By FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary who became one of television’s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died Thursday at age 91.

Moyer died in a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, the former CEO of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. He did not cite Moyers’ cause of death.

Moyer’s career ranged from youthful Baptist minister to deputy director of the Peace Corps, from Johnson’s press secretary to newspaper publisher, senior news analyst for “The CBS Evening News” and chief correspondent for “CBS Reports.”

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But it was for public television that Moyers produced some of TV’s most cerebral and provocative series. In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he proved at home with subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse.

In 1988, Moyers produced “The Secret Government” about the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration and simultaneously published a book under the same name. Around that time, he galvanized viewers with “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” a series of six one-hour interviews with the prominent religious scholar. The accompanying book became a best-seller.

His televised chats with poet Robert Bly almost single-handedly launched the 1990s Men’s Movement, and his 1993 series “Healing and the Mind” had a profound impact on the medical community and on medical education.

In a medium that supposedly abhors “talking heads” — shots of subject and interviewer talking — Moyers came to specialize in just that. He once explained why: “The question is, are the talking heads thinking minds and thinking people? Are they interesting to watch? I think the most fascinating production value is the human face.”

(Softly) speaking truth to power

Demonstrating what someone called “a soft, probing style” in the native Texas accent he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a calm, reasoned perspective, whatever the subject.

From some quarters, he was blasted as a liberal thanks to his links with Johnson and public television, as well as his no-holds-barred approach to investigative journalism. It was a label he didn’t necessarily deny.

“I’m an old-fashion liberal when it comes to being open and being interested in other people’s ideas,” he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to term himself a “citizen journalist” operating independently, outside the establishment.

Public television (and his self-financed production company) gave him free rein to throw “the conversation of democracy open to all comers,” he said in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press.

“I think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists,” he said another time, “but they’ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.”

Over the years, Moyers was showered with honors, including more than 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody awards, three George Polks and, twice, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton Award for career excellence in broadcast journalism. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.

From sports to sports writing

Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a dirt farmer-truck driver who soon moved his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him into journalism.

“I wanted to play football, but I was too small. But I found that by writing sports in the school newspaper, the players were always waiting around at the newsstand to see what I wrote,” he recalled.

He worked for the Marshall News Messenger at age 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more appropriate byline for a sportswriter, he dropped the “y” from his name.

He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained and preached part time at two churches but later decided his call to the ministry “was a wrong number.”

His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; he wrote the then-senator offering to work in his 1954 re-election campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired him for a summer job. He was back in Johnson’s employ as a personal assistant in the early 1960s and for two years, he worked at the Peace Corps, eventually becoming deputy director.

On the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip. He flew back to Washington on Air Force One with newly sworn-in President Johnson, for whom he held various jobs over the ensuing years, including press secretary.

Moyers’ stint as presidential press secretary was marked by efforts to mend the deteriorating relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam war took its toll and Moyers resigned in December 1966.

Of his departure from the White House, he wrote later, “We had become a war government, not a reform government, and there was no creative role left for me under those circumstances.”

He conceded that he may have been “too zealous in my defense of our policies” and said he regretted criticizing journalists such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Peter Arnett, then a special correspondent with the AP, and CBS’s Morley Safer for their war coverage.

AP writer Dave Bauder and Former Associated Press writer Robert Monroe contributed to this report. Moore retired from the AP in 2017.

“Despite decades of harm, the Department of Transportation is pushing a plan to widen the Cross Bronx by adding another highway structure over the Bronx River and Starlight Park, doubling down on the already blatant environmental injustice.”

The Cross Bronx Expressway. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

When America’s environmental first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, championed the Highway Beautification Act in 1965, she understood something fundamental about American infrastructure: roads should serve as a conduit for people, not just cars.

Her yearly drives from Texas to Washington D.C. took her through junkyards filled with abandoned cars and blighted, urban spaces, a sight that remains familiar to New Yorkers today. Her fight to counter the concrete brutality of highways and preserve the natural environment wasn’t just about “beautification,” as many suggested, but about improving Americans’ quality of life.

Today, as the New York State Department of Transportation pushes to expand the Cross Bronx Expressway, it is betraying that vision and the Bronx communities already choking on the highway’s pollution. This National Highway Day urges us to commit to transportation alternatives that nourish Bronx communities, instead of poisoning them. 

The great outdoors have long been under attack, paved over and trodden via the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act which birthed the nation’s interstate system. Situated along Interstate 95, the Cross Bronx Expressway is a product of this legacy. Under Robert Moses, the Cross Bronx carved through working-class neighborhoods of color in the 1950s, displacing thousands, severing neighborhoods, and leaving behind a legacy of asthma, heart disease, and premature death.

It remains one of the most congested roadways and toxic polluters in the nation, sickening residents along the Bronx River, including more than 3,000 at the adjacent public housing complex Bronx River Houses. Now, despite decades of harm, the Department of Transportation is pushing a plan to widen the Cross Bronx by adding another highway structure over the Bronx River and Starlight Park, doubling down on the already blatant environmental injustice. 

This cannot happen. Instead of expanding the Cross Bronx Expressway—a monument to racist urban planning—the DOT must follow through with a version of its second, safer proposal for the Cross Bronx: standard bridge repairs with improvements that the community has long been calling for, reducing traffic by rerouting trucks and cars not headed to the area using regional highways. And if DOT really wants to center our community’s priorities, it will explore options that increase connectivity on the east and west portions of the Cross Bronx, move forward with improvements to the 174th Street Bridge, and support future-looking solutions like “Blue Highways” that reduce traffic on local highways.

Bronx residents have already voiced our concerns: we want bridge repairs without expansion. We want to reduce traffic, not build a new road that will only increase it. We want more green space, not a new highway that towers over a park where children play on two playgrounds, already breathing in too much pollution. And we want our neighborhoods reconnected, not further severed.

NYSDOT knows this—the agency was a partner in the Reimagine the Cross Bronx Expressway report, a community-designed blueprint which outlines real solutions for reducing traffic while improving air quality and green space, and reconnecting our neighborhoods. But their new proposal does the exact opposite.

As Lady Bird Johnson knew way back in the 60s, highway “beautification” wasn’t just that, “it involves much more,” she said. “Clean water, clean air, clean roadsides…and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.”

To unnecessarily expand the Cross Bronx Expressway at the expense of clean water, clean air, and our parks wouldn’t just go against her legacy. It would endanger our quality of life in the Bronx— something which too often hinges on the baseless decisions of people hundreds of miles away, with little regard for community input.

This National Highway Day, let’s heed the lessons of the past and commit to a healthier, safer transportation system that connects our communities while preserving our natural spaces. Gov. Kathy Hochul and DOT have a choice: they can rubber-stamp another highway-sized road and spend taxpayer money to further endanger Bronx communities, or halt this expansion, conduct a full environmental review of the plan, and finally listen to the Bronx. 

Siddhartha Sánchez is the executive director of Bronx River Alliance, which works to protect, improve and restore the Bronx River corridor. Jaqi Cohen is the director of climate & equity policy at Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which promotes sustainable transportation, equitable planning policies and practices, and strong communities in the New York City metro area.

The post Opinion: On National Highway Day, Lady Bird Johnson’s Legacy Beckons Us to Stop the Cross Bronx Expansion appeared first on City Limits.

Samuel Junior Sanchez had served around 15 years of a 75-year sentence for a violent road-rage incident and had seemingly exhausted all appeals when his sister contacted a group of Abilene attorneys in 2021 about new information she hoped might finally give her brother another chance at life.

As an angry young man, Sanchez had chased down and shot at a car whose driver honked at him, resulting in the injury and permanent paralysis of a passenger and Sanchez’s indictment for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in 2006. But Sanchez was now in his 50s, and he’d radically changed in prison. Though he never expected to live long enough to win release, he’d been keeping journals and dedicating himself for a decade to daily bible study, prayer, and counseling younger men to avoid prison gangs and violent behavior.

Sanchez was among about 300 criminal defendants who’d received notice that they’d been affected by a nationally publicized misconduct scandal, described blandly by the Midland County District Attorney’s office in a form letter as an “ethical situation.” During Sanchez’s trial—and during his initial unsuccessful appeal—a Midland County assistant district attorney named Ralph Petty simultaneously worked as a paid law clerk for the judges overseeing his and other cases, while concealing that double role from defense attorneys. 

Samuel Sanchez (center) with attorneys Jacob Blizzard and Sarah Durham (Courtesy/Blizzard & Zimmerman)

In 2021, the moonlighting Midland prosecutor’s shocking misconduct made national news because of his participation in the case of a death row inmate named Clinton Young. During Young’s appeal, Laura Nodolf, then Midland County’s elected district attorney, unearthed evidence that Petty, by then a retired assistant district attorney, had clerked after hours for years. Nodolf disclosed this to Young’s attorneys, and investigative reporter Jessica Priest broke the story for USA Today. As a result, Young’s conviction and death sentence were reversed in September 2021. (Young spent a peaceful, though brief, period out on bail before being retried and resentenced to life.)

On June 12, Sanchez left the courtroom as a free man, following a plea deal that was negotiated after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) reversed both his aggravated assault conviction and sentence because of Petty’s misconduct. Sanchez’ court victory came due to the support of relatives who scraped up funds for his representation by Blizzard & Zimmerman, an Abilene criminal defense firm, which spent nearly four years pursuing his appeal and negotiating his release. 

Surrounded by about 30 family members and friends, Sanchez stood speechless in court when the judge approved a new conviction and sentence for time served—meaning he could go home. “He just cried,” Jacob Blizzard, one of Sanchez’ criminal defense attorneys told the Texas Observer. “He was just overwhelmed with emotion.”

So far, at least four men—Young, Sanchez, and two others—have had their felony convictions and sentences tossed by the conservative CCA based on evidence that Petty’s misconduct violated their rights to a fair trial and an unbiased judge, court records show. Sanchez appears to be the first freed on a plea deal.

“I think that what’s so egregious is how systematic it was,” Blizzard said. Petty “did it over and over again for pretty much all of the judges but at the same time I think kept it secret.”

In April 2021, Petty was forced to resign from the Texas Bar after the state Supreme Court found his misconduct was “conclusively established.” Still, he submitted an affidavit in 2023 opposing relief for Sanchez.

Many more Midland criminal defendants remain, some imprisoned, who were affected by Petty’s long-term misbehavior, and “dozens and dozens” of cases remain to be addressed, Midland District Attorney Glenn Harwood told the Observer. 

In an opinion in another case, CCA Judge Bert Richardson echoed a Fifth Circuit court judge’s description of the situation as “utterly bonkers.” 

Richardson continued: “Our adversarial system of law before an impartial judge malfunctioned. The barrier to prevent ex parte communications between the prosecutor and the neutral judge vanished (unknown to the defense). This situation leaves ‘lasting stains on a system of justice’ that will take years to restore.”

Petty had played a dual role as prosecutor and judicial clerk in Midland County from about 2001 until his retirement in 2019, records show—often performing both duties on the same cases and even drafting judicial orders in response to motions he’d filed as a prosecutor. Though Nodolf said she didn’t learn of his clerking for judges until August 2019, when she disclosed it, court records show two former elected district attorneys concealed his moonlighting and many local judges participated. (It’s unclear whether other players in Midland besides Petty will face any consequences for their roles in his misconduct.)

After being hired by Sanchez’ relatives in 2021, Blizzard and his associates spent nearly two years digging into Petty’s part in Sanchez’ conviction and 75-year sentence. In all cases tainted by Petty’s moonlighting, the burden remains on the defendants to prove that Petty’s tenure as a judicial clerk overlapped with his participation in their cases as a prosecutor and also caused a violation of their constitutional rights.

Attorneys dug through old billings and court files and found what they considered clear evidence that Sanchez’s rights had been violated. Their 2023 appeal calculated that Petty had made at least $271,850 moonlighting as a law clerk, while earning a full-time salary from the county as assistant DA. Petty played his double role during Sanchez’ 2007 trial, and, in 2016, Petty was “paid by the trial court to dispense” with Sanchez’ first habeas application while he “also opposed the application as a prosecutor,” per the appellate record.

Sanchez’s Abilene attorneys also found court-issued documents resembling Petty’s writing style—bearing the unusual fonts and asterisks he favored—coinciding with Petty’s arguments to the judge to deny Sanchez’s appeal. 

Petty had clearly been “in the decision-maker’s secret ear to help them make decisions about the case,” Blizzard told the Observer.

Clinton Young in a prison visitation booth earlier this year (Michelle Pitcher)

Still, Blizzard’s firm’s initial efforts to challenge Sanchez’ conviction ended with an unpublished CCA ruling—in 2023, one year prior to the court’s ultimate reversal—that Sanchez’s constitutional rights had not been violated. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, lawyers in other parts of Texas were filing other appeals that challenged the prosecutor’s dual role in their clients’ cases. 

One appeal that made its way to the CCA sought relief for Michael David Lewis, who’d been sentenced to life without parole for capital murder. Another was separately filed for Mohsin Mazhar Syed, who’d been convicted of sexual assault. Both cases overlapped with Petty’s moonlighting years.

In Ex Parte Lewis, handed down in May 2024, the CCA strongly condemned Petty and the judges who employed him. “The undisputed facts establish that the trial court allowed his paid judicial law clerk to represent one of the parties appearing before him in a contested legal matter. This undisclosed employment relationship between the trial judge and the prosecutor appearing before him tainted Applicant’s trial,” the court ruled. 

Lewis was resentenced to 30 years in prison. Syed and Sanchez subsequently won reversal of their convictions and sentences under the Lewis decision. In both cases, the CCA issued new opinions, reversing their prior denials.

Nodolf had recused her office from handling any appeals based on Petty’s misconduct after discovering it in 2019; she didn’t seek re-election in 2024. Harwood, a former state and federal prosecutor who took office on January 1, has inherited the aftermath.

“The whole Ralph Petty thing is just a big old mess, and we’re doing our best,” he told the Observer. In some cases, it takes research to determine whether Petty was involved. What course Harwood takes in each depends in part on the details of Petty’s actions.

“Some we can’t retry. Some we can come to an agreed resolution—that’s not necessarily satisfactory,” Harwood said. “And there’s the cases where we can retry, like Clinton Young’s, and that’s what we’re going to do.” 

The post Moonlighting Midland Prosecutor Means Freedom for Samuel Sanchez appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By TAMMY WEBBER, Associated Press

Power plants and industrial facilities that emit carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global warming, are hopeful that Congress will keep tax credits for capturing the gas and storing it deep underground.

The process, called carbon capture and sequestration, is seen by many as an important way to reduce pollution during a transition to renewable energy.

But it faces criticism from some conservatives, who say it is expensive and unnecessary, and from environmentalists, who say it has consistently failed to capture as much pollution as promised and is simply a way for producers of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal to continue their use.

Here’s a closer look:

How does the process work?

Carbon dioxide is a gas produced by burning of fossil fuels. It traps heat close to the ground when released to the atmosphere, where it persists for hundreds of years and raises global temperatures.

Industries and power plants can install equipment to separate carbon dioxide from other gases before it leaves the smokestack. The carbon then is compressed and shipped — usually through a pipeline — to a location where it’s injected deep underground for long-term storage.

BKV Carbon Ventures project manager Spencer Crouch explains how the carbon capture and sequestration process works at their facility in Bridgeport, Texas, Thursday, May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Carbon also can be captured directly from the atmosphere using giant vacuums. Once captured, it is dissolved by chemicals or trapped by solid material.

Lauren Read, a senior vice president at BKV Corp., which built a carbon capture facility in Texas, said the company injects carbon at high pressure, forcing it almost two miles below the surface and into geological formations that can hold it for thousands of years.

The carbon can be stored in deep saline or basalt formations and unmineable coal seams. But about three-fourths of captured carbon dioxide is pumped back into oil fields to build up pressure that helps extract harder-to-reach reserves — meaning it’s not stored permanently, according to the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

BKV Carbon Ventures senior facility engineer Laura Mamazza walks at a compression station at a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Bridgeport, Texas, Thursday, May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

How much carbon dioxide is captured?

The most commonly used technology allows facilities to capture and store around 60% of their carbon dioxide emissions during the production process. Anything above that rate is much more difficult and expensive, according to the IEA.

Some companies have forecast carbon capture rates of 90% or more, “in practice, that has never happened,” said Alexandra Shaykevich, research manager at the Environmental Integrity Project’s Oil & Gas Watch.

That’s because it’s difficult to capture carbon dioxide from every point where it’s emitted, said Grant Hauber, a strategic adviser on energy and financial markets at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

BKV Carbon Ventures project manager Spencer Crouch looks at a compression station that’s part of a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Bridgeport, Texas, Thursday, May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Environmentalists also cite potential problems keeping it in the ground. For example, last year, agribusiness company Archer-Daniels-Midland discovered a leak about a mile underground at its Illinois carbon capture and storage site, prompting the state legislature this year to ban carbon sequestration above or below the Mahomet Aquifer, an important source of drinking water for about a million people.

Carbon capture can be used to help reduce emissions from hard-to-abate industries like cement and steel, but many environmentalists contend it’s less helpful when it extends the use of coal, oil and gas.

A 2021 study also found the carbon capture process emits significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that’s shorter-lived than carbon dioxide but traps over 80 times more heat. That happens through leaks when the gas is brought to the surface and transported to plants.

BKV Carbon Ventures senior facility engineer Laura Mamazza closes a gate on a carbon sequestration injection well pad site at a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Bridgeport, Texas, Thursday, May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

About 45 carbon-capture facilities operated on a commercial scale last year, capturing a combined 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — a tiny fraction of the 37.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector alone, according to the IEA.

It’s an even smaller share of all greenhouse gas emissions, which amounted to 53 gigatonnes for 2023, according to the latest report from the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says one of the world’s largest carbon capture utilization and storage projects, ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek facility in Wyoming, captures only about half its carbon dioxide, and most of that is sold to oil and gas companies to pump back into oil fields.

BKV Carbon Ventures senior facility engineer Laura Mamazza stands near part of a compression station at a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Bridgeport, Texas, Thursday, May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Future of US tax credits is unclear

Even so, carbon capture is an important tool to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, particularly in heavy industries, said Sangeet Nepal, a technology specialist at the Carbon Capture Coalition.

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“It’s not a substitution for renewables … it’s just a complementary technology,” Nepal said. “It’s one piece of a puzzle in this broad fight against the climate change.”

Experts say many projects, including proposed ammonia and hydrogen plants on the U.S. Gulf Coast, likely won’t be built without the tax credits, which Carbon Capture Coalition Executive Director Jessie Stolark says already have driven significant investment and are crucial U.S. global competitiveness.

They remain in the Senate Finance Committee’s draft reconciliation bill, after another version passed the House, though the Carbon Capture Coalition said inflation has already slashed their value and could limit projects.

Associated Press reporter Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.