Police had only just opened Blarney Stone Way in Forney Monday afternoon when this picture was taken. Satellite trucks were already stacked fender to fender for 100 yards or more, and cameramen were trained on the house ringed with yellow police tape, shooting B roll for the evening newscasts. See…
Late yesterday evening, about 8 p.m., four Dallas police cars descended on a the 2800 block of South Avenue, lights and sirens blazing. They’d been told there was a major disturbance on the South Dallas street, and that one of those involved was hurling legitimate-seeming death threats. Officers arrived to…
Texas has never played around when it comes to its standardized tests, and the STAAR exam, the new assessment whose rigor is currently the center of debate in the state legislature, is no different. As one of the primary ways the state evaluates educational outcomes, and thus ensures accountability, the…
The murder this weekend of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, two months after assistant DA Mark Hasse was gunned down in broad daylight, has Texas prosecutors on high alert. The Associated Press reports today that district attorneys throughout the state are taking extra precautions as they…
It’s been a decade since the city of Dallas announced the development of a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, a quest that, as a short stroll downtown will tell you, has fallen short of its goal. There are still plenty of people without homes. That’s not to say the…
As you may recall, Texas’ 2011 plan to redraw political boundaries was so brazenly partisan, so undeniably bent on reducing minority influence, and the evidence was so mountainous and convincing that a federal court didn’t even bother cataloging it all in its ruling against the state. “The parties have provided…
Sometime last month, Domingo Garcia launched his bid to become the next president of LULAC, the nationwide Latino civil rights advocacy organization. He started a campaign page on Facebook on March 8 and sent an open letter to the group’s members at about the same time. “Today LULAC is at…
As he walked along the sidewalk of his Far East Dallas apartment complex at 5:15 on Easter morning, a 24-year-old man heard someone call out from behind, asking him to hold up. He turned and saw three Hispanic men, clad in identical white T-shirts, hop out of a black Toyota…
Before news broke of the brazen murder of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife at their home, reporters were doing what they do every agonizingly news-less Easter weekend: scrounging for something to report on, preferably, given the season, religiously oriented. That’s must be what led CBS 11’s…
Every week, managing editor Patrick Williams disappears into his office and reemerges a cranky, nicotine-addicted, third-person-referring superhero we like to call Buzz. Awwww, man. Why Texas? Why must you always be the turd in the punch bowl of progress? Buzz is talking — this time — about Texas A&M, the…
Tony Romo is a flawed quarterback. Talent-wise, he’s on the cusp of being one of the NFL’s elites, but he has the unfortunate tendency to meltdown in key, late-game situations. But you have to give the man one thing: he (or, more accurately, his agent) is a helluva negotiator. ESPN’s…
It wasn’t long after Gary Isett parked a Kip’s Big Boy statue on his front lawn at the corner of Abrams and Trammel that people started taking notice. First, passersby, then the Lakewood Advocate, then the Morning News. D’s Tim Rogers reminisced about that time in high school he took…
Last year around Easter-time, local conservative talking head and life-sized Cabbage Patch doll Ben Ferguson was upset with the Dallas Fort-Worth Coalition of Reason, our local band of godless heathen sodomites. He was unhappy that they’d chosen Easter for their newest ad campaign, the theme of which was “Our Families…
The life of a tax office mail clerk seems that it’d be dull. Box after cardboard box of IRS forms, IRS instruction manuals and IRS paraphernalia, with only an occasional piece of computer equipment to spice things up. So, yesterday’s special delivery must have come as a surprise to the…
Every single day in Dallas brings a dismaying number of reports of men beating their wives and girlfriends, which is what’s fueling Mayor Mike Rawlings’ crusade against domestic violence. But the message he delivered at his recent City Hall rally apparently hasn’t yet sunk in for everybody. In the early…
There remains a pressing need for meaningful, statewide regulation of payday lending in Texas, since the industry has shown a willingness and ability to skirt restrictions passed by Dallas, Austin, and other cities. Those reforms look like they are still at least a couple of years off. Despite high hopes…
It’s been eight years since the Dallas City Council passed its homeless feeding ordinance, which barred charity groups from serving food except at certain designated sites. And it’s been just more than six years since two of those groups, Big Heart Ministries and Rip Parker Memorial Homeless Ministry, sued the…
News came out yesterday that former Spring Branch ISD high school teacher Kathanna Culp, 28, is accused of having sex with one of her students and of supplying him and his friends with pot and alcohol. This follows last month’s story about a Dallas teacher Jessica Guilbeaux, 31, accused of…
At an ungodly hour this morning (2:38 a.m.), a member of the new but active “Stop Walmart Spanish Village” Facebook group posted the lease, signed back in November, giving the Arkansas-based retail giant rights to the northwest corner of Coit and Arapaho roads for at least 20 and as many…
We knew this was coming. The North Texas Tollway Authority kind of telegraphed it when the agency announced that some 6,000 of its top scofflaws would be referred to an outside law firm for possible litigation over their toll-ignoring ways. And now, it’s here. The NTTA filed more than a…
Richard Railey is definitely not an idiotic, racist troll. Nope, he’s just your average 56-year-old community college student, pursuing an associates degree in IT security while trying to form a White Student Union at Tarrant County College. Burnt Orange Report wrote about Railey’s quest this morning, and also referred to…
You wouldn’t know it from glancing at his bank account, but Mark Cuban used to be poor. This isn’t exactly news. Cuban embodies the modern version of the peculiarly American up-by-the-bootstraps fairy tale, in which a hard-luck young person, through hard work and business savvy, transforms himself from struggling peon…
