It was pretty much guaranteed that Dwaine Caraway’s “Saggin’ Pants Forum,” held Saturday in City Hall chambers, was going to be weird. This was, after all, almost a full afternoon devoted to the City Council member and former mayor’s ongoing crusade against men who don’t belt their pants at the…
There weren’t supposed to be many kids at CityWalk@Akard. The 200 units at the downtown office building-turned subsidized apartment complex were small, closet-less studios and one-bedroom units, and half were set aside for the formerly homeless or those at risk of becoming so. But there they are: 38 kids, from…
A week after being thoroughly handled by the Seattle Seahawks, the Cowboys returned to Dallas to be thoroughly handled by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Fortunately for Dallas, Tampa didn’t have a running back near the caliber of Marshawn Lynch, and their punt coverage team couldn’t resist going for Cowboys’ punter…
The longtime owners of the Dallas Observer have sold the paper and its 12 Village Voice Media sister publications to a group of VVM executives, creating a new holding company and cutting ties with Backpage.com, the controversial classified advertising company. So: We have new owners, but the same old bosses…
After more than a decade as an investment banker for outfits like Merrill Lynch, John Kleinheinz struck out on his own in 1996, establishing what would become Kleinheinz Capital Partners in Fort Worth. Over the next decade-and-a-half, the hedge fund exploded, growing from basically nothing to $1.8 billion and providing…
First, the good news. The Dallas Fed’s most recent economic numbers show that Texas’ economy is growing. That growth is moderate, 2.4 percent for the year, but it’s better than in the country as a whole. Energy is booming; so is construction. Even the government sector is expanding slightly, in…
SMU is not known as a party school, at least according to the party-school power rankers. But this is still college, where people have a tendency to gather in large groups and drink, and the school does have a robust Greek scene, so there are parties at SMU, and they…
Shakbsha Burleson has trouble sleeping at night. So around 3 a.m. this morning, as she told police, she set out for her usual late-night walk in her Lake Highlands neighborhood. Soon after, she noticed a man walking up and down the street nearby, then parking himself on a bridge railing…
Quantifying a the cleanliness of an entire city seems like it would pose a challenge. Do you count the number of discarded Taco Bell cups? Analyze shower head sales? Perform a census of head lice? There are countless factored to be considered if you are to get a solid grasp…
Some six million Texans are one health emergency away from financial ruin, and the state of affairs in Dallas County isn’t any better. Nearly 30 percent of its residents are uninsured. That’s 672,681 of our neighbors whom the health insurance markets have excluded, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau…
For a dozen years, John Montford was a powerful force in the Texas Senate. He subsequently did a stint as chancellor of the Texas Tech University System before moving on to the private sector, where he served as an executive at AT&T and GM. Now, he’s found himself a new…
Even as the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System (DPFP) tries to deflect media attention from its shiny, shiny Museum Tower project, Courthouse News reports that it’s also fighting to avoid releasing information on a different luxury developer, one that it wholly owns. The pension system filed a lawsuit in…
Lukas Da Cruz, 21, was standing outside Lolita’s on Lemmon Avenue in the early morning hours of August 16 when a silver Honda drove past. According to a police report and a Facebook account, someone in the car fired a shot from a .40-caliber pistol, hitting him in the back…
Scott McCartney, the Wall Street Journal’s veteran (and Dallas-based) travel reporter, recently offered a word of advice to the literate public: If you or a loved one is considering stepping onto an aircraft in the foreseeable future, make sure it’s not one operated by American Airlines. “American’s operation is in…
In 2008, Rebecca Williams sued DART. She worked in the agency’s human resources department at the time, and said that she had been ordered by her boss to hire only Hispanics, as she told WFAA at the time. She was subsequently fired in what she says was an act of…
Governor Rick Perry, it may shock you to learn, is not such a big fan of abortion. Perry vowed some time ago to create a new, Texas-run version of the Women’s Health Program, one that would ban doctors from discussing or “promoting” abortion with their patients. It would also explicitly…
Last week, Harris County District Attorney Patricia Lykos asked Attorney General Greg Abbott for some advice. County law enforcement has dutifully taken blood samples from suspects in certain intoxication-related offenses (driving drunk with a child in the car, for one) as required by state law. Now, the county’s running out…
The Dallas Cowboys almost snatched up the Cowboys.com domain five years ago. They called in the winning bid at auction but backed out after realizing that the “275” the agreed to was $275,000, not just $275.00, according to a report at the time from Domain Name News. The name was…
Ask someone like Jon Entine, a science writer for Ethical Corporation, to describe the sort of person who claims hydraulic fracturing presents a pollution nightmare in waiting, and you quickly find yourself pummeled with talk-radio invective: “ideological blowhard,” “leftist loony” and “upper middle class lefties.” But none of those descriptions…
Despite what you might think, the Texas government doesn’t just hand out food stamps to whoever holds out a hand. They’re actually debit cards, not stamps, and they come with very strict guidelines. You have to live in Texas, for one, and make less than $14,079 for a single-person household…
Every year, the wealth fetishists over at Forbes compile an exhaustive list of the 400 richest Americans. It’s a rarefied club, whose admittance requires an aggregate worth in the billions. Not surprisingly, a number of Dallasites made the cut — 16 in fact. They range from oldies-but-goodies like Ross Perot,…
Poor Mitt Romney finally says exactly what he’s thinking and the guy gets hammered for it. You wanted specificity and numbers from the man? Well, as you no doubt heard, Mother Jones reported this week that he’s plenty specific when talking to gatherings of his big-money contributors: “All right, there…
