John Wiley Price first inserted himself into the debate over school reform in Dallas ISD when he showed up at a November board meeting to lambast Superintendent Mike Miles’ heavy-handed attempts to enact change. His specific complaint then was the departure of longtime administrator Shirley Ison-Newsome, but Price made it…
You didn’t seriously expect Ron Paul to disappear into a quiet, uneventful retirement, did you? If you did, you probably weren’t watching as over a couple of decades in Congress and a pair of long-shot presidential runs, Paul became the outspoken face of unapologetic libertarianism, and you probably didn’t listen…
Voters didn’t mince words in 2005, when they added Article I, Section 32 to the Texas Constitution. “Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman,” it says. “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any…
On the morning of March 18, police were called to Gerald Canepa’s modest brick home in Oak Cliff. Inside, they found the 68-year-old’s body, naked and lifeless. It was clear from the stab wounds that he’d been murdered. His TV, two computers and DVD collection were gone. The friend or…
Public Policy Polling is a new but fairly well-respected outfit that churns out an impressive quantity of high-quality snapshots of public opinion on political races and the important issues of our time. But PPP doesn’t let that stop them from putting out equally authoritative figures on the percentage of Americans…
Ryan Ball didn’t know that porn legend Jenna Jameson was having her birthday party at Le Vu on Friday night, or so he claims in his recap of the night on Reddit. He and a pair of friends just wanted to have a couple of drinks and settled on the…
From time to time, when police have a particularly busy weekend, we like to compile some of the more interesting happenings into a quick crime digest. We think of it as a public service. How else would readers know not to visit the Stults Elementary playground at 1 a.m., or…
When the city, AT&T and golfing legend Lee Trevino gathered at City Hall last November to announce plans for a PGA-caliber golf course in southern Dallas, they were long on such adjectives as “game changer” and “world-class” but short on details, like where the tens of millions of dollars to…
We’ve written about Kaitlyn Samuels twice: Once last February when her parents went before a military judge to argue that Tricare, the Department of Defense’s health insurer, should cover therapy costs for their severely disabled daughter, and again in October after Tricare ignored the judge’s order to do so. Kaitlyn…
Dominique Thornton did not testify in his trial for charges that he committed a string of armed robberies along the Katy Trail last May. It probably wouldn’t have done any good. He was IDed by victims as the gunman in the heists, and police found Thornton’s thumbprint on a stolen…
Teena Mathis has always said it was an accident. She had left her 15-month-old niece, Heidi, with her children on a backyard swingset while she stepped inside to answer the phone. While she was in the house, the girl wandered behind the swing, which hit her in the head. Heidi…
Goat Island Preserve is a comma of 348 acres hugging the Trinity River as it meanders through an unincorporated portion of far southeastern Dallas County. It’s surrounded by gravel pits and crisscrossed with crude four-wheeler trails but is otherwise a rather wild and seldom visited tangle of land. County officials…
The Morning News’ David Moore put it gently when he wrote that the Cowboys’ selection of Wisconson center Travis Frederick in the first round of the NFL draft is “not likely to satisfy [the] fan base.” The football cognoscenti had predicted he’d be a second or third round pick. Even…
We somehow missed this in the chaotic aftermath of last week’s Boston Marathon bombing, partly because we don’t watch the news with closed captioning on, partly because we don’t follow Zooey Deschanel on Twitter. But local Fox affiliate KDFW seems to have labeled the 33-year-old actress/indie songstress/Apple pitchwoman as an…
First, the good news. According to a report just released by the American Lung Association, the air in Dallas-Fort Worth has gotten considerably cleaner in recent years. The average number of days with unhealthy levels of ozone has been cut in half over the past decade, and the concentration of…
The men and women who gathered alongside Central Expressway this morning to protest the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center were mostly well-behaved. They marched by peacefully by in their Jason-esque hockey masks, Guantanamo prison garb and comically oversize papier mache heads. But then something went wrong. A…
When police officers raided former Kaufman County Justice of the Peace Eric Williams’ Seagoville storage shed earlier this month, amongst the guns and other items they found a white, four-door Ford Crown Victoria that they were pretty sure had been the getaway car in the March 30 murder of District…
The most interesting of the three institutions that comprise the sprawling George W. Bush Presidential Center at SMU is the museum, which is filled with artifacts from the former president’s life. There’s the bullhorn he used to address first responders from the rubble of Ground Zero in 2001, the windbreaker…
At 10 a.m. today, the tweets and media reports previewing the George W. Bush Presidential Center in increasingly granular detail will reach a crescendo as the center is dedicated. Every media outlet in the known universe is there, which explains your exploding Twitter feed. Unfair Park is the exception. The…
Last week, Texas Alliance for Life paused briefly in its crusade to enact increasingly onerous abortion restrictions and shifted its focus to the other end of the human lifespan. The group urged its supporters to lobby for passage of SB 303, state Senator Bob Deuell’s bill to reform end-of-life care…
The corpse of the Bowl Championship Series, college football’s much-maligned way of wrapping up each season in often incomprehensible fashion, has gone cold. The organization that will replace it now has a clever name — the College Football Playoff — that leaves plenty of room for a big-dollar corporate sponsor…
Just after 2 a.m. Monday, a young Hispanic woman walked to a walk-up cigarette shop on Ann Arbor Avenue. Her boyfriend had taken her car, she told the person behind the window, and she needed a phone to call 911. She had the phone when two men drove up in…
