Baylor News

This week, the Mayborn Museum’s Monday Storytime featured two stories that explore themes and ideas related to Black History Month. With children gathered around, Breshena Crosby, the box office manager for the theater arts department, read Rio Cortez’s “The ABC’s of Black History” and Russell and Ciara Wilson’s “Why Not You?”

Waco News

He said difficult days lay ahead. But from the mountaintop, he could see the Promised Land. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words the day before his assassination. According to Rev. Dr. Kenyatta Gilbert, the son of the first black Baylor student, he was right. As a student at Baylor from 1963-1967 and as a civil rights leader and pastor in Waco, Gilbert’s father, Robert Gilbert, suffered severe discrimination and resistance to change.

One of two suspects in robberies of two local cash lending stores was arrested on Baylor campus at 3:43 a.m. Tuesday, hours after an on-campus manhunt.

State News

Beyond the races for U.S. Senate and governor, Texas voters will decide who fills several statewide offices this November — positions that oversee everything from the state’s finances to its oil and gas industry.

INTERNATIONAL

The Iran war is now in its 46th day. Iran responded by restricting access to Hormuz, which carries about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil, and moving to toll vessels transiting the strait. Waco drivers are already feeling it. The local average hit $3.38 a gallon last week, up 21 cents in seven days and 75 cents year-over-year, according to AAA data.

Gas prices in Texas have surged more than 70 cents per gallon since the U.S. went to war with Iran three weeks ago. The near-total shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has driven oil prices up more than 40%, pushing the national average to its highest point since 2023 and sending diesel past $5 for the first time in three years.

The largest U.S. military operation in the Middle East in decades unfolded as American and Israeli forces struck Iran Saturday, killing its supreme leader and triggering retaliatory strikes from the Gulf to Israel. The White House said the campaign is aimed at dismantling Iran’s military and toppling its government.