POSSIBLE TOPICS: VOTETEXAS.GOV—Voter Information; May 07, 2022: Local and Constitutional Amendment Election Results; May 24 Primary Runoff & Precinct Chair Election; League City City Council postpones vote on pigs as pets; Incumbents unseated in Harris County ESD No. 9 election; Austin becomes first Texas city to test a taxpayer-funded “guaranteed income” program; Abbott sees another opportunity to hurt children; Gov. Greg Abbott voices clear support for school voucher program; Texas Republicans say if Roe falls, they’ll focus on adoptions and preventing women from seeking abortions elsewhere; A minor trespassing case gives Gov. Greg Abbott’s border initiative its first courtroom win; Trump’s Handling of the 2020 Census Was Even Worse Than You Think; Ukraine to halt key Russian gas transit to Europe, blames Moscow; Nuclear fusion is one step closer with new AI breakthrough; More.

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• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

1. Make sure you are registered to vote! VoteTexas.GOV – Texas Voter InformationTEXAS SoS VOTE-BY-MAIL BALLOT APPLICATION (ALL TEXAS COUNTIES) HarrisVotes.com­ – Countywide Voting Centers, (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965), Harris County Clerk
   1. Harris County “Vote-By-Mail’ Application for 2022
      1. Fort bend County Elections/Voter Registration Machine takes you to the proper link
      2. GalvestonVotes.org (Galveston County, TX)
      3. Liberty County Elections (Liberty County, TX)
      4. Montgomery County (TX) Elections
      5. Brazoria County (TX) Clerk Election Information
      6. Waller County (TX) Elections
      7. Chambers County (TX) Elections
      8. For personalized, nonpartisan voter guides and information, Consider visiting Vote.ORG.   Ballotpedia.com and Texas League of Women Voters are also good places to get election info.
      9. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
      10. HarrisVotes.com – Countywide Voting CentersHARRIS COUNTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
          1. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
          2. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
          3. Current utility bill
          4. Bank statement
          5. Government check
          6. Paycheck
          7. A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
          8. You may vote early by-mail if:You are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
             1. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
             2. Sick or disabled;
             3. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
             4. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
             5. Make sure you are registered:
             6. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
             7. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
             8. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
             9. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
2. BE REGISTERED TO VOTE, and if eligible, REMEMBER TO FILL OUT AND MAIL YOUR MAIL-IN BALLOT APPLICATIONS FOR 2022
   1. You can track your Mail Ballot Activity from our website with direct link provided here https://www.harrisvotes.com/Tracking
   2. May 07, 2022: Local and Constitutional Amendment Election Results: The Tax -capping Constitutional Amendments passed, because lower taxes are better than education funding. There were many local propositions and technically non-partisan races. You can click on the link I provided and go straight to the Harris County results page. Otherwise, go to the appropriate county results for where you live and check your local results.
   3. May 24 Primary Runoff & Precinct Chair Election
      1. 13May – Last Day to Apply by Mail (Received, not Postmarked)
      2. 16May – First Day of Early Voting by Personal Appearance
      3. 20May – Last Day of Early Voting by Personal Appearance
      4. 24May – Election Day & Last Day to Receive Ballot by Mail
   4. ELECTION NOTE:
      1. Other sources of election information: The League of Women Voters of Texas’s has a nonpartisan Voters Guide available Englishor Spanish. Also com, among others.
3. League City City Council postpones vote on pigs as pets; By Jake Magee | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 7:39 PM May 10, 2022 CDT | Updated 7:48 PM May 10, 2022 CDT
   1. On May 10, League City City Council voted to postpone a decision on whether to allow residents to keep pigs as pets.
   2. On April 26, City Council passed the first reading of an ordinance update to allow residents to keep pigs as pets. It requires the approval of a second reading to go into effect.
   3. Under the ordinance, pigs would have to be vaccinated, spayed or neutered, and registered with the city. Additionally, there would be no size restrictions for the pigs, meaning residents could keep pigs that grow to hundreds of pounds in their homes.
   4. Pigs would also have to remain collared and stay indoors except for exercise or elimination of waste. Outdoor areas where pigs go would have to be cleaned daily, according to the ordinance.
   5. Several residents spoke in opposition to allowing pigs as pets, citing concerns about pigs’ noise, size, aggression and other issues. …
   6. Police Chief Gary Ratliff sent council members a letter outlining concerns with the ordinance, Council Member Larry Millican said. His concerns were not discussed at the meeting, but Ratliff did discover other cities that allow pigs as pets do have several restrictions in place, Mayor Pat Hallisey said.
   7. Council Member Nick Long said he is not opposed to size restrictions on pigs. In addition, he said he does not see the point of the ordinance requiring pigs be registered with the city when residents do not need to register their guns.
   8. Council Member Hank Dugie said he agrees with removing the registration requirement.
   9. Long also requested that the ordinance clearly states that it does not trump homeowners association restrictions or deed restrictions that may prevent residents from keeping pigs as pets in certain neighborhoods.
   10. The vote to postpone the matter passed 5-3 with Council Members Dugie, John Bowen and Chad Tressler opposed. It will be brought before council again at a later date after city staff makes changes to the proposed ordinance. …
   11. MIKE: There’s a little more going on here besides domesticated pigs being kept as household pets. First, there’s Council Member Nick Long, who is not opposed to size restrictions on pigs, and does not see the point of requiring pigs be registered when residents do not need to register their guns. So is the argument here that the Constitution not only guarantees the right to bear arms, it also guarantees the right to bear pigs?
   12. It’s nice that the ordinance doesn’t require that it supersedes homeowners association restrictions on animal ownership. And I have nothing against pigs. Everything I’ve read about pigs is that they’re intelligent and they are perfectly capable of forming bonds with their owners. But they don’t stop growing. And they can reach weights of hundreds of pounds. Now for some reason we find ourselves talking about the League City City Council, a lot. I’m not quite sure why that is. They just seem to do interesting stuff down there and they have interesting characters running the place. Now we don’t know the party affiliations of the pro and con pig groups. But it sounds from the association of pigs with the Second Amendment right to bear arms like what we have is I don’t know about whether the Pro-Pig registration faction is Democratic or just more like moderate Republican in the sense we used to understand. But obviously the anti-pig registration faction is a libertarian bunch, so it’s like if you’re not gonna register guns, you shouldn’t register anything. And if you’re not going to forbid the ownership of guns, you shouldn’t forbid the ownership of anything. That seems to me to be the direction that this is going. I’m sure that we’ll be discussing League City City Council again, possibly on this very topic.
4. Incumbents unseated in Harris County ESD No. 9 election; By Danica Lloyd | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM |11:20 PM May 7, 2022 CDT | Updated 11:20 PM May 7, 2022 CDT
   1. [Three challengers] will serve four-year terms as commissioners for Harris County Emergency Services District No. 9 …
   2. All three incumbents … were unseated.
   3. [The 3 victorious challengers earned … 20.7% of the total, … 18.9% of the total, and 7% of the total, respectively.]
   4. A total of 10,787 total votes were counted as of May 7. …
   5. TAGS: Naressa MacKinnon Kevin W. Stertzel Robert O. Paiva Scott DeBoer William McDugle Tommy Balez John Peart Harris County Emergency Services District No. 9
   6. MIKE: Under 11,000 votes is a relatively small number of votes in an absolute sense, and I have no idea what the party affiliations of political positions are of either the winners or the losers, but I have real issues with anyone winning any office with such tiny percentages of the vote.
   7. MIKE: This is a crying example of why we need ranked choice voting, because this is clearly minority rule with absolutely no real electoral mandate.
5. Austin becomes first Texas city to test a taxpayer-funded “guaranteed income” program; by Joshua Fechter | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | May 5, 2022, Updated: May 6, 2022
   1. Austin will be the first major Texas city to use local tax dollars to give cash to low-income families to keep them housed as the cost of living skyrockets in the capital city.
   2. Under a yearlong, $1 million pilot program that cleared a key Austin City Council vote Thursday, the city will send monthly checks of $1,000 to 85 needy households at risk of losing their homes — an attempt to insulate low-income residents from Austin’s increasingly expensive housing market and prevent more people from becoming homeless.
   3. “We can find people moments before they end up on our streets that prevent them, divert them from being there,” Mayor Steve Adler said at a press conference Thursday morning. “That would be not only wonderful for them, it would be wise and smart for the taxpayers in the city of Austin because it will be a lot less expensive to divert someone from homelessness than to help them find a home once they’re on our streets.”
   4. Eight Austin City Council members voted Thursday to establish the “guaranteed income” pilot program and contract with a California nonprofit to run it.
   5. Austin joins at least 28 U.S. cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago and Pittsburgh, that have tried some form of guaranteed income. Locally, the idea came out of efforts to rework how the city tackles public safety in the wake of protests over police brutality in 2020. …
   6. Preliminary findings from a similar pilot program showed some promising results. UpTogether, the California nonprofit that will run the Austin program, ran a separate guaranteed income program funded by private dollars in Austin and Georgetown that ended in March, the nonprofit said in a statement Thursday. That program gave 173 families $1,000 a month for a year, and the nonprofit said participants used the money for expenses like rent and mortgage payments, child care, fuel and groceries.
   7. Some were able to boost their savings, more than half of recipients slashed their debt by 75% and more than a third eliminated their household debt, the nonprofit said. …
6. Abbott sees another opportunity to hurt children; by Charles Kuffner | OFFTHEKUFF.COM | May 6th, 2022
   1. He is definitely making this a habit. [Citing HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM]
      1. Greg Abbott wants to “resurrect” a court challenge over a 1975 Texas law withholding state funds from school districts for kids who were not “legally admitted” into the United States. That law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1982.
      2. He made the remarks in an interview Wednesday on the Joe Pags radio show.
      3. “The challenges put on our public systems is extraordinary,” Abbott said before referencing Plyler v. Doe, the ruling that overturned the Texas law. “I think that we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler v. Doe was issued many years ago.”
      4. In that case, the court ruled that “education has a fundamental role in maintaining the fabric of our society,” and withholding it from the children of immigrants in the country without paperwork “does not comport with fundamental conceptions of justice.” People living without documentation in the country remain people “in any ordinary sense of the term” and are thus entitled to the same basic rights as anyone else in the country.
   2. We’re going to see a lot more of this, because people like Abbott have realized that SCOTUS is now a cheat code for achieving whatever policy ends they want, without having to legislate them. You could say that the policy he seeks to achieve here is the reversal of one that had been done via the court and not the legislative process. The difference is that the litigants in the Plyler case had to win on the merits and could have lost. They didn’t get to count on having a majority on the court that was ideologically on their side and willing to use their power towards that end. …
   3. TAGGED: abortion DREAM Act · Election 2022 · Greg Abbott · immigration · schools · SCOTUS · Texas · The Lege
7. Greg Abbott voices clear support for school voucher program; Abbott said he supports giving parents the option to attend private school … by Patrick Svitek | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | May 10, 2022, 15 hours ago
   1. … “We can fully fund public schools while also giving parents a choice about which school is right for their child,” Abbott said during a campaign event in San Antonio. “Empowering parents means giving them the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school or private school with state funding following the student.”
   2. Abbott has long been a supporter of the broad concept of “school choice,” but his focus on it has ebbed and flowed throughout his governorship. His commitment to the cause was thrown into question by a recent string of endorsements in Texas House primary runoffs in which he backed Republicans opposed by school-choice proponents, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
   3. Critics of vouchers say they hurt public schools, an argument that Abbott’s Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, quickly made after the governor’s remarks.
   4. “Abbott is for defunding our public schools,” O’Rourke tweeted. “I’m for fully funding our kids’ classrooms and fully supporting parents, teachers, and students.” …
   5. Abbott held the event as part of a focus on “parental rights” in his reelection campaign. Echoing Republicans nationwide, he has vowed to give Texas parents more say in their kids’ education, including over the curriculum they are taught and the types of schools they can attend.
   6. The Association of Texas Professional Educators said Abbott was “again attempting to capitalize on trendy political rhetoric by mislabeling vouchers as a ‘parental right’ and again ignoring the facts: Texas voters support Texas public schools.” …
   7. Vouchers have long been a tough sell in the Legislature, where the idea tends to draw bipartisan opposition in the House, partly from rural Republicans concerned about the health of public schools in their districts. The House speaker, Beaumont Republican Dade Phelan, said in a recent radio interview that he has “no problem with an up-or-down vote” on school choice issues but noted test votes have previously failed by wide margins. …
   8. MIKE: Abbott said, “We can fully fund public schools while also giving parents a choice about which school is right for their child,” and he said this just about the time that the Texas Legislature passed, and the voters approved a statewide cap on local governments’ ability to fund schools through property taxes in a state that also prohibits any kind of income tax.
   9. MIKE: So, how close is Texas to being able to drown Texas public education in a bathtub?
8. Texas Republicans say if Roe falls, they’ll focus on adoptions and preventing women from seeking abortions elsewhere; by Zach Despart and James Barragán | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | May 9, 20225 AM Central
   1. … [S]ome of the more conservative members of the House said they also want to ensure strict enforcement of the abortion ban and to prevent pregnant Texans from seeking legal abortions in other states.
   2. “I think I can speak for myself and other colleagues that align with my policy beliefs — we’ll continue to do our best to make abortion not just outlawed, but unthinkable,” said Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus. …
   3. Cain said he has a particular interest in going after abortion funds, which seek contributions from donors to help defray the cost of out-of-state trips for pregnant Texans to receive the procedure, citing a state law that prohibits “furnishing the means for procuring an abortion.”
   4. In a March letter to one such group, the Lilith Fund, Cain threatened to file a bill in the coming legislative session that would empower district attorneys to prosecute abortion-related crimes across the state even when local authorities refuse to do so. …
   5. Greg Abbott did not respond to questions from The Texas Tribune about abortion-related legislative priorities for the coming session in January. House Speaker Dade Phelan said in a statement that he was confident the Legislature would “rise to the occasion and redouble our commitment to maternal health care in our state.”
   6. State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, the author of SB 8, did not respond. He posted on Twitter on Thursday that Texas would “lead the way in a post-Roe world.” …
   7. Other Republican lawmakers spoke about pitching nonpunitive measures in the upcoming legislative session. Toth said if abortion is outlawed in the state, Republicans in the statehouse will focus on expanding social programs to help pregnant women and their children. …
   8. Republicans have good reason to avoid discussing enforcing Texas’ pre-Roe laws, said Renée Cross of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston: A full abortion ban is broadly unpopular with voters.
   9. Just 15% of respondents in a University of Texas at Austin poll released this week said they support prohibiting all abortions. More troubling for Abbott’s reelection bid this year, Cross said, is the fact that a majority of independents said they believe abortion should be available in most circumstances. …
   10. MIKE: Texas is going to “redouble [its] commitment to maternal health care in our state.” I suppose the usually-generous Texas government will do this at the same time it’ll fully fund Texas public education, while state education funding “follows the student” to charter and private schools, while also capping the taxing authority of local governments to raise taxes to fully fund public education.
9. A minor trespassing case gives Gov. Greg Abbott’s border initiative its first courtroom win; … [A] Kinney County jury Monday convicted a Honduran national in the first jury trial for trespassing under Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. by Jolie McCullough | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | May 10, 2022, 15 hours ago
   1. … [Lester Hidalgo Aguilar, a Honduran migrant.] was the first migrant to stand trial in Gov. Greg Abbott’s “catch-and-jail” initiative under Operation Lone Star, a multibillion dollar border security crackdown launched last March in response to a sharp rise in illegal immigration.
   2. In an attempt to deter border crossings, state police have arrested more than 3,000 men in Kinney County on trespassing charges since July. The county accounts for the vast majority of Operation Lone Star’s trespassing arrests, with migrants typically picked up on its many hunting ranches or at a remote railyard.
   3. The mass arrests, funneled through the court system of a town used to handling a few dozen misdemeanors a year, caused a litany of problems. Errors and delays by the local prosecutor and judge have led to illegal detentions, and the trespassing initiative has led to constitutional challenges in both state and federal courts. Other pieces of Operation Lone Star have also faced criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike over deaths of Texas National Guard members and its ever-increasing price tag.
   4. With the operation’s increasing backlash, as well as continuously rising levels of immigration, securing a conviction out of the first jury trial for the trespassing arrests wasn’t necessarily about Aguilar. It was a win the state and the county needed.
   5. Out of Kinney County’s more than 3,100 reported trespassing arrests through April, 860 men have pleaded guilty, typically after spending weeks or months in prison before their first court appearance. But Aguilar’s was the first trespassing case to go to trial, and the county wasn’t taking any chances. …
   6. [S]ix jurors, all of whom had Spanish surnames, found Aguilar guilty of trespassing on a fenced ranch land Monday evening after deliberating for less than 20 minutes. …
   7. After the jury was discharged, the Honduran national told the court that he was brought to the United States by his family when he was 6 and was raised in Florida. After a stint in jail in his early 20s, he said he was given the choice of voluntarily going back to Honduras or extended probation, and he left.
   8. There, Aguilar said, he became a family man, eventually fathering five children. But he was forced to flee from political persecution about five years ago, he said, and sought asylum in Mexico. He was trying to stay in Mexico five years to gain citizenship so he could more easily apply for a visa into the United States, he said. But he fled to Texas after four years because he said he was being targeted by cartels.
   9. While the judge weighed an appropriate jail sentence for his conviction, Aguliar showed what he said was a machete-inflicted scar on his forehead. He raised his hands to reveal only nine fingers, explaining his pinky was taken when he was kidnapped and tortured by cartel operatives.
   10. State District Judge Roland Andrade gave Aguilar the maximum punishment for trespassing: a year in jail. But, against the wishes of the three prosecutors on the bench, Andrade declined to issue an accompanying fine, the maximum of which would be $4,000. …
   11. [Aguilar’s court-appointed defense attorney, Bryan Owens assured the court that [w]henever Aguilar is released, the end result will be the same. After a costly imprisonment and extensive trial procedure, he said the Honduran migrant will be deported.
   12. MIKE: Yes, it’s perfectly obvious to me that the Republican-run government of Texas is just full of empathy and generosity for education, children, moms, and humans generally. Trust them.
   13. MIKE: Texas: Where the cruelty of government is the point.
10. Trump’s Handling of the 2020 Census Was Even Worse Than You Think; The Commerce Department official who oversaw the 2000 census explains how minorities got undercounted and white people got overcounted in 2020. by Robert Shapiro | WASHINGTONMONTHLY.COM via OFFTHEKUFF.COM | April 14, 2022
    1. Donald Trump’s most consequential legacy might be the debate he spurred about whether our democracy truly includes everyone. … That’s also the issue in the Trump administration’s hobbling of the 2020 census and how it distorted the current apportionment for the House of Representatives.
    2. The large-scale errors in the census cost New York, Texas, Florida, Arizona, California, and New Jersey one seat each, and resulted in an extra representative for Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Montana, Wisconsin, and Indiana. 
    3. You may recall then Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s ham-handed scheme to include a question on citizenship status in the 2020 census. It was a ploy to depress minority participation, and it was batted down by the Supreme Court. But the bigger scandal was the census’s persistent funding shortfalls, understaffing, and truncated schedule. The result was the most error-riddled count in decades. The undercounting of Blacks and Hispanics and double counting of whites and Asians altered the allocation of congressional seats for the next decade. 
    4. Those wide-ranging errors are matters of public record, because the professionals at the Census Bureau obligingly report the decennial census undercount and overcount rates by race and ethnicity. Compared to 2010, undercounts in 2020 jumped from 2.06 to 3.3 percent for Blacks, from 1.54 to 4.99 percent for Hispanics, and from 0.15 to 0.91 percent for Native Americans on reservations and Alaskan Natives. Overcounts also shot up, increasing from 0.83 to 1.64 percent for whites and from virtually zero to 2.62 percent for Asians.
    5. These substantial errors skew the apportionment of seats in the House because the racial and ethnic makeups of the states vary so widely. The share of Black residents by state in 2019 ranged from less than 2 percent in Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and nine other states to more than 30 percent in Maryland, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia. Similarly, Hispanics accounted for less than 3 percent of those living in Maine, Mississippi, and two other states, compared to between 27 and 50 percent of residents in Florida, Arizona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico. 
    6. In much the same way, overcounts tend to be concentrated among two groups—non-Hispanic whites and Asians. The share of white residents by state ranged in 2019 from 36 percent in California and New Mexico to 92 percent in Vermont and West Virginia. Similarly, Asians comprise less than 2 percent of the population of Mississippi, Wyoming, West Virginia, and 13 other states, compared to 9 percent in New York and Nevada, 10 percent in New Jersey, 15 percent in California, and 39 percent in Hawaii. 
    7. By applying the 2020 error rates to each state’s racial and ethnic makeup, we find that undercounts in the 2020 census deprived six states of a congressional seat; correspondingly, overcounts of white and Asian residents enabled six other states to gain one seat more than their populations warranted. …
    8. The effort by Trump officials to hobble the census did not involve overt manipulation of the results. Instead, they simply withheld the means to avoid serious errors. …
    9. Officials in the Trump administration may or may not have conspired to use the 2020 census to shift seats in Congress based on the states’ racial and ethnic makeup, but that was the inescapable effect of their debasement of its operations. The outcome is also consistent with the GOP’s implicit (and sometimes explicit) consensus that power and legitimacy in America are inseparable from race and ethnicity. That view is simply incompatible with democracy. 
    10. MIKE: As near as I can tell, no lawsuits related to the census have affected actual Congressional apportionment to the present time.
        1. REFERENCE: Census Bureau to Hold Third Status Briefing for the National Urban League Plaintiffs, March 25, 2022, & FOLLOW-UP, National Urban League Briefings, March 29, 2022: The U.S. Census Bureau will hold a briefing for the National Urban League plaintiffs in the case of NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE, et. al., v. GINA RAIMONDO et. al. The Census Bureau agreed in a Joint Stipulation in settling this lawsuit to brief plaintiffs every two months to allow an opportunity for questions and answers regarding the status of census processing, forthcoming data quality metrics, and assessment of released data quality metrics. A final briefing will occur after the release of the Post-Enumeration Survey final results.   
        2. REFERENCE: The Brennan Center for Justice – 2020 Census Litigation
        3. REFERENCE: Fair Lines America Foundation v. U.S. Dep’t of Commerce — The Fair Lines America Foundation filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Commerce Department and the U.S. Census Bureau under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to compel the Census Bureau to release records concerning institutional living facilities and other housing facilities counted in the group quarters operation for the 2020 Census. The case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
        4. REFERENCE: Records Obtained in 2020 Census FOIA Lawsuit — The Brennan Center is releasing in their entirety all records obtained through our Freedom of Information Act requests seeking information related to the 2020 Census. All records that the government did not redact in full are available …
11. Ukraine to halt key Russian gas transit to Europe, blames Moscow; By Pavel Polityuk and Susanna Twidale | REUTERS.COM | May 10, 20224:30 PM CDT, Last Updated 10 hours ago
    1. Ukraine said on Tuesday it would suspend the flow of gas through a transit point which it said delivers almost a third of the fuel piped from Russia to Europe through Ukraine, blaming Moscow for the move and saying it would move the flows elsewhere.
    2. Ukraine has remained a major transit route for Russian gas to Europe even after Moscow’s invasion.
    3. GTSOU, which operates Ukraine’s gas system, said it would stop shipments via the Sokhranivka route from Wednesday, declaring “force majeure”, a clause invoked when a business is hit by something beyond its control.
    4. But Gazprom (GAZP.MM), which has a monopoly on Russian gas exports by pipeline, said it was “technologically impossible” to shift all volumes to the Sudzha interconnection point further west, as GTSOU proposed.
    5. GTSOU CEO Sergiy Makogon told Reuters that Russian occupying forces had started taking gas transiting through Ukraine and sending it to two Russia-backed separatist regions in the country’s east. He did not cite evidence. …
12. Nuclear fusion is one step closer with new AI breakthrough; The green energy revolution is getting closer. By Tom Metcalfe | LIVESCIENCE.COM | published March 4, 2022 (4 days ago)
    1. The green energy revolution promised by nuclear fusion is now a step closer, thanks to the first successful use of a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system to shape the superheated hydrogen plasmas inside a fusion reactor.
    2. The successful trial indicates that the use of AI could be a breakthrough in the long-running search for electricity generated from nuclear fusion — bringing its introduction to replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission on modern power grids tantalizingly closer. …
    3. The [reactor] coils are usually governed by a set of independent computerized controllers… But the new AI system was able to manipulate the plasma with a single controller…
    4. The doughnut-shaped fusion reactor is the type that seems most promising for controlling nuclear fusion; a tokamak design is being used for the massive international ITER (“the way” in Latin) project being built in France, and some proponents think they’ll have a tokamak in commercial operation as soon as 2030.
    5. MIKE: Over the course of my life, science-fiction-like advances like flat screen TVs have always been 10 years away. Sooner or later, they’re right. Time will tell. I might even still be here to tell it.