Almost five minutes of audio, posted in full below, obtained by Naral Pro-Choice Texas and Progress Texas, shows the tactics Texas anti-abortion activists are using in order to exploit recent court decisions — like McCullen v. Coakley, which outlawed buffer zones around health clinics that provide abortions — and prevent…
Ixar, a slight, gangling teenager, nervously fidgeted in his chair as Judge Michael Baird stared him down. Babies’ cries could be heard echoing through the halls, but it did not break the formal tension within the courtroom. Ixar’s eyes flashed between the translator and Baird. He had come a long…
News reports this morning indicate that one of the Cowboys’ few defensive bright spots from last season, cornerback Orlando Scandrick, has been suspended for the first four games of the 2014 regular season for violating the NFL’s performance-enhancing substance abuse policy. Scandrick has already lost his appeal in the matter,…
For all the talk of adding toll lanes to various portions of U.S. 75 and LBJ, there hasn’t been much attention paid to the Texas Department of Transportation’s plan to include similar lanes — referred to as “managed lanes” in plan documents — along the stretch of I-35 between U.S…
Michael Morris, as Schutze mentioned this morning, is arguably the most important man in local transportation. As transportation director for the obscure but powerful North Central Texas Council of Governments, he has an outsize say in how transportation dollars get divvied up across 16 counties and, by extension, which ideas…
In Texas, we already knew there was plenty of work to be done to alleviate the tired and overburdened public mental health care system. In Dallas, we know that we have the same stretched resources that are reported statewide, but in addition we have also not received the majority of…
Around 10:30 this morning, Dallas police received a call about a “cutter” on Espanola Drive near Dallas Love Field. Soon after, 8-year-veteran Kevin Gladden arrived at a red-brick house with a basketball hoop in the front driveway, according to police. Eighteen-year-old Jose Manuel Gonzalez had a knife in each hand…
Guns, most people seem to agree, should be handled carefully. Drunks, most people seem to agree, are not generally known for their powers of caution. But at least one DFW gun club has decided that, hey, you know what would be a nice addition to Texas gun shows? Booze. Alcohol…
Off-duty Dallas police officer Antonio Hudson shot and killed Andrew Scott Gaynier, who was unarmed, in an Oak Cliff street on Sunday night after the Gaynier apparently charged the officer, according to police. A little after 6 p.m., Hudson responded to a 911 dispatch about a man “walking up and…
After reading Jeff Speck’s book Walkable City, Brian Reinhart had to respond. The book spoke to the issues he and his friends faced in Dallas so clearly, outlining many of the problems they’ve had and the aspirations they have. He wanted to give Speck “an update on the lay of…
A recent video compilation of a UT-Dallas professor’s research is making the Internet rounds. The film charts complex mathematical data to show where 150,000 “notable individuals” in art history have been born and died. That includes artists, architects, actors and other leaders in cultural history. The information has one glaring…
It’s never a good idea to cut off a humongous cement truck on the freeway. Not so much because karma may bite you in the ass at some vague point in the future as that it could be piloted by a driver who has no qualms about crushing the back…
When British artist Mishka Henner was looking through satellite photographs of the Texas landscape, he kept finding huge, brown pools of water. The pools, as he discovered, were the toilets of the beef industry, waste lagoons where all the feces and urine of factory farmed cows is funneled. Texas cow…
It may be surprising to hear, with as much as North Texas has been deservedly trashed for being a car-dependent, unwalkable hellscape, but DFW fails to crack even the top 50 of a recent Governing.com study measuring pedestrian deaths per capita. Between 2008 and 2012 the region has averaged 6.5…
A new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) collects data from each state to determine the use of alcohol and drugs. Among the findings? We Texans like our booze, and we like a lot of it. The report divides the findings by age group and…
When Urban Orchard Market opened to moderate fanfare last October, there was hope that maybe, finally, Downtown Dallas was grown up enough to support a grocery store. It’s not. Ten months after opening, the jaunty “Now Open” banner still hanging above the door, the market has quietly closed. A downtown…
We already knew homosexuality was pretty much the same thing as alcoholism. But now, top Texas GOP leaders inform us that allowing gay marriage would be akin to allowing polygamy, incest and pedophilia, according to a brief filed by members of the Texas Conservative Coalition in support of Texas’ ban…
Riding the DART train, you may have wondered at some point whether those those overhead straps are capable of holding the weight of a fully grown adult. The answer is yes. You’ve probably never wondered whether those straps are capable of holding the weight of a fully grown adult as…
Ever since a doctor from Fort Worth became one of two Americans recently infected with the Ebola virus on a mercy trip in Liberia, the Western public has developed a renewed interest in the rare disease, often described as incurable. For researchers like University of Texas virologist Dr. Thomas Geisbert,…
Texas has the highest processing fees for home loans in the nation, according to a recent Bankrate report, but don’t bother asking why. The banks won’t tell you. The report zeroed in on closing costs — the combination fees charged by lenders for processing plus third-party fees for things like…
The Little Free Library project has established a national reputation for encouraging local literacy among kids. The Wisconsin-based group was founded in 2009 and encourages neighborhoods to set up small boxes of books for kids to read and return. The idea of the Little Free Library project is that people…
If you’ve stumbled on the nightly news or a daily paper of late, you’ve heard of the Surge: the wave of Central American children who are arriving, often alone, at the Texas border, and walking right into the arms of Border Patrol agents. To follow the news is to believe…
