would limit it to one drop box. You only try to gain partisan advantage. All the other reasons that they put forward are simply nonsense,"

"They're trying to steal this election," he added.

The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Abbott's order, saying it "provides Texas voters more ways to vote in the November 3 election than does the Election Code" and that it doesn't "disenfranchise anyone."

Texas Attorney General Paxton was unable to reach the 50% support he needed to avoid a runoff, and will face a head-to-head match-up with a member of the state’s best-known political family.

The efforts to oust him center on his legal troubles: Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on securities fraud charges, and is being investigated by the FBI after former aides accused him of abusing the power of his office to help a political donor.

Progressives did have one victory to celebrate Tuesday night: Greg Casar, a former Austin city councilman, was projected to win the 35th Congressional District primary outright, avoiding a runoff.

he most competitive US House race in Texas this year could come in the 15th District, a South Texas district that stretches from towns east of San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley.

Republican Monica De La Cruz, who came within 3 percentage points of defeating Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2020, will win the Republican nomination, CNN projected. Gonzalez, meanwhile, is running in the neighboring 34th District.

Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.

"Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."

Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.

"I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."

The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.

Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.

Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.

Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.

Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.

Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.

Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.

Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.

The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.

More than a dozen states currently do not have a mask mandate in effect, though Texas is now the largest without rules for face coverings.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) defended his decision against bipartisan criticism last week, saying that lifting the mask mandate “isn’t going to make that big of a change in the state of Texas.”

Voting rights advocates say those and other provisions of the bill would make voting more difficult in Texas and would disproportionately burden people of color. There's been no evidence of significant voter fraud in Texas or elsewhere.

Abbott also has said he intends to order lawmakers back to Austin to complete work on the bill.

Lawmakers in several states have introduced similar legislation, motivated at least in part by former President Donald Trump's continued promotion of the "big lie" that the 2020 election was somehow stolen despite evidence to the contrary.

Heavy precipitation will also revisit much of coastal Louisiana this weekend as recent weather model trends have shifted the axis of heaviest rainfall slightly eastward.

Like Texas, this is also an area hit hard by recent rain and flooding and can't seem to catch a break from the rough weather. Between May 16-22, Lake Charles, Louisiana reported over 21 inches of precipitation, while Baton Rouge saw a staggering 15 inches during the same period. This amount of rain turned streets into rivers, quickly inundating vehicles with water.

Currently, the low pressure responsible for the inevitable soaking is churning over southern Texas. It is perfectly positioned to utilize the warm ocean waters of the Gulf of Mexico, helping to feed bands of rain into the coast.

With a sweeping set of executive orders in his initial days in office, Mr. Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement among nations to fight climate change, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and issued a moratorium on drilling for fossil fuels on federal land, among other things.

“Our infrastructure cannot handle extreme weather events, which these fossil fuels are ironically causing.”

Social media posts mocked renewable energy as “unreliables.”

“Building resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing climate will play an integral role in creating millions of good paying, union jobs, creating a clean energy economy, and meeting the president’s goal of reaching a net zero emissions future by 2050,” said Vedant Patel, a White House assistant press secretary.

The bulk of the power loss in Texas came from natural gas suppliers, according to regulators, as pipelines froze, making it difficult for plants to get the fuel they needed. Production from coal and nuclear plants dropped as well. A similar phenomenon played out in Kansas and other states.

Ms. Boebert mentioned a photo shared repeatedly this week on social media of wind turbines she said were in Texas and apparently being de-iced by helicopter with a substance derived from fossil fuels.

In Kansas, one of few states that rely heavily on wind power, the blades on some turbines froze, too. However, just like in Texas, the bigger problem was that the state’s frigid temperatures stopped delivery of natural gas to fossil-fuel-burning power plants.

Grid operators say it simply doesn't make sense to pinpoint any one generation source for criticism.

Wind turbines did, in fact, freeze. But so did natural gas wells. And pipelines. And critical pipes at coal and nuclear power plants. And equipment panels.

Blaming wind and solar is a political move, Bird says. What's really needed — in Texas and elsewhere — is better preparation.

The court also argued the risk of mailing the ballot is "small," and "voters who are worried about it can mail their ballots in plenty of time before Election Day to eliminate the chance of untimely delivery."

that voters can also vote in person for an expanded period of time than usual, drop off their mail-in ballot in a 45-day window before Election Day rather than on November 3 only, and also mail in their ballots.

"The 2020 general election is already underway and the integrity of our election process must be protected and preserved," the statement continued. "Governor Abbott's order rightfully bolsters the security of dropped-off ballots."

Harris County -- which had reduced its 12 drop-off locations to one -- and Travis County -- which reduced its four drop-off locations to one -- continued to operate with one site per county throughout the month.

Tuesday's ruling comes as Texas' rapidly growing cities and inner suburbs -- including the increasingly Democratic-leaning areas of Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth -- have seen a massive surge of early voting.

In Texas, lack of

This particular case has implications for women across the United States, according to Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"This case represents the greatest threat to women's reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade over 40 years ago."

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that 1 in 3 women will have an abortion in her lifetime. Lawmakers have passed a record-breaking 231 abortion restriction laws in the last four years, and more than 100 anti-abortion bills have been introduced in 28 state legislatures so far this year.

exas currently ranks 46th in the US for percentage of residents receiving at least one dose of vaccine. Only 8% of Texans are fully vaccinated.

"We're now beginning to see glimmers that the worst of Covid-19 may soon be behind us," and added, "We have demonstrated that we can corral the coronavirus." He was tragically wrong. By November, Texas had the highest number of coronavirus cases in the nation.

More than a year into this pandemic, we know which public health mitigations work. This week, the CDC published a report of the effect of mask mandates and indoor restaurant dining. The researchers found that mandating masks was associated with a decrease in daily Covid-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation. In-restaurant dining was associated with an increase in daily Covid-19 case and death rates.

Biden argues that Trump's denial and neglect of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and is getting worse by the day should deny the President reelection.

Counting in midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, where he is expecting to do well, could take longer and lead to the kind of disputed outcome that the President is threatening. Trump has already tried to discredit mail-in ballots, which take longer to count, while Republicans in Texas -- so far without success -- have been trying to invalidate ballots cast at drive-thru sites in the Houston area.

"We feel very confident about our pathways to victory," Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Trump, while trailing Biden, also has a clear, if narrower, chance to get to 270 electoral votes that relies on him sweeping through a swath of battlegrounds he won four years ago with what his campaign promises will be a huge Election Day turnout.

At a rally in Florida on Sunday night, Trump's crowd started a chant of "Fire Fauci" when the President complained that everyone heard too much about the pandemic.

But an air of foreboding is hanging over one of the most surreal elections in modern US history. Reports of delays in the delivery of mail-in votes in several crucial battleground states deepened anxiety over the possibility of protracted legal duels between the campaigns in the event of a close election.

In Texas, the state Supreme Court denied a petition by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru facilities in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that surrounds Houston. Republicans have also filed suit in federal court, which has an emergency hearing Monday morning in Houston.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

"I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that's very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it's a very dangerous, terrible thing," Trump told reporters.

But Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on "State of the Union" that she was concerned that Trump could try to declare victory in her state if Election Day voting tallies showed him with a lead before early and mail-in votes were counted.

He took part in a "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote event at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and then held a drive-in rally. He called out disparities in the impact of the virus on minorities and, in the cradle of the American experiment, he painted Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms.

"Let's not ever let anyone take our power from us. Let us not be sidelined, let us not be silent, there is too much at stake and the ancestors expect so much more from us than that," Harris said in North Carolina.

President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.

The President's maneuvering, as he fights to the last moment to secure a second term, is taking place ahead of a court hearing in Texas Monday morning on a Republican request to throw out 127,000 drive-thru votes in a key county.

Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.

Biden is leading in national polls and by a narrower margin in many key states and has multiple paths to victory.

Trump's route to the required 270 votes is thinner but still viable, meaning either candidate could win.

It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.

In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is "rigged" against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

Some of the most crucial battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, have warned it could be several days before a final result can be declared.

Hanen said that if he found the plaintiffs did have standing, he would have still ruled against them "as to the voting that has already taken place," but that he would "probably enjoin tomorrow's votes."

One of the intervenors in the hearing, lawyer Andre Segura of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, argued that a ruling allowing the ballots to be thrown out would cause people to have to vote a second time.

Other attorneys said some of the affected voters were receiving medical treatment and would be unable to get to the polls on Election Day.

The Texas case is one of a number of legal challenges to voting and ballot counting, many of them brought by Republicans.

Texas, long a GOP stronghold, has become an unlikely swing state this year, with urban and suburban areas such as Harris County accounting for the bulk of the growing Democratic vote.

"Make no mistake: [T]his is not a partisan victory," Rebecca Acuña, the Biden campaign's Texas state director, said in a statement.

The true number of infections is likely higher because many people haven’t been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected and not feel sick

Texas’ seven-day rolling average of the positivity rate has risen over the last two weeks from 7.12% to 10.72%. Nationwide, the positivity rate was 6.6%.

Texas health officials have reported more than 18,000 deaths so far from COVID-19.

Last Thursday, El Paso County officials ordered a two-week shutdown of nonessential activities after the area’s medical resources were overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases.

El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego says they’re struggling to find space for the increasing number of people dying and are setting up a fourth mobile morgue unit at the medical examiner’s office.

Out of “an abundance of caution,” they said, the campaign canceled an event scheduled for later that day at a parking lot belonging to the Texas A.F.L.-C.I.O. in downtown Austin

“Rather than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump supporters in Texas instead decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way,” Tariq Thowfeek, the Texas communications director for the Biden for President campaign, said in a statement.

Efforts to contact the Texas Department of Public Safety to determine the possibility of any law enforcement action also were not immediately successful.

“Anybody see the picture of their crazy bus driving down the highway, they are surrounded by hundreds of cars, they are all Trump flags all over the place,” Mr. Trump said, chuckling.