Le Journal

Team USA women’s hockey is heading into the 2026 Winter Olympics hoping for more than the silver medal finish from Beijing in 2022. While they have dreams of gold, they are also inspiring the next generation of potential Olympians, some of whom are being coached in North Texas. One of them is Angel Zerby, who has already caught the attention of USA Hockey. “I want to be at the highest level that I can be,” Zerby said. “It’s hard to lose. Honestly, sometimes it’s hard to win when you have to be mentally tough in every scenario.” Tough lessons learned at just 16-years-old, but she says they are lessons that are worth it. That mental toughness and her love of hockey started when her dad took her to her first Dallas Stars game. “I decided that I thought that it looked cool, and I wanted to try that. So ever since then, he put me in skates,” Zerby said. She learned to skate when she was just 8 years old. She was playing hockey by the age of 9 years old and then leveled up to the traveling Dallas Stars Elite when she was 10. She quickly realized that this was a lot different from the sports that her other friends were playing. “So there’s not really enough girl competition here to have [a big league]. I think there are only three girls’ teams in Texas. There’s only one Tier One, which would be Dallas Stars Elite. So there’s not really enough for us to play other girls’ teams in Texas regularly,” Zerby said. Her team has seen a lot of success. They have won regionals and been to nationals. Zerby herself has plenty of personal accomplishments to celebrate already. “I was selected in 2024 for the USA player development camp. So that means I was invited by USA Hockey. That was a big deal for me. I was just super excited to go and do that,” Zerby said. She was just one of four defensewomen in her region of several states to be invited. Her hard work was all in hopes of following in the skates of North Texas women who came before her from the Dallas Stars Elite Program. Coppell’s own Hannah Bilka, who plays in the Professional Women’s Hockey League for Seattle, was on the USA Women’s National Team when they won the World Championship in 2024. Bilka has been named to Team USA’s roster for the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina. Allyson Simpson from Frisco plays professional women’s hockey for the New York Sirens and was also a member of the Dallas Stars Elite in her early career. It’s a spotlight Angel says she has trained most of her life for. “We can go at this and be scared, or we can go at this as a challenge and see what we can do,” Zerby said. While girls like Angel are still playing with the guys… the sport is growing. According to Dallas Stars Hockey programs, the girls’ side saw an 18-percent increase year over year. Since 2013, the Dallas Stars Elite has helped more than 90 North Texas girls earn scholarships for higher education.

From the wild to the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo. The FWSSR Mustang Magic showcases what a good trainer can do when paired with a wild Mustang. “It’s kind of a 2-way street of respect and trust,” trainer Eloise Ogier said. “You give them some, they give you some, and they don’t see your size, they see how in control you are.” They must not see age either. Ogier is from Round Rock and is just 13-years-old. She hasn’t even started high school yet! “I went to a show and they had a youth division, and I joked with my parents in the stands, you think i could do that,” Ogier said. Now she’s trained 3 wild mustangs to show. “When people think America, they think Wild West, they think Mustangs, but they’re really gentle, awesome creatures.” “Not everyone can train a wild Mustang,” trainer Craig Moore of Stephenville said. “So it’s something we can train that horse, and offer it to the general public, and then they can have a really neat horse that they can actually ride and get along with.” Moore said competitions like the FWSSR Mustang Magic help spread awareness of the breed and help find them homes, kind of like getting a pet from a shelter. “You don’t always know what you’re gonna get, but yeah,” Moore said. “It is like adopting a dog, but it’s adopting a horse.” Moore’s Mustang is ‘A Boy Named Sioux’. The pair placed first in their first class and 6th in their second class. “So in August, he was completely wild. You couldn’t touch him. He as tons of personality. He’s just really a unique, special horse, and really shows how good a mustang can be,” Moore said. “It’s kinda like the harder the climb, the better the view.” About 20 Mustangs will be sold after the Mustang Magic finals at 6:00 p.m. Saturday, January 24th, with pricing expected to range from about $500 to $25,000. You can get tickets to the finals here.

Tens of millions of dollars are headed to Texas to help law enforcement cover the costs of securing the World Cup. “It costs money. It’s expensive,” Senator John Cornyn said. Cornyn announced Thursday that Texas will get around $100 million of the $625 million in federal funding from the Big Beautiful Bill to reimburse law enforcement agencies in DFW and Houston responsible for securing the FIFA World Cup. “While fans and athletes are gearing up for the games behind the scenes, federal, state, and local law enforcement were working together along with emergency management teams to make sure that these games are safe,” Cornyn said. North Texas is expected to see three to four million visitors, around 100,000 of them a day. Much of the funding will go toward overtime to police departments, including Dallas and Arlington. Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux says DPD is now dialing down how many officers it will need for the World Cup. “If we need extra officers out there spending a lot of money on overtime, we’ll use some of this money to reimburse the city for overtime,” Comeaux said. “We’ve never had anything quite like this. We’ve got tried and true public safety plans that we will implement and bring to bear on these World Cup games,” Leland Strickland, Assistant Chief for the Arlington Police Department, said. Other recently approved funding will go to technology, including drones. “You saw the counter-UAS money also come through. I think that’s a big concern, obviously, so that money is coming down from the federal government also,” Rick Burkhead, Regional Safety & Security Liaison for the North Texas FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee, said. Christina Foley, Special Agent in Charge of the United States Secret service has been named the federal coordinator for the Dallas games and will help oversee the coordination between federal and local agencies. “FIFA has a component that they’re looking at intelligence, local law enforcement, state law enforcement, fusion centers, everybody’s a part of this as a combined effort,” Christina Foley, Special Agent in Charge of the United States Secret Service, said. “These nine games will be the equivalent of having hosted multiple Super Bowls in a row week after week. It’s an incredible opportunity to market our neck of the woods,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said.

A small band of moderate House Democrats teamed with Republicans on Thursday to pass a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, overcoming a revolt by most Democrats furious about ICE’s aggressive operations in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities. The vote was 220-207, with seven Democrats breaking with their party and voting yes. The House also passed a separate package of bills funding other federal agencies in a broad, bipartisan vote, in a bid to avert a partial government shutdown on Jan. 31. In an unexpected twist, the House unanimously voted to add an amendment to the package repealing a law crafted by the Senate that allows eight particular Republican senators to sue the government for a minimum of $500,000 in damages after their phone records were collected as part of a Jan. 6 investigation. House members in both parties have been critical of that law since it passed as part of the deal to end the government shutdown two months ago. Thursday’s vote puts the Senate in a jam, forcing it to accept repeal or shut down the government next week when the House is scheduled to be on recess. The House has combined the repeal amendment and six of its approved spending bills into one package. It now heads to the Senate, where Appropriations Committee leaders have signed off on the funding deal. The package represents the final tranche of the 12 spending bills Congress needs to pass each year to keep the government open and will fund it through the end of September. “You see, we aren’t here for just another stopgap, temporary fix,” House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said before the vote. “We’re here to finish the job by providing full-year funding.” The successful DHS vote came as some on the far left called on Democrats to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good, a Minneapolis woman and U.S. citizen, this month. And in a sign of how the ICE issue has become a major political issue for Democrats, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and his top lieutenants joined rank-and-file Democrats in voting no on the DHS funding bill, saying it lacked sufficient guardrails and accountability for ICE. Liberal Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a lead negotiator of the broader funding deal, also voted no on the DHS bill — an unusual move for House Democrats’ top appropriator. “ICE is out of control and operating, in far too many ways, in a lawless fashion,” Jeffries told reporters, accusing the agency of “using taxpayer dollars to inflict brutality on the American people,” including by killing Good “in cold blood.” The leaders made that decision even after DeLauro and other top Democratic appropriators — who work closely with leadership — struck the bipartisan, bicameral deal to fund the government through the 2026 fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. “You have to ask every individual member who’s going to vote the best interest of their district why they’ve chosen to vote one way or the other,” Jeffries said when asked about the split over ICE. The seven Democrats who voted in favor were: Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, both of Texas; Jared Golden of Maine; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state; Don Davis of North Carolina; and Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, both of New York. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was the only Republican to vote no. Some Democrats lamented that their party had not fought as hard for ICE guardrails as they had for an extension of Affordable Care Act funds, when they forced a 43-day shutdown last fall. (A group of eight Senate Democrats ultimately relented without ACA concessions.) “Instead of explaining to the American people where we are and what the immigration system is and why it is broken — it is broken, but why it’s broken and what are fixes for it? — we just have a bunch of Democrats who have gone around trying to be tougher on immigration than Republicans. It’s never worked,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “You can’t…

Un beau travail de la part d'Apple si la révélation de cet informateur est juste.