For almost two years now, like an angry minnow nibbling at a whale, a coalition of labor groups operating as OURWalmart has been organizing nationwide protests against the retail giant, complaining of low wages, terrible benefits and the company’s general hostility toward organized labor. It started in late 2011, when…
Two years ago, after their cameras were denied entry to a secretive government immigration camps on Christmas Island, the Australian version of 60 Minutes piloted a small, unmanned aircraft above the island detention center. A few months later, activists in Poland dispatched a drone to document the abuses of riot…
Arboretum officials were understandably cautious when they unveiled early plans for a Garland Road parking garage last night. The memory of the public uprising and PR debacle that greeted a proposal to park cars on Winfrey Point is no doubt fresh on their minds, so they made clear that the…
William Wylly Lamar is something of a rock star amongst readers of sites like HerpNation.com and WildHerps.com. His reptile-capturing skills — we’re talking herpetology here, folks — are unparalleled, as is his knowledge. He wrote the book on venomous snakes. Several books, actually, including his magnum opus, the two-volume The…
Richie Whitt and Greg “Greggo” Williams have now had two months to reflect on CBS’s unceremonious cancellation of The Rage, their drive-time sports talk show on 105.3 The Fan, and they’ve come to starkly different conclusions. Greggo chalked it all up to ratings, which he says had dropped. Whitt, a…
It’s been more than a year since a task force sent the Dallas City Council its recommendations for retooling the city’s gas drilling ordinance. But the first step toward updating city code will finally be taken at the Plan Commission. The city attorney’s office will brief commissioners at this Thursday’s…
It’s been more than three years since the City of Dallas first began moving CNG-powered cabs to the front of the line of taxis at Love Field. The protesters have long since vacated the City Hall plaza, and the city’s attention has inevitably drifted. But through it all, the cabbies…
It’s always reassuring to know that no matter how stupid things get in the state legislature, things are just as dumb, if not more so, in Congress. Perhaps “reassuring” is the wrong word. In either case, in order to fully grasp the import of this story, you should know that…
At first glance, the ads proclaiming last week’s grand opening of the JJ Health Center might have appeared to suggest something more than a massage. The massive amounts of cleavage, the pining eyes and lingerie uniforms of the “Friendly Charming Attentants,” the scantily clad masseuse doing what appears to be…
In his book American Sniper, under the heading “Punching Out Scruff Face,” slain Navy SEAL Chris Kyle claimed that in a 2006 he got into a bar fight with “Scruff Face,” a “celebrity” veteran. Kyle claimed the fight started because Scruff Face was insulting then-President George Bush, and then said…
The Arlington Parks Department described the crime in clinical terms. Vandals had come in the night and defaced a piece of playground equipment at Allen Saxe Park, causing $5,000 in damage. But the detached language masked some strong emotions. This wasn’t just any old jungle gym. This was Nessie, which…
Every year, something like 6,000 Dallas County residents are diagnosed with HIV, giving us the dubious honor of having the highest infection rate in the state. The statistics are particularly grim for gay black men, who contract the disease at an alarming rate. Dallas County Health Director Zachary Thompson knows…
When The Dallas Morning News announced three months ago that it would be rolling out the most definitive ranking of the area’s neighborhoods in history, I put my money on Frisco. Not real money, mind you; if I had that, I could afford to commute from Frisco. But I was…
The city of Dallas recently sent out a survey to a few thousand lucky residents asking them to assess the state of the city. It’s partly for quality control, a way of ensuring the city is accountable to its customers, partly a self-congratulatory pat on the back, since the folks…
The trouble started innocently enough, back in early May, when Cairo the tiger had a snotty nose. Vicky Keahey, the president of In-Sync Exotics, the Wylie rescue society where Cairo and several dozen other big cats live, wrote down the nose leakage in the cat’s logbook on May 5. “I…
In the end, Belmont Addition attorney Melissa Kingston’s lawsuit against neighborhood activist Avi Adelman ended not with the expected bang, but with a whimper of a settlement agreement. Under the terms of the settlement, Adelman agreed not to do a handful of annoying and/or stalker-esque things, like taking pictures of…
In case you missed it, Gov. Rick Perry used his veto Friday to override the bipartisan will of the legislature, which sought to inject the most meager, almost universally agreeable ethics reform into the state oil and gas regulator. They attempted to do this because the Railroad Commission of Texas…
Juan Ponce de Leon got some bad information. The Fountain of Youth isn’t in Florida, as the 16th-century Spanish conquistador eventually figured out. It’s actually a thousand miles to the west in an otherwise unremarkable Preston Center storefront, conveniently sandwiched between the Park Cities and Preston Hollow. That’s where the…
The fight against drunk driving in Texas underwent a sea change in 1987. That’s when the Texas Supreme Court ruled that El Chico was liable for overserving a customer who subsequently caused a fatal car crash and when the legislature codified the decision in the Dram Shop Act, which allowed…
Ever since 25-year-old Clinton Allen was shot and killed by Officer Clark Staller, Allen’s family has been calling for action against the officer and the Dallas Police Department. Collette Flanagan, Allen’s mother, filed an ethics complaint against police Chief David Brown claiming that DPD never informed the FBI about Allen’s…
Governor Rick Perry signed a bill into law today that will require people applying for unemployment benefits to submit to a drug test, if their responses to a screening questionnaire indicate possible drug use, the Texas Tribune reports. (Those questions will likely include: “Which Cheech and Chong movies do you…
A 3-year-old boy drowned in a swimming pool in far North Dallas yesterday afternoon, according a statement just issued by the Dallas police. DPD’s report says that Genesis Gregory went with his grandfather and uncle to a house in the 6600 block of Ridgeview Circle, where the men were providing…
