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The Lead: Voter Registration Ending, Austin Tech Co. Reaps Funding, Fusion Centers Criticized

Good morning. The cooler weather we’ve been enjoying will gradually warm this afternoon to a high near 80, the National Weather Service says – great weather on this last day of voter registration. Here’s some of KUT’s overnight stories.

Here’s some more Texas stories from around the web:

Austin-based Calxeda Pulls In $55M to ‘Slash Data Center Power’ (Venture Beat)

Calxeda, the Austin, TX-based company with the first ever chip capable of running an entire server at a mere 5 watts, just announced a $55 million fundraise. “Businesses require a more efficient solution for the Web, Cloud, and Big Data,” Barry Evans, the company’s CEO explained in a statement.

Austin Police, DPS Defend Fusion Centers After Critical Senate Report (Statesman)

Law enforcement officials in Austin are defending the use of “fusion centers,” some of which across the country were lambasted by a U.S. Senate subcommittee recently as spending wastefully, being intrusive into citizens’ private lives and producing information of little value for counterterrorism. Austin is home to two such centers, the Police Department’s Austin Regional Intelligence Center and the Department of Public Safety’s Texas Fusion Center. … Responding to the Senate criticism, DPS Director Steve McCraw said in a statement that the report is inaccurate because investigators did not get a large enough sample of how the nation’s 77 fusion centers operate.

Politics Raised in U.S.-Mexico Spat Over Tomatoes (San Antonio Express-News)

Texans have a stake in this beef. Mexican tomatoes, mostly grown in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, are about all that's to be found in Texas grocery stores and restaurants much of the year. “From a Texas perspective, a lot of the produce we handle is coming from Mexico ... because we don't grow those products anymore,” said Marco Palma, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University.

Wells has been a part of KUT News since 2012, when he was hired as the station's first online reporter. He's currently the social media host and producer for Texas Standard, KUT's flagship news program. In between those gigs, he served as online editor for KUT, covering news in Austin, Central Texas and beyond.
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