It’s a pretty good time to be in Frisco, if you are the Texas Legends. Last week the Frisco City Council agreed to spend $90,000 in taxpayer dollars to purchase a basketball court for the minor league NBA team to play on. By coincidence, Frisco Mayor Maher Maso is good…
Yesterday afternoon, Dallas police were called to one of the dumber bank robbery attempts in recent memory. At 5:15 p.m. a man in his 40s pulled up to the drive-thru window (the sliding-drawer kind rather than suction tube) and placed what police described as a “suspicious device” inside along with…
The Dallas Morning News’ Brandon Formby spent days, maybe weeks, trying to chase down Councilwoman Vonciel Jones Hill to get her views on tearing down I-345, the short nub of freeway dividing Deep Ellum from downtown. She wouldn’t talk, twice begging off because she was too busy, then just not…
Of late, the North Texas Tollway Authority has been testing out a host of new methods to encourage drivers to pay their tolls. The agency will block your vehicle registration and impound your car. It will publicly shame you. It will sue you. Sometimes, though, nothing works as well as…
On March 24, Cheryl Blasius was stopped cold at her front door. Hanging from the doorknob was a notice from Terrell’s animal control department: Got complaint you own a monkey. You cannot have a monkey in Terrell. 10 days to remove of you will recieve (sic) citations for keeping an…
Editor’s note: Recently, our Eric Nicholson reported on the goat skulls and carcasses that await visitors of the new Texas Horse Park, one of Dallas City Hall’s bizarre attempts to develop southern Dallas. Together with Eric’s previous scoop about the park being entrusted to an accused horse abuser, the story…
Garland ISD’s foreign teachers aren’t in danger of being sent back to their native countries because the human resources director might have been taking all-expense paid trips to the Philippines, or pocketing fees he wasn’t supposed to be charging in the first place, or illegally funneling business to his step-kids,…
A synagogue operating out of a Far North Dallas home has won a preliminary victory over neighbors who want it shut down. Collin County District Judge Jill Willis this morning denied the Highlands of McKamy homeowners association’s request for a temporary injunction against Congregation Toras Chaim, which operates out of…
On Wednesday, the federal government released a massive trove of Medicare data showing how much some 880,000-plus U.S. healthcare providers were paid for their services in 2012. Fully mining the data will take months or years, but using the data to compile a list of the top Medicare billers took…
Garland ISD trustee Scott Luna typically has a clear path to victory. Three times he’s been up for election, three times his name has been the only one on the ballot. Not this time. He has a challenger, 21-year-old Lawrence Billy Jones III, and now Luna’s become embroiled in a…
People who live in Flower Mound may or may not be at higher risk for developing cancer. The state already assured the public that there isn’t a cancer cluster back in 2010, but after a UT-Austin researcher published a recent report challenging the state’s methods, Texas has grudgingly agreed to…
They arrived by Beast. It was the summer of 2011, and Juan and Jose, twin brothers from Honduras, had decided to flee to the United States. Thousands of young Central Americans make the journey every year, riding the roofs of freight trains that chug north through Mexico. The train goes…
Nowadays, Dallas’ network of tunnels are pretty widely reviled as an urban planning nightmare that have sucked the life off downtown’s streets. They are a “sordid story,” Downtown Dallas Inc. CEO John Crawford told the City Council this morning. “Frankly, we’re trying to do away with them as quickly as…
Congratulations, Dallas. Your never-ending quest to become “world class” has finally paid off. Not in the sense that Dallas will now be mentioned in the same breath as London and Paris or transformed into a international tourist hotspot. But you have finally succeeded in scrubbing off the redness the rest…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown didn’t think his proposal to secure access to a federal database of private banking and financial information would be controversial. It sailed through the City Council’s Public Safety Committee unopposed last week. Then again, that committee didn’t have City Councilman Lee Kleinman. “‘The right of…
High school students in Texas can take, and get credit toward, electives like floral arrangement, team sport officiating, and turf-grass management. But not for Mexican-American studies, something activists, education groups, and several dozen state lawmakers are pushing to change. They came out in force for Tuesday’s State Board of Education…
Orville Paul Dunagan and Bryan Coleman are friends. Scratch that. They were friends, neighbors and longtime softball buddies and teammates in a slow-pitch league in East Dallas. The moment their bond began to dissolve, on June 21, 2005, is now immortalized in Dallas County court records. That’s the day Dunagan…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wears many hats. He’s a “man’s man,” a pizza lover, a terrible actor, the titular head of a major American city. He is also, you might be surprised to learn, a distinguished journalist. So says the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism. It has…
Until now, there have been only vague hints of improprieties in Garland ISD’s H1-B visa program. There was an investigation serious enough to call in the feds, possibly involving foreign teachers paying fees they shouldn’t have had to pay, and a bunch of teachers’ visas were set to expire. Today,…
Craig James, the former SMU football star and Senate candidate whose retrograde views on homosexuality, litigiousness and overall mediocrity have made him unemployable as a football analyst, has fallen into a new career as a mouthpiece for the religious right. The Family Research Council, labeled by the Southern Poverty Law…
Remember that story a couple of weeks back about how Dallas was sitting on 25,000 municipal court warrants? And how you were probably safe ignoring your traffic citation with impunity? That was caused by a technical glitch, and technical glitches get fixed. The reprieve was temporary. The broader trend is…
The town of Hutchins doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. There’s Hutchins State Jail, the town’s second-largest employer, and new intermodal facilities centered on the Union Pacific train tracks and I-20 (this presumably explains how the population doubled between 2000 and 2010, to 5,338), but it has otherwise…
