AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas expects more than 1 million COVID-19 vaccine doses next week. State health officials say the vaccines will be first doses, with almost a quarter-million doses being the new single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The federal government will send more than 200,000 doses directly to pharmacies and federally qualified health centers. The state will distribute more than 930,000 doses to providers in all but 20 of the state's counties. The state has administered more than 6.3 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine so far, with more than 4 million people receiving at least one dose.

DALLAS (AP) — Dallas' former police chief says the police department allowed an officer to continue patrolling for more than a year while investigating whether he ordered two people to be killed because it didn’t want to tip him off. U. Renee Hall left the department at the end of 2020. She said in a statement on Twitter that police investigators, in collaboration with the FBI, recommended not placing Officer Bryan Riser on administrative leave after he was identified as a person of interest in 2019. Riser was arrested Thursday on two counts of capital murder. He's being held on $5 million bond. Authorities say he arranged for someone to kill two people in separate 2017 attacks.

KLEIN, Texas (AP) — Officials in Texas say seven people have been injured in a natural gas explosion near Houston. News outlets report Comcast workers struck a gas line while working in Klein on Friday. CenterPoint Energy crews arrived to fix the line. Those crews struck a larger, 6-inch gas line that sparked the explosion. All seven people injured are CenterPoint workers, including one who was flown to a nearby hospital. The Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office says people living close by were evacuated from homes. One house sustained damage. The fire from the explosion burned a power line and a power pole fell over.

HOUSTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration is instructing long-term facilities that hold immigrant children to lift capacity restrictions enacted during the coronavirus pandemic. The administration is looking to open up much-needed beds in a system facing sharply increased needs. A memo issued Friday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tells service providers to “temporarily increase capacity to full licensed capacity ... while implementing and adhering to strict COVID-19 mitigation measures.” It’s not immediately clear how many beds will come available beyond the roughly 7,000 that were online last month.

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