Texas has suffered through years with basically no rain. As my West Texas-dwelling grandmother was fond of telling my drought-bemoaning grandfather, it shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, she’d say, we live in the middle of the desert. In May though, across the state and in Dallas specifically, the seemingly…
Plano knocked over its old water tower today “to make room for Legacy West, an exciting new development, which will include shops, restaurants, residential living, a high-rise hotel and the Liberty Mutual Insurance campus,” according to a city news release. Crews from a Michigan company, Iseler Demolition, cut the base…
Featuring boarded-up, bullet-hole riddled windows, Dallas Police’ Lamar Street headquarters in the Cedars reopened Monday, after a weekend attack that saw 14 officers engage with James Boulware. Boulware attacked the building early Saturday morning, spraying it with semi-automatic rifle fire and planting pipe bombs in its parking lot. He was…
Maybe it’s a busy day for you, but every once in a while if you get a minute you need to stop and think about what you want the city to be. If you don’t, somebody else will. “This is social engineering,” Elizabeth Julian said to me recently. “The question…
Please excuse us for missing this last week, but First Baptist Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress has again said something as odious as it is catastrophically stupid. American Christians, Jeffress said, are being treated in the same way Jews in Nazi Germany were treated before the Holocaust. “I want to remind…
At about 12:30 Saturday morning, according to police, witnesses near Dallas Police headquarters in the Cedars saw what they believed to be multiple people shooting at the building. Patrol cars approached the armored van the shots were coming from. The van rammed the patrol cars and someone inside fired more…
Does the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office really need a military-grade mine-resistant SUV designed to withstand insurgent bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan? Almost certainly not, but with the federal government literally giving them away as part of its program to militarize local law enforcement agencies, it seemed a shame to pass up…
A yet to be named Corinth resident is facing charges for trying to keep a black bear as a pet. The cub was found running around a neighborhood Thursday morning after an off-duty police officer spotted him. Corinth Police Lieutenant Jim Gregg told Star Local Media that the department believed…
Let’s be clear: No member of the clergy in Texas has been forced to marry a couple they didn’t want to marry, nor will they be in the future. Churches are not a public accommodation like, say, a pizza restaurant run by opportunistic bigots in Indiana . Even if the…
Last summer, the seven doctors and scientists on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee unanimously recommended significantly strengthening federal smog standards. Current allowable levels of smog-producting ozone — 70 parts per billion — cause serious health problems (e.g. a “decrease in lung function, increase in respiratory symptoms, and…
When Dr. Hasan Hashmi and his son Suleman opened a hospital in Grand Prairie three years ago, they pitched it as a noble necessity for an underserved area. “Nationally, Grand Prairie was on the map as one of the largest cities in the country without an acute care hospital,” Suleman told…
Sometimes, in the giddy throes of class warfare (i.e. making fun of the Park Cities), one can occasionally lose sight of the bigger picture — namely, the basic human need to expel waste products from their bodies. We regret that, in gently ridiculing Highland Park’s crackdown on portable toilets last week,…
One would think that maybe, just maybe, that XTO Energy, faced with a peer-reviewed study by SMU researchers and a mountain of evidence that the company is causing earthquakes, consider shutting down its fracking and disposal wells in Azle and Reno. The SMU and federal research demonstrates pretty clearly that the…
In 2004, after a man’s death from a controversial choke hold (the “lateral vascular neck restraint”) prompted Police Chief David Kunkle to revisit the department’s use-of-force guidelines, the Dallas Police Department bought its first batch batch of 400 Tasers. They were intended as an intermediate option, a relatively humane way…
Words, words, words. What do they really mean? Always a favorite game of mine. Recently I found myself back on a familiar reporting beat — affordable housing. I know what affordable means: something that non-zillionaires can afford. A week ago a member of the Dallas Plan Commission, Paul Ridley, proposed…
The McKinney police officer who pulled a gun on two unarmed teenage boys and tackled and pinned an unarmed teenage girl was the victim of his emotions, his attorney said Wednesday. “With all that happened that day, he allowed his emotions to get the better of him. Eric regrets that…
One of the two women charged with operating an illegal butt injection clinic in Deep Ellum has been arrested for murder. Wykeshia Reid died on February 15 after allegedly receiving injections at the clinic. Reid said she didn’t feel well after the injections, Clarke told police earlier this year, so…
On the evening of April 28, the typically sleepy chambers of the Richardson City Council were aboil. Hundreds of agitated residents pressed into the auditorium, so many that police refused entry to several dozen, who were ushered into a separate room to watch a video feed of the proceedings. Mayor…
The young people today like memes. What is a meme? I think it’s a picture with big white words on it, John. Kids, look at these cool memes brought to you by FrackFeed, a new website created by North Texans For Natural Gas. Obama’s interior secretary is definitely going to…
And then there were eight. Tuesday afternoon, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed most of a lower court decision that kept most of the state’s remaining abortion providers open. The ruling makes the most onerous provision of Texas 2013 anti-abortion law, House Bill 2, enforceable. Every health clinic…
Monday night, a weekend of outrage, stemming from a McKinney police officer pulling a gun on unarmed kids at a pool party before tackling and pinning an unarmed 14-year-old girl, culminated in a pair of protests in the North Texas suburb. One group of protesters marched from Comstock Middle School…
Every year, the energy drink company Red Bull sponsors a touring cliff-diving competition. (Cliff-diving, for those unfamiliar, is the sport of jumping off a cliff). The Texas stop on the tour, late last month at Possum Kingdom Lake, sure looked fun, the type of event where you might expect to…
