Richard Keiper has built a life in Boyd, Texas. The Facebook photos posted by his wife show him at birthday parties and family gatherings often cradling his granddaughter with the awkward caution of someone not quite accustomed to caring for a creature so small. The 67-year-old doesn’t look the part…
The Los Angeles Times put out an article today suggesting the U.S. might be better off swapping Texas for England if it wanted to avoid the particular Texas brand of Republicans shutting everything down for their own special reasons. While as a resident of Texas I cannot possibly approve of…
In the wake of last month’s hunt for a serial rapist targeting South Dallas, the smart money said that the first lawsuit would come from Alan Mason, the mild-mannered insurance salesman whose name and picture were plastered across the media after he was mistakenly identified by police as a “person…
When Shannon Herrin’s teenage son found his mom dead in her garage in August, Mineral Wells police were perplexed. There was no evidence of murder — no trauma, no signs of a struggle, no one with any apparent reason to want her dead — and yet there was the indisputable…
In a new book that’s been making the rounds this week, federal appeals court judge Richard Posner expresses regret for writing a 2007 opinion upholding Indiana’s tough voter ID statute, which he now describes as “a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than…
In initial reports, Dallas police said they had good reason to open fire on Bobby Gerald Bennett. The 52-year-old schizophrenic had been acting erratically, reportedly saying he wanted to be shot by police. When they arrived at his cul-de-sac in the Rylie neighborhood of far southwest Dallas just after noon…
For a while now, at least since March, the writing on the wall has suggested that Nolan Ryan’s exit from the Rangers’ front office was imminent. That writing has now migrated from the wall and into an official announcement from the club. His tenure as CEO officially ends on Halloween…
When a U.S. Postal Inspector interviewed Jessica Nicole Weatherread at the Keller Police Department on December 30, 2011, she made two things clear. One was that she didn’t steal the 400 pieces of open mail and packages addressed to Southlake residents that police had found scattered throughout her rental car…
Congress has kicked the can down the road for a couple of months until the next round of full-faith-and-credit brinksmanship. Ted Cruz, the freshman senator from Texas, maintained his cherished ideological purity by voting against increasing the debt limit and reopening the federal government — this time without obstructing the…
It’s fun to joke about the filthiness of the Trinity River. It’s even more fun to remind Houston that all that urine and feces and prescription medication we flush down our toilets winds up in their water glasses. By all means, this should continue. At the same time, it’s worth…
With Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings’ bankruptcy possibly approaching as soon as the end of this month, Public Citizen warns that if the giant electric utility’s assets are broken up, Texas taxpayers may end up paying to reclaim its coal mines. As we’ve reported before, the Sierra Club’s Beyond TXU campaign…
For a few months at least, you can rest a little easier thanks to Congress’ eleventh-hour decision to reopen the federal government, lift the debt ceiling, and not send the country plunging over the cliff it’s been careering toward so ominously. The last-minute display of sanity came with no help…
If you happened to find yourself on westbound I-20 yesterday, our condolences. The entire interstate was closed for a brief time between Lancaster Avenue and Houston School Road, and lane closures lasted into the evening, causing traffic to back up for miles. You might be alarmed to discover that the…
After five years of litigation and a three-week trial, it took a jury all of a couple of hours to decide that, contrary to the Securities and Exchange Commission, there was no evidence that Mark Cuban was guilty of insider trading. Outside the courthouse, a newly vindicated Cuban briefed a…
When Texas’ State Board of Education convenes next month to adopt new biology textbooks, chairwoman Barbara Cargill will be disappointed. The Republican from The Woodlands is a staunch advocate of teaching “all sides of scientific explanations,” which is code for more Genesis and less Darwin. Yet none of the 14…
True.com has always been a study in contradictions, an upstart dating website promising “a wholesome environment for courtship” while rather shamelessly inundating the Internet with ads featuring photos of scantily clad women and, in one alleged case, a dead soldier. For a time, the paradox worked. The New York Times…
The electronic cigarette is either a) a near-miraculous smoking-cessation tool that has enabled untold thousands of smokers to ditch tobacco or b) a rapidly growing menace to public health. Or, it could be both. Researchers aren’t really sure and won’t be until they can study the long-term health effects of…
The good news for Child Care Associates, a major Tarrant County Head Start provider that serves 10,000 low-income kids, is that Congress seems to be inching toward a last-minute deal to avert a default on the federal debt and end the government shutdown. If that doesn’t happen, the Fort Worth…
Gubernatorial hopeful and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott probably won’t get a chance this time around to roll back every meaningful regulation that curbs carbon-dioxide emissions — the gas driving climate change — but he will take a shot at a significant one. The high court announced Tuesday that it…
On Monday night, a fully laden 7-Up trailer, much like the one you see above, vanished from the the Dr Pepper bottling plant in West Dallas. It simply disappeared. No trace. One minute it was there, the next it was gone. So stealthy was the disappearing act that employees didn’t…
Carlos Sanders was at home in Burleson with his young son on January 31 when there was a knock on the door. He opened it to find two cops standing there, holding a warrant. Exactly what happened next depends on whom you ask. Sanders says in a federal lawsuit filed…
Collette Flanagan has spent the past seven months rallying to have the cop who killed her son Clinton Allen put in jail. Nothing has worked, not her complaints against Dallas Police Chief David Brown, not her protest outside District Attorney Craig Watkins’ Grambling-Prairie View fundraiser, not Allen’s twin boys holding…
