Either We're a Free and Self-Governing People, Or We're Not

In what state Sen. Angela Paxton describes as an effort to safely expand Texas’ burgeoning financial tech industry, the freshman Republican from McKinney has filed a bill that would empower the office of her husband, Attorney General Ken Paxton, to exempt entrepreneurs from certain state regulations so they can market “innovative financial products or services.”

One of those exemptions would be working as an “investment adviser” without registering with the state board. Currently, doing so is a felony in Texas - one for which Ken Paxton was issued a civil penalty in 2014 and criminally charged in 2015.

Senate Bill 860, filed Friday, would create within the attorney general’s office a new program - what the bill calls a “regulatory sandbox” - that would allow approved individuals “limited access to the market … without obtaining a license, registration, or other regulatory authorization.” The bill, based on a 2018 Arizona law hailed as the first of its kind, aims to cut red tape for the growing financial tech sector, allowing businesses to market new products for up to two years and to as many as 10,000 customers with scant regulation.

But skeptics pointed to the bill’s optics problem: Ken Paxton, a statewide official accused of violating state securities law, would be empowered to decide who can skirt state securities law. And he’d get that power from a bill authored by his wife. Currently, Texas law requires investment advisers to register with the state. Failing to do so is a third-degree felony punishable by a sentence of two to 10 years.

So when another bruised and bloodied girlfriend told police he had flown into a rage and head-butted her and bit her finger at a camper park in Ellijay, Shell faced serious consequences. A grand jury charged him as a repeat offender, which could mean up to 20 years in prison for aggravated assault. Yet more than four years after his indictment, Shell remains a free man, the charges against him stymied. A big reason: He paid a large retainer fee to hire an attorney who is also one of Georgia’s most powerful lawmakers, state Speaker of the House David Ralston.

Just as Ralston has done for other clients charged with violent or heinous crimes, he used his elected position to delay hearings and court dates, preventing the case from moving forward in the Gilmer County justice system. “That’s why I gave him 20,000 bucks,” Shell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He’s worth every penny of it.”

A joint investigation by the AJC and Channel 2 Action News found that Ralston appears to be misusing the power of his public office to benefit his private law practice. By doing no more than writing letters to judges declaring that court dates interfere with his lawmaking duties, he has been able to keep cases perpetually off the docket. But his tactics can thwart justice, harm crime victims and put the public at risk. Ralston has tied up cases for clients charged with child molestation, child cruelty, assault, terroristic threats, drunken driving and other crimes.

Often, he writes letters that stave off cases in bulk. That keeps his clients free on bond, while their chances of escaping harsh punishment get better with every passing year. “Please be advised that I am hereby requesting a continuance of these three cases from the criminal calendar call,” reads one of Ralston’s typical letters. “I hereby certify to the Court that my legislative duties and obligations will require that I be elsewhere on that date.” Under a state law dating back to 1905, judges and prosecutors must defer to the legislative schedule of any practicing attorney who serves in the General Assembly. Other attorney-lawmakers, though, are mainly relegated to claiming the exemption during the annual 40-day legislative sessions.

Former Govs. Roy Barnes and Nathan Deal both called The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in separate interviews to voice support for Ralston, who faces backlash after an investigation found he frequently delayed criminal court cases by claiming the dates interfered with his legislative duties. He later picked up two more endorsements: Gov. Brian Kemp’s office said he looks forward to continuing to work with Ralston. And Senate Pro Tem Butch Miller praised Ralston’s “diligence, perseverance and commitment.”

Hippocamp marks the seventh inner moon. But Showalter and his colleagues weren't moon-hunting when they began to look at Hubble Space Telescope data about Neptune. Instead, they were trying to understand the interactions between the existing moons and a series of semi-rings called arcs, which were also discovered around Neptune in 1989.

"It was always in the back of our minds that there might be the possibility of discovering a small moon out around Neptune, but we didn’t expect to find one out in this location," Showalter says. It was found by taking Hubble data starting in 2004. When the images are distorted in a particular way, the points of light that represent small moons become more apparent-it's easier to follow their orbit by smudging an image to bias their brightness. There was one mysterious light source in there, unmistakably a moon, but smaller than anything else out there.

The dinosaur fossil was found in Utah, where it lived 96 million years ago in a lush delta during the Cretaceous period. It's been named Moros intrepidus, which means "harbinger of doom." The dinosaur lived at the end of the allosaurs' reign at the top of the food chain and before Tyrannosaurus rex arrived. It's now the oldest tyrannosaur from the Cretaceous period found in North America. Medium-size tyrannosaur fossils have been found from the Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago. And then, about 81 million years ago during the Cretaceous, tyrannosaurs grew into giant predators and replaced allosaurs as the top of the food chain.

So what happened in between? Moros is helping researchers fill that 70 million-year gap, as well as provide a portrait of tyrannosaur lineage in North America. Moros links the earliest, smaller tyrannosaurs to Tyrannosaurus rex. Zanno and her team spent a decade searching for fossils from the Late Cretaceous period. They recovered teeth and a hind limb consisting of a femur, a tibia and parts of a foot belonging to Moros in the same area where Zanno found the fossil of a giant carnivorous carcharodontosaur. But Moros stood between 3 and 4 feet tall. The dinosaur they found was 7 years old when it died, a nearly full-grown adult that would have weighed around 172 pounds. The elongated leg and foot bones indicated that it would be a great runner.