Last April, in a dual effort to ease parking shortages and make a little scratch, DART began charging some of the commuters parking at its northernmost light stations. The charge was $2 to $4 per day and applied only to drivers who live outside of DART’s taxpaying area who parked…
For the third time in four months, former self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown has been indicted on federal charges, this time for concealing evidence. Brown has already been charged with a laundry list of crimes. He was arrested in September, after a raid on his Dallas apartment, then charged in…
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the U.S. military will drop its ban on women serving in combat. For many, this was a long overdue, a commonsense step and an acknowledgment that women are fighting in combat in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and have been for more than…
It’s clear and has been for a while that, barring a wholesale shift in the worldview of both Republicans and Latino voters, demographic shifts will turn Texas into a Democratic state. Eventually. That’s what San Antonio’s political wonderkinder Joaquin and Julian Castro were talking about on Sunday when they told…
Julie Orr has plenty of reasons to bounce a check. In just a few years, she’s gone from running a successful advertising business to being a single mom on disability. Hers is a dilemma of American life: A leg injury keeps her from working, but she can’t afford the surgery…
It’s impossible to pin down exactly how much employment discrimination there is against the LGBT community in Texas. Equality Texas estimates that gay men and women on average make 10 percent less than their straight, married counterparts and that a quarter of transgender Texans have lost a job because of…
Every year, Forbes puts out a list. More accurately, the magazine puts out about a gazillion lists with varying degrees of credibility, one of which ranks the fastest growing cities in the nation. This year’s results are in, and Texas managed to nab gold, silver and bronze, sweeping the top…
If you visit the website of DarkSide After Hours, you’ll still find crudely designed event posters advertising 2 a.m. raves and boasts about “the club too krunk to be locked into one location.” Fueling the party was a never-ending buffet of ketamine, LSD, MDMA, Ecstasy, mushrooms and marijuana, as undercover…
On Friday, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst handed out his picks for the State Senate committees; from those assignments, we learned that “Agriculture, Rural Affairs and Homeland Security” is, for some mystifying reason, lumped together into one body. And in a move that’s drawn a ton of attention and more than…
Water — or the lack thereof — has already made it to the top of the state Legislature’s priority list, and it’s an area of rare bipartisan agreement. After all, it doesn’t take a hydrological engineer to figure out that growing population plus soon-to-be-maxed-out water sources plus historic drought equals…
When DART last sat down to update its long-range plan in 2006, the agency was thinking big. With the recession still beyond the horizon, planners envisioned 86 additional miles of rail and 121 miles of new bus routes. Since then, the agency has added the bus routes, opened up the…
The saga of Ty, the Tyrannosaurus bataar fossil smuggled out of Mongolia and into a May 2012 sale by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, effectively came to a close last month when Eric Prokopi, the “commercial paleontologist” behind the sale, pleaded guilty to illegally smuggling the specimen into the U.S. But that,…
Just after midnight on Tuesday, Cowboys nose tackle Jay Ratliff was driving his Ford pickup along State Highway 114 in Grapevine when police say he drunkenly crashed into an 18-wheeler, then a highway barrier. No one was injured. Ratliff, 31, refused a Breathalyzer test before bonding out of the Grapevine…
Note to self: Never ride a 4-wheeler on the runway at Lancaster Airport. That’s what some members of Texas-based Team Stunters were doing last week when they were nearly hit by a modified Pitts S2S biplane. The camera person is completely excused if they crapped their pants. The plane was…
When Mary Kay Beckman was ambushed in the garage of her Las Vegas home in January 2011, it made national headlines. That was partly because of the brutality of the attack. The attacker “knocked her to the ground, and began stabbing her repeatedly until he recognized that the knife broke,”…
In a federal courtroom in Fort Worth today, Ryan Walker Grant learned that he will have exactly 10 years in federal prison to ponder just where exactly he went wrong. After all, his plot to murder Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck and attorney Tom Brandt after the city effectively shut down…
Right now, there are three remaining Blockbuster stores in Dallas proper. That’s down considerably from the gazillions that once crowned street corners during the heady days of VHS, before movies could be conveniently dispensed from a red box or instantaneously zapped onto your telephone, and that number could drop even…
Today is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark court case that originated in Texas with Norma McCorvey and ultimately led to the Supreme Court sweeping away a number of state and federal abortion restrictions. Because of Roe, terminating a pregnancy in the first trimester is between a…
The Nacogdoches judge who granted a Douglass landowner’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Keystone pipeline back in November now is telling him to take his case to another court. County Court at Law Judge Jack Sinz ruled last week that he could not hear Mike Bishop’s fraud…
If you don’t know anything about Elliott Naishtat, you can go here, where you’ll learn that he likes to color with crayons, wears the same shirt every July 4, is pretty sure he’d make a fantastic president and loves buffets. He’s also a Democratic state representative from Austin who, though…
In 1967, back when Helvetica was still brand new, American Airlines recruited Italian designer Massimo Vignelli to develop what would become the carrier’s logo for the next 46 years. It was simple, straightforward, and instantly recognizable: a pair of A’s, one red, one blue, separated by a stylized blue eagle…
In the lead-up to November 22, the city’s focus has been on Dealey Plaza and how to get it ready — and keep it clear of conspiracy types — for the official commemoration of JFK’s death there 50 years ago. But its neighbor one block to the east, Founders Plaza,…
