Lubbock City Council members said this week they have no choice but to remove it, to comply with a directive from the Trump administration and Republicans to rid the public roadways of any political messages or artwork.

Laredo, in South Texas, removed a mural in October that protested the border wall along the southern border with Mexico. In August, Florida officials removed a rainbow-colored crosswalk outside the Pulse nightclub where 49 people were gunned down.

Lubbock’s crosswalk was first installed in 2020 and is near the Buddy Holly Center, a downtown museum with exhibits honoring Lubbock’s most famous native son.

“It’s such a tasteful cross section and people like it. But what do you do?” said City Council Member Christy Martinez-Garcia, who was among those questioning why it had to go.

Lubbock received a letter from the Texas Department of Transportation with “some harsh wording” that threatened the possible loss of state or federal funding for road projects if such artwork was not removed, David Bragg, Lubbock’s interim division director of public works, told council members on Tuesday.

“This was very broad letter. I don’t think it was intended to go after, say, the Buddy Holly glasses. Unfortunately it did,” Bragg said.

Mayor Mark McBrayer said the city had no choice but to comply.

“Probably everybody here got some communication from people wanting that not to be the case,” McBrayer said. “But I don’t really feel like we have the wherewithal to do anything about that without trying to litigate it and I don’t think there’s any appetite here anyway.” Bragg said the removal will happen during normal maintenance next year.

On Oct. 8, Abbott directed the department to ensure that all Texas cities and counties are in compliance with federal and state guidelines on roadway safety and that symbols, flags and other markings conveying social or political messages are prohibited, as well as any signage and signals that don’t directly support traffic control or safety.

“Texans expect their taxpayer dollars to be used wisely, not advance political agendas on Texas roadways,” Abbott said in a statement.

Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Friday.

Abbott’s directive came after Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy sent letters to all U.S. governors in July saying that intersections and crosswalks must be kept free from distractions.

“Roads are for safety, not political messages or artwork,” Duffy’s statement said.

Holly was born and raised in Lubbock, located in northwest Texas. He decided to play rock and roll music after seeing Elvis Presley perform in 1955. His best known songs include “That’ll Be the Day,” ’’Rave On” and “ Peggy Sue.”

Holly was only 22 when he died in a Feb. 3, 1959, plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, that also killed Ritchie Valens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson. The three rockers’ deaths were immortalized in Don McLean’s 1971 song “American Pie,” and became known as “the day the music died.”

Warren Buffett’s conglomerate revealed in a regulatory filing late Friday that it purchased 17.8 million shares of Google parent Alphabet during the third quarter. The stock jumped 4% in after-hours trading yesterday.

It was the biggest stock addition last quarter and was worth about $4.3 billion at the end of September. Berkshire also bought shares of Chubb, Domino’s Pizza, Sirius XM and Lennar.

Meanwhile, Berkshire maintained its position in Amazon, another AI hyperscaler, in the third quarter.

The addition of Alphabet comes amid a massive rally. Even after the most recent AI-fueled stock market selloff, Alphabet shares are still up 46% this year.

To be sure, Alphabet has been on Berkshire’s radar in the past. In 2019, Buffett’s right-hand man at the time, the late Charlie Munger, admitted that he felt “like a horse’s ass for not identifying Google better. I think Warren feels the same way.”

Back then, Google’s dominance in search piqued Berkshire’s interest. But today, the company is among the tech giants leading the charge into AI.

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft alone are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year with no signs of a slowdown.

Morgan Stanley has estimated AI hyperscalers plan to spend about $3 trillion on data centers and other infrastructure through 2028.

The relentless capital expenditures, much of which is coming via debt, have made Wall Street nervous about whether AI companies will be able to translate all those outlays into sustainable revenue and profits.

With Buffett due to step down as Berkshire’s CEO by year’s end, it’s not immediately clear whether he, successor Greg Abel, or another top executive made the call to buy Alphabet stock.

And investors may not hear directly from the “Oracle of Omaha” on the matter. In a letter published Monday, Buffett said he’ll be “going quiet,” and will no longer write Berkshire’s annual report, nor talk “endlessly” at the annual meeting.

Leading up to Buffett’s departure, Berkshire has been taking a cautious stance on the stock market as well as company acquisitions, sending its cash pile to record highs.

Buffett’s closely followed stock portfolio continued to shrink overall, as last quarter marked three straight years of net selling. The most recent round of selling included more shares of Apple, which Berkshire has been steadily offloading for more than a year.

The replacements came after online commenters seized on striking similarities in the president’s signature across a series of pardons dated Nov. 7, including those granted to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon. In fact, the signatures on several pardons initially uploaded to the Justice Department’s website were identical, two forensic document experts confirmed to The Associated Press.

Within hours of the online speculation, the administration replaced copies of the pardons with new ones that did not feature identical signatures. It insisted Trump, who mercilessly mocked his predecessor’s use of an autopen, had originally signed all the Nov. 7 pardons himself and blamed “technical” and staffing issues for the error, which has no bearing on the validity of the clemency actions.

The questions about Trump’s signature come amid a new flurry of clemency and weeks after the president claimed to not even know Changpeng Zhao, a crypto billionaire he pardoned last month. He said in an interview with 60 Minutes that the case had been “a Biden witch hunt.”

“A basic axiom of handwriting identification science is that no two signatures are going to bear the exact same design features in every aspect,” said Tom Vastrick, a Florida-based handwriting expert who is president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners.

“It’s very straightforward,” said Vastrick, who compared the apparently identical images, now only visible through the online Internet Archive, with the replacements at AP’s request.

Chad Gilmartin, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the “website was updated after a technical error where one of the signatures President Trump personally signed was mistakenly uploaded multiple times due to staffing issues caused by the Democrat shutdown.”

“There is no story here other than the fact that President Trump signed seven pardons by hand and DOJ posted those same seven pardons with seven unique signatures to our website,” Gilmartin said in a statement to AP, referring to the latest wave of clemency Trump has granted in recent weeks.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email that Trump “signed each one of these pardons by hand as he does with all pardons.”

“The media should spend their time investigating Joe Biden’s countless auto penned pardons, not covering a non-story,” she wrote.

Trump has been an outspoken critic of Biden’s use of the autopen to conduct executive business, going as far as to display a picture of one such device in place of a portrait of his predecessor in a new “Presidential Walk of Fame” he created along the West Wing colonnade. His Republican allies in Congress last month released a blistering critique of Biden’s alleged “diminished faculties” and mental state during his term that ranked the Democrat’s use of the autopen among “the greatest scandals in U.S. history.”

The Republicans said their findings cast doubt on all of Biden’s actions in office and sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging a full investigation.

“Senior White House officials did not know who operated the autopen and its use was not sufficiently controlled or documented to prevent abuse,” the House Oversight Committee found. “The Committee deems void all executive actions signed by the autopen without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent.”

On Friday, Republicans who control the committee released a statement that characterized Trump’s potential use of an electronic signature as legitimate, which it distinguished from Biden’s.

But Rep. Dave Min, a California Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, seized on the apparent similarities in the initial version of the pardons and called for an investigation of the matter, deploying the Republican arguments against Biden in a statement to AP that “we need to better understand who is actually in charge of the White House, because Trump seems to be slipping.”

Regardless, legal experts say the use of an autopen has no bearing on the validity of the pardons.

“The key to pardon validity is whether the president intended to grant the pardon,” said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law who is writing a book on pardons. “Any re-signing is an obvious, and rather silly, effort to avoid comparison to Biden.”

Much of Trump’s mercy has gone to political allies, campaign donors and fraudsters who claimed they were victims of a “weaponized” Justice Department. Trump has largely cast aside a process that historically has been overseen by nonpolitical personnel at the Justice Department.

Casada, a disgraced former Republican speaker of the Tennessee House, was sentenced in September to three years in prison. He was convicted of working with a former legislative aide to win taxpayer-funded mail business from state lawmakers who previously drove Casada from office amid a sexting scandal.

Strawberry was convicted in the 1990s of tax evasion and drug charges. Trump cited the 1983 National League Rookie of the Year’s post-career embrace of his Christian faith and longtime sobriety when pardoning him.

McMahon, a former New York City police sergeant, was sentenced this spring to 18 months in prison for his role in what a federal judge called “a campaign of transnational repression.” He was convicted of acting as a foreign agent for China after he tried to scare an ex-official into going back to his homeland.

McMahon’s defense attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, said he was not aware the pardon documents had been replaced until he was contacted Friday by an AP reporter.

“It is and has always been our understanding that President Trump granted Mr. McMahon his pardon,” Lustberg wrote in an email.

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Mustian reported from Natchitoches, Louisiana. AP reporter Eric Tucker contributed reporting from Washington.