Tuffy Gessling didn’t mean to offend anyone when he put on an Obama mask and did his thing as a rodeo clown at the Missouri State Fair. Yet enough people mistook Gessling’s good intentions for some sort of race-baiting minstrel show that he wound up getting banned for life from…
A 25-year-old woman was kidnapped while leaving a downtown party on Thursday night. According to police, the woman was getting into her 2004 Lexus, parked in a lot adjacent to Bryan Tower at about 11 p.m. when a man approached with a gun and knife. He forced her inside, hopped…
Unfair Park has no particular beef with Deion Sanders Jr. He, unlike his father, has never established a charter school and used it to get his own reality show, or tried to trick us into being a part of that reality show. He’s just your average SMU student who enjoys…
Readers, have you ever purchased coke or meth from a man named Yayo? If so, stop reading, get on a Greyhound and immediately get out of town. For the rest of you: “Yayo” was the subtle nickname of a convicted drug dealer named Sergio Moreno Vidales, a former Dallas resident…
Carrollton police Officer Don Patin was pretty sure Jason Geils was drunk when he pulled him over on December 10, 2009, for speeding down Stemmons Freeway and driving in the HOV lane without a passenger. Patin said he could smell alcohol on Geils’ breath and, according to Dallas County court…
Before the Dallas Plan Commission got to what is almost certainly the most controversial matter it has ever deliberated on — whether and how the city should drill for natural gas — it spent more than an hour on the positioning of a wooden fence and a gazebo in relation…
Talk of closing the so-called “gun show loophole,” like talk of gun control in general, has died down in recent months. Partly, this is the inevitable ebb of the rage that followed Sandy Hook; partly, it’s because it seems futile to talk about something Congress has made clear it has…
One of the undersung virtues of dating is the ability to end a relationship without lawyers and protracted litigation. It’s easier that way to make a clean break and move on with one’s life. Christopher Konvicka, a 24-year-old from McKinney, appreciates that fact less than most. He was dating a…
Update at 11:43 a.m.: Attorney General Eric Holder officially has Dallas County’s back: Holder statement on new Texas voter ID lawsuit: pic.twitter.com/YhdZstRCLF— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 22, 2013 Original post: On Tuesday, Dallas County Commissioners voted 3-2 to join Congressman Marc Veasey in a lawsuit seeking to overturn Texas’…
Earlier this week, the Houston Astros called up Max Stassi from the Double-A Corpus Christi Hooks. On Tuesday, he made his Major League Debut against the Rangers, going a solid 2-3. On Wednesday, he faced Rangers reliever Tanner Scheppers. Things did not go very well. On the SportsCenter replay, fast-forward…
Not too long ago, The Dallas Morning News promoted Avi Selk from the crime beat to the Irving beat, where he’s so far proved himself a more-than-capable chronicler of the bout of mild insanity currently gripping Irving’s City Council and school board. So, things are looking up for Selk professionally…
There were two main actors in the weekend stabbing of 26-year-old Good Samaritan Terrell Cowherd on Lower Greenville, police say: Jerry Brown, 23, who punched Cowherd, then held him from behind, and Julian Terence Martin Jr., also 23, who repeatedly plunged his knife blade in Cowherd’s torso. Both men were…
The Madera Lakeside apartments in north Arlington have the cookie-cutter look of much of suburban North Texas, a series of low-rise buildings in various shades of beige with a name (“Lakeside!”) that doesn’t quite match reality (an oversized puddle). The road it sits on, Brown Boulevard, is curvy, narrow and…
A young boy buys a bag of potato chips. He’s barely out of the local bodega when he takes his first bite, thoughtlessly tossing aside the plastic bag it came in. Meanwhile, in an alleyway nearby, two more of the polyethylene sacks dislodge themselves as a garbage truck empties the…
The collapse of the U.S. housing bubble wreaked tremendous amounts of misery on homeowners, who suddenly discovered that they owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth, or found themselves in overbuilt and mostly vacant subdivisions, or could no longer afford ballooning mortgage payments. But whereas they saw…
“You look nervous,” is how Deion Sanders greets me, loudly, as we meet me for the first time. I am not nervous. “That’s just the way my face looks,” I respond. He says that I look fine but definitely nervous. I am confused. We are standing in a fancy indoor…
During his decade in the Texas House, Republican Dan Branch has never been one to demagogue on social issues, always more focused more on fiscal and other matters that lined up better with the values of his Park Cities constituency. Now that he’s waded into the attorney general’s race, however,…
The NBA, like other professional sports leagues, is in the midst of a statistical and technological revolution. Advanced stats are helping teams better evaluate players and tweak in-game strategy while new gadgets emerge that better evaluate just about everything. Take SportVU, an advanced camera-tracking system recently purchased by 15 NBA…
Even if what they put in the police report were true — and it’s now clear that it wasn’t — Dallas police officers Bryan Burgess and Michael Puckett had no business chasing Fred Bradford Jr. on the night of April 21. The two officers were on patrol in South Dallas…
Yesterday, 16 months after Justice died from burns suffered at a Pleasant Grove apartment complex, the last of the four men accused of dousing the dog in lighter fluid and setting it on fire pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges. Richard Valentine, 25, and 19-year-old Darius Ewing, the alleged ringleader,…
Life Dynamics, the Denton-based pro-life group that long ago earned a permanent spot on Planned Parenthood’s anti-choice hall of fame, has always prided itself on being a bit different from its allies in the abortion fight. It’s less about standing outside of abortion clinics with photos of bloody fetuses than…
As we reported last week, the U.S. Department of Justice has sued Dallas-based Luminant, Texas’ biggest power generator, for alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The federal complaint, filed on behalf of the EPA, contends Luminant made major modifications to two of its biggest northeast Texas coal-fired power plants…
