It started as a Icemageddon mystery. Sometime between 6 and 9 p.m. on Friday night, a 10-month-old Greater Swiss Mountain Dog named Heidi went missing from her Fort Worth back yard. Her owners canvassed the neighborhood and put up fliers but to no avail. Finally, on day three, they turned…
You remember Anna Merlan, right? The Dallas Observer staff writer who specialized in writing about norm-bucking local subcultures (strippers, the leather scene, atheists, etc.) Well, she’s doing the same thing in New York and just published a feature on the ladies fighting to defend their legal right to go topless…
The shaking around Azle and Reno, which I will hereafter refer to as “San Andreas Minor,” has attracted the attention of the U.S. Geological Survey precisely because the area has almost no record of seismic activity. A few studies, including one recently from SMU, point to correlation between the epicenter…
In September, on the heels of the landmark Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Windsor, which entitled legally married gay and lesbian couples to the same federal perks as their heterosexual counterparts, the Obama administration declared that the opinion encompassed military veteran’s benefits. So that should mean that the Veterans…
A Duncanville City Councilman was arrested by the city’s police department after his wife accused him of stealing her cell phone and assaulting her, court records show. Mark Cooks was elected to the Duncanville City Council in 2012. More recently, in June, the Duncanville City Council in June selected him…
It’s like clockwork. Each October, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announces that Eric Nadel, the longtime voice of the Texas Rangers, is a finalist for the Ford C. Frick Award. And every year, the award goes to someone else. Not this time. This morning, the hall of…
There’s no doubt that Ethan Couch, 16, is guilty of drunkenly killing four people in a deadly car crash in Burleson. Last week, the teen pleaded guilty to four counts of intoxication manslaughter stemming from a June 15 wreck in which his Ford pickup, going 70 in a 40-mph zone,…
For a brief moment Tuesday evening, it seemed that the Dallas Police Department had learned something from the case of Bobby Gerald Bennett, in which an officer, unprovoked, shot a mentally ill man in a Rylie cul-de-sac. Rather than waiting for a damning video to emerge showing that Monday afternoon’s…
The way police told it, 76-year-old Chung Kim simply exploded. The couple who lived upstairs with their five children dumped dog poop on the back porch of his Abrams Road condo, so he pulled out a handgun and murdered them in cold blood. In a series of jailhouse interviews, Kim…
Those who could stay off the roads on Friday did so, but truckers, the grease that keeps American commerce humming, couldn’t rest. They had consumer goods to deliver, groceries to restock, gasoline stations to replenish. At around 3:30 p.m., police say Martin Barrera was transporting a particularly precious load of…
Representative Steve Stockman, the Houston-area congressman famous for bringing Ted Nugent to the State of the Union and wanting to arm fetuses, was not the Tea Party’s first choice to run in the GOP primary against Senator John Cornyn. That honor belongs to Representative Louie Gohmert. Next on their list…
If anyone deserves a public shaming, it’s the guy who allegedly abandoned his injured but still very much alive pit bull in the dumpster of his Vickery Meadow apartment complex on Monday night. For better or worse, that will have to wait. The man wasn’t home (or didn’t answer the…
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst unveiled his interim charges to the Senate Committee on State Affairs Friday, and they are, to say the least, pretty ambitious. They read like red meat for the paranoid-hacker constituency at times, but they also include the bones of some common-sense privacy protections. And they may…
Now that Dallas has officially made it through Icemageddon 2013, there are plenty of totally legitimate questions to ask about the storm and its response. Here are a few: -Did TxDOT do an adequate job of staving off carmageddon? -Can DART not shut down the entire light rail system next…
If you’re not familiar with Tenaha, Texas, go back and read this The New Yorker piece from August detailing how police and prosecutors in the tiny East Texas town used civil forfeiture laws and a phantom suspicion of drugs to seize cars, cash, jewelry and anything else they could find…
This weekend, all the prophecies were confirmed. Ice fell from the sky, vehicles careened into cars and trees and off bridges, children were loosed from their schools — all exactly as it had been written. WFAA weather oracle Pete Delkus watched with smug satisfaction as, one by one, his predictions…
No one expects Dallas City Councilman Sheffie Kadane to be an expert on drug culture. He comes across as a staunch teetotaler, someone who associates marijuana with Reefer Madness-style hysteria, who would turn off The Wire in shocked disgust. Yet his role as a municipal policymaker requires at least a…
Anyone visiting Klyde Warren Park over the the weekend — and judging by the crowd at 10 a.m. on Sunday, attendance bordered on nonexistent — would have been struck by how closely the unbroken white sheet resembled an ice rink. Ironic, given park officials’ promise of an actual ice rink,…
Prime Prep Academy, the charter school that Deion Sanders co-founded last year and was fired from last week, is known for its suspicious tendency to attract some of the top high school athletes in the country. Now, the parents of those athletes say they were misled by school officials and…
Welcome to the Winter Storm Cleon live blog, where will be constantly updating you about a storm that is potentially the apocalypse, another damp squib, or somewhere in between the two. As you are no doubt aware, the Weather Channel’s harbinger of sky death, Jim Cantore, is on the ground…
So far, none of the two dozen earthquakes recorded in North Texas since the start of November have caused any serious damage. The Eagle Mountain Lake Dam is fine. Homes and businesses are intact, save for the occasional hairline crack. No one has been hurt. There’s no guarantee that won’t…
Nearly a quarter million homes and businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are without electricity as a winter storm encases North Texas in ice. Some 2,500 Oncor Electric Delivery linemen and contractors are currently working to restore power. “We’ve been prepping for this all week,” Oncor spokesperson Jeamy Molina tells…
