Our record-busting summer 2011 continues to be an object of fascination to climate scientists all over the world. Alongside floods in Thailand, drought in Eastern Africa and the European heat wave, the driest, hottest year in recorded Texas history has provided a case study for gauging the influence of climate…
At the ungodly hour of 8:30 a.m. today, the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System board of trustees held their monthly meeting. We decided to join them, both due to our love of waking up in what was basically the middle of the night to sit in a conference room,…
Last December, with Texas in the midst of one of the worst droughts on record and with lake levels dropping to worrying lows, the city of Dallas implemented Stage 1 water restrictions, meaning residents and businesses could only drench their grass twice per week. Even as North Texas was emerging…
Splashed across the front page of the Morning News today, large and above the fold, is an article detailing a new Brookings Institution study that measures how well public transit connects people and jobs in the nation’s 100 most populous metropolitan areas: “D-FW among worst for getting to work on…
As promised, the North Texas Tollway Authority published a list of all drivers with 100 or more unpaid tolls, and it’s a long one. Some 25,000-plus people owe the agency a total of $12.5 million. NTTA is billing the posting as a convenient resource for drivers to check and see…
In the months following Prime Prep Academy’s February town hall information sessions, Deion Sanders and his business partner, D.L. Wallace, have been publicly silent about almost every aspect of their charter school, Prime Prep Academy, with campuses in Dallas (grades 6-12) and Fort Worth (K-5). In a May cover story,…
On July 11, 2008, the price of oil rose to $147 per barrel, a record high. Gas stations engaged in hot pursuit as the price of a gallon rocketed past $4. All hell was about to break loose. The country’s largest banks had already begun to implode through arrogance and…
Back in May, longtime Dallas Independent School District educator George Clayton was defeated in State Board of Education reelection bid, apparently ending his all-too-brief, redistricting-shortened two-year term. The loss was partly because he was badly outspent by Tincy Miller in her attempt to regain the seat she occupied for several…
For the past decade, the city has been inching forward with plans for the Elm Fork Soccer Complex, a $40 million, 160-acre collection of athletic fields at Stemmons Freeway and Walnut Hill Lane that’s part of the non-tollway portion of the Trinity River Corridor Project. Last we checked, phase one…
Honest to God, we have no idea what’s going to happen at Glenn Beck’s upcoming three-day-long “Restoring Love” rally at Cowboys Stadium. None whatsoever. When Robert Wilonsky first tipped you to the event back in December, he mentioned, per the promo materials, that there would be “music, speakers and fireworks.”…
On Tuesday, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced it would use a single drug — pentobarbital, a barbiturate — to carry out executions due to a shortage of one component in a three-drug cocktail. Overseas manufacturers of pancuronium bromide, a powerful paralytic, have halted shipments to the U.S., protesting…
A local medical device maker agreed yesterday to pay $5.2 million to settle a charges that it systematically bribed officials to win sales contracts with government hospitals in Mexico in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. According to a complaint filed by the SEC, Promeca, the Mexican subsidiary of…
Just before 2 p.m. on June 9, Kerrick Butler was shot and killed by two men inside his Northeast Dallas apartment while his 3-year-old daughter watched. An informant pinned the murder on Marquis White, the 21-year-old believed to have committed two rapes near an Audelia Road bus stop. That lead…
A few dozen of the world’s best young hockey players filed into Elm Fork Shooting Sports earlier this week, to try their hand-eye coordination at sporting clay shooting, a sport unfamiliar to many from as far as Canada and Switzerland. Some looked like naturals, others missed almost every flying disk,…
As Governor Rick Perry vows not to take any of that filthy federal money to expand Medicaid in Texas, state lawmakers may also have to find another $39 million next year to keep the Medicaid Women’s Health Program alive. These days, the WHP has been going through some prolonged death…
There was a lot of buzz back in May when a group led by the Central Japan Railway Co. and former Harris County Judge Robert Eckels announced plans to raise $10 billion in private funds to establish a bullet train linking Dallas and Houston. TxDOT, too, has been looking at…
Not to belabor the point, and with all due respect to the people who were injured, but watching a DART paratransit van plow into a line of cars on the Tollway is awesome. Now, we can watch it from the van’s perspective, plus bonus footage of the driver, who is…
Together, they have a population of fewer than 2,000, but the tiny East Texas hamlets of Reklaw, Alto and Gallatin have an outsized mission: To halt the southern portion of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, a conduit designed to ferry some 830,000 barrels of Canadian tar sands a day from an…
NBC 5 anchor Jane McGarry is gone effective today, the station announced in a statement released a while ago. Long-time NBC 5 news anchor Jane McGarry announced that she will leave effective today, Tuesday, July 10, 2012. Tom Ehlmann, NBC 5 president and general manager said, “We support Jane’s decision…
An officer with the Dallas Police Department was arrested last night for drunk driving after she allegedly got into a wreck on the Central Expressway service road and drove away without leaving insurance information. DPD announced a few minutes ago on their Facebook page that Officer Erica Montanez , a…
With the baseball season at the symbolic halfway point, we asked former Unfair Parker Sam Merten to root around in his beard and see if he could come up with anything to say. He obliged … and obliged … and … Sports are unpredictable. That’s why we watch. And there’s…
Gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, is a powerful sedative used in Europe for decades as a sleep aid and anesthetic during childbirth before it became widely used as a convenient and powerful date rape aid. That use has become disconcertingly common, at least according to date rate victims, their advocates, state and…
