It’s flu season, a fact you’ve probably noticed if you’ve experienced a bout of achy, feverish misery, or if you’ve seen the equally feverish news reports on the mounting death toll in North Texas, which reached 21 yesterday. To put this all in context, we spoke with Dallas County Health…
If it were possible for a human being to physically climb into bed with an industry, Texas attorney general hopeful Barry Smitherman would be under the covers with oil and gas interests in a nanosecond. He has more than proved his ardor during nearly a decade as an energy regulator,…
First, a spot of good news: Hillcrest High School has climbed off the Texas Education Agency’s annual list of low-performing schools. So have two other Dallas ISD schools, Francisco Medrano Middle School and John W. Runyon Elementary. Now for the depressing news: twenty-five DISD schools took their place, leaving the…
The man in the photo to the left isn’t a Ranger in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. He’s a Texas game warden, kitted out to check your deer tags or lead a paramilitary, kick-the-door-in assault on your tent. The militarization of every possible law enforcement entity in America is complete: Texas Parks…
Pretend that a corporation from China wants to build a factory in Texas just for the fun of it and needs to seize a bunch of Texans’ private property to build the factory, because it’s going to be really big and awesome. Do you think the Texas Supreme Court would…
Chung Kim might look like someone’s kindly grandpa, but the 76-year-old has a helluva mean streak. His former boss knew this; when Kim was laid off from his job in 2001, he allegedly pulled a weapon. So did his neighbors, several of whom he allegedly threatened with murder over the…
At some unknown point in the not-too-distant past, after the advent of the internal combustion engine, human beings discovered that pouring volatile chemicals into underground burrows made it much, much easier to hunt rattlesnakes and other critters. The practice, aptly called “gassing,” caught on and has been in use in…
The Bob’s Steak & Chophouse on Lemmon Avenue isn’t the type of establishment that plasters its dining room walls with pictures of famous athletes, which explains how a $3,000 photo of Babe Ruth came to be hanging in the men’s restroom. When dinner began on Wednesday evening, the Great Bambino…
Yesterday, the Dallas City Council green-lighted a long-delayed, million-dollar renovation of the dog park at White Rock Lake. Built for a song a dozen years ago, it is crowded, muddy and in bad need of an overhaul. City Councilman Dwaine Caraway agrees. He, like the rest of his colleagues, voted…
We missed a fascinating SBOE campaign forum in Fort Worth Monday night. It didn’t start when Tea Party candidate Eric Mahroum kicked off the evening with some fringe buzzwords like CSCOPE and Common Core, and an invocation of the former President Ronald Reagan’s “are you better off?” speech. Nor did…
This weekend, upwards of 45,000 of the world’s most passionate big-game hunters will descend on Downtown Dallas for the Dallas Safari Club’s annual convention. Only one will walk away with permission from the Namibian government to kill an endangered black rhino. As DSC Executive Director Ben Carter told us last…
UPDATED JUNE 9 2014: Cops Barricade South Dallas Car Wash, Threaten Arrest If You Ask Too Many Questions ORIGINAL POST In the evening after sundown, the neighborhood behind Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in old South Dallas is a scene from Detroit — vacant lots, boarded-up houses, crackheads and drunks…
Driving on LBJ Freeway while it’s under construction is pure misery. Living next to it, as Laraine Schaffer and her neighbors have discovered over the past three years, is pure hell. Schaffer’s home is in the 12000 block of High Meadow Drive in far Northwest Dallas, a street that backs…
SeaWorld has taken a bit of a beating recently as the backlash from CNN’s Blackfish documentary, which lays bare the cruel folly of keeping killer whales in captivity and forcing them to entertain the masses. To a lesser extent, so has Southwest Airlines, which has a longstanding partnership with the…
On Thursday, the Texas Supreme Court will thrust itself into a debate as old as the Internet: Is the web a place where ideas and opinions, often vile, sometimes damaging, should be allowed to flow unencumbered? Or should there be some means of identifying defamatory speech and purging it from…
If you can’t get enough of Deion Sanders talking sports on ESPN or Deion Sanders being accused of assaults in the news, soon you can turn to the Oprah Winfrey Network and see Deion Sanders from a pleasant, uplifting human-interest angle. The network will air a series documenting his life…
The advent of liquor stores in Plano has not transformed the suburb into a downtown Dallas-like pit of moral depravity, as some naysayers had predicted in the lead-up to last May’s local-option election. The level of debauchery is about the same as it’s always been. On the other hand, contrary…
The only thing surprising about the fact that TSA agents confiscate a ton of loaded weapons from passengers attempting to board aircraft at D/FW International Airport is that Atlanta apparently confiscates more of them. Houston comes in third, nationally, behind us. So says the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, which…
When Denton City Councilman Kevin Roden first made his pitch to bring Sriracha to North Texas last October, it seemed like an impossible long shot. What chance did a lone municipal official, bearing no tax breaks or economic development incentives, have of convincing the manufacturer of the most delicious condiment…
HUD spent four years building its recently unveiled case against the city of Dallas, compiling statistics and gathering evidence to show that for years the city been illegally promoting residential housing segregation. Evidence that the city was steering affordable housing outside of downtown, the claim that formed the seed of…
It’s been a while since we had occasion to skewer Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles for a personnel move. Jennifer Sprague, the overpaid and underqualified strategy maven; Miles saboteur Rebecca Rodriguez; chief of staff and FBI target Jerome Oberlton — they are all long gone. But now that Oberlton is…
State Representative Lon Burnam has a simple request of anyone interested in learning just how far the state Republican leadership will go to throw a wrench into efforts to provide affordable health insurance to millions of uninsured Texans. Subpoena him. Do it. Please. The Fort Worth legislator is among a…
