Last summer, as the Dallas City Council was briefed on the ins and outs of bringing heavy, industrial processes into a densely populated, urban area, industry boosters like Ed Ireland of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council assured council members we would know in virtually all cases what was being…
Sometimes we get voicemails that are too good not to share. This is one of those times. To quote our new favorite human: Un. Freakin. Believable…
If you ask the people who run it, the city’s red light camera program, aka SafeLight, has been a tremendous success. They cite statistics maintained by the program showing the number of crashes at intersections has dropped by more than half, from 115 to 57 per year, and that the…
There are only so many times one can look at a football game and say “A win is a win.” Early in the season, when a team is getting its bearings, scrappy victories can be a bit charming. In Week 12, against a team that dragged in a seven-game losing…
Early Saturday morning, about 6 a.m., the manager of the Knox Street Apple Store received a call from the alarm company: Someone had breached the store’s inner sanctum, the Genius Room, tripping the alarm. The manager arrived within minutes, but he was too late. Checking the stockroom, he discovered that…
Over the weekend, the New York Times took a hard look at the tax breaks and other incentives state and local governments dole out by the billions to lure businesses. As the magnitude of those gifts has increased over the years, corporations have learned to shop for the most lucrative…
Eric has a pretty nice rundown of today’s big announcement, and I’m sure Schutze will chime in at some point, when he’s done looking into the combination polo-field/squash complex expected to be announced for southern Dallas next week. In the meantime, Sharon Grigsby, editorial page editor for the Morning News,…
This morning, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the conflict in Syria had reached “new and appalling heights of brutality and violence,” as the clashes between government troops and opposition forces drag on. An estimated 40,000 people have died in the conflict, which began in March 2011. The Assad regime continues…
The Great Trinity Forest, as Mayor Rawlings is fond of reminding people, is an underutilized jewel, a huge, relatively untrammeled swath of nature cutting through the city’s southern half. As the country’s largest urban hardwood forest in the country, it’s already world-class, to borrow a phrase. Yet Rawlings and his…
For more than two decades now, SMU’s men’s basketball program has languished in mediocrity. It saw moderate regular-season success during the Mike Dement era of the late ’90s and early ’00s but made the postseason only once, and that was a berth in the lowly NIT. Its last trip to…
As we’ve mentioned more than once, Dallas Animal Services has been dealing with a few serious unresolved issues, some of them stretching back years: the HVAC system in the shelter doesn’t work and apparently never really has, leading to stifling temperatures in the summer months; the shelter and field divisions…
Earlier this month, I wrote a cover story so bizarre, I had to periodically check official documents just to be sure I had not wandered into the realm of magical realism. Yes, in fact, a sacred white buffalo was born to a Greenville rancher named Arby Little Soldier during a…
Way back in January, over the objections of just about everyone affected, the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees tacked a mandatory 45 minutes onto every teacher’s workday. How the teachers used the time would be up to principals. Not surprisingly, the decision sparked considerable resentment among teachers who felt the…
For those of you who haven’t been keeping score at home, a quick recap. Tom Corea is a disbarred, Klonopin-addicted trial lawyer accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of his client’s money, with which he bought luxury cars, a half-million-dollar RV, a quarter horse operation and other things…
On the night of October 9, Juan Herrera and Willie Jones went to a strip club. They showed up at Dallas Cabaret on Harry Hines Boulevard at about 11:30 p.m., where they paid $20 for their cover. Herrera then went to the bar for drinks when the bouncer, Brian Rodriguez,…
Cowboys fans no doubt had high hopes that something would come of that White House petition to remove Jerry Jones as owner of the Cowboys. Alas, the White House removed the petition from its web site, claiming it was because it had nothing to do with the operation of the…
In recent months, Hostess’ corporate leaders have struggled valiantly to save the Twinkie. That they didn’t succeed goes to show not that the company utterly failed to adapt to a changing market but that they simply couldn’t overcome the mighty power of a union bent on destroying an American icon…
The City Council made it pretty clear last month that it’s not quite ready to take the bold step of barring drivers from throwing things at cyclists. This is in keeping with general reluctance to turn Dallas into a legitimately bike-friendly city, a reluctance that seems to stem both from…
A few weeks ago, the Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder went on a journalistic mission to a Cash Store outlet near his home in Austin. His aim, as he describes it, was to see what it was like to take out a payday loan in Texas, particularly in the wake of…
You’ll remember Andrew Rodriguez as the 17-year-old who learned the hard way what Hurst police officer Disraeli Arnold’s knee feels like when it strikes the back of one’s head. The video of that encounter, and Arnold’s expletive-laced threats (“Move and fucking’ die.”), went viral, embarrassing the Hurst Police Department and…
Quick programming note: Things are going to be light around here in the coming weeks. A bunch of us threw in on the Powerball, which is up to $550 million, and as everyone knows, the more people who get together on buying a ticket the better the odds. So I…
We’ve had it good, no doubt about it. Ever since the drought of the ’50s, when Dallas water planners set forth, constructing and acquiring the rights to reservoirs that would feed the city’s growth for the coming decades, we haven’t had to worry. Even as Lake Travis contracted to a…
