Danny Cantu is a diesel mechanic who says Dallas Police tossed a flash-bang grenade through his window while he was making a sandwich. In a lawsuit filed back in January, he claims they kicked in the door and yelled, “Get on the ground!” and that he kindly obliged. Then, he…
There are few certainties in life, but this is one of them: If a person offers you a thousand percent return on an investment, you have on your hands a scam. And there’s about a thousand percent chance someone will end up in court. Yet two brothers, Terry Wiese of…
On a Thursday evening in February, parents and kids piled into the pews of a barren brown-brick church on East Ann Arbor Avenue in Oak Cliff. This wasn’t a religious service, but there would be preaching, and the adults in the room were focused intently on the man at the…
In 2007, having served with distinction during two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force firefighter John Brownfield Jr. took a job as a correctional officer at the maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, 40 miles south of Colorado Springs. Ten months later prison officials caught the…
Something happened to me at City Hall today, where I went in hopes of chronicling the mayor’s Trinity Toll Road speech. I have really debated with myself about going public with it. But my hope is that if I tell my story, other men who have been through the same…
All right, I missed on one thing this morning in my predictive imaginary report on Mayor Rawlings’ Toll Road press conference at City Hall. I predicted that former city councilman Dave Neumann would bound around the room like a kangaroo shouting “Pickles and applesauce.” That did not happen. I think…
Sierra Club on Tuesday sued Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, the state’s largest unregulated generator of electricity, accusing the company’s Big Brown coal-fired plant near Fairfield of thousands of violations of Clean Air Act standards. The environmental group gave the company an ultimatum last fall when it discovered a litany of…
Citizen Mike Rawlings has put his Mayor cape back on and will host local, federal, state and Dallas ISD officials at a news conference Friday morning. The event, at 9:30 a.m. at Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Magnet Center, is geared toward providing new strategies for Dallas ISD to “increase regional…
In a new twist for a case full of them, lawyers of Kerry Max Cook, the Dallas man sentenced to death for a gruesome rape and murder before being exonerated two decades later, are accusing a prosecutor in his case of taking home the murder weapon as a dark, twisted…
Yesterday Joe told you that Mike Rawlings, our mayor, is having a press conference today to announce how he feels about the Trinity River Toll Road. So guess who’s got to go to the damn thing at 12:30? OK, OK, I’m doin’ it. Wow, everybody doesn’t just need to get…
The city of Dallas has been grappling for years with how to better regulate boarding homes for the elderly, mentally ill and disabled , which are currently subject to very little oversight. About three weeks ago, the city council’s housing committee was told that licensing and regulating the homes could…
After soliciting a week’s worth of feedback from the luminaries on Facebook, Mayor Mike Rawlings, heretofore uncommitted on the controversial Trinity Toll Road, will hold a press conference at City Hall tomorrow “to deliver significant development” and also to “give his perspective on the Trinity River Corridor Project including the…
When we said yesterday Planned Parenthood could remain part of the Texas’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program “for now,” we didn’t know “now” would last less than 24 hours. A Fifth Circuit appeals judge has overturned yesterday’s preliminary injunction blocking Texas from kicking Planned Parenthood out of the WHP. In his…
Heads up, guys. Remember last summer? It was so damned hot Texans were horse-whipping their thermostats. We came this close to rolling blackouts. So close we’re pretty sure Public Utility commish Ken Anderson lost some years off of his life, or at least a little hair. We’d like to tell…
Damn! They almost got me to fall off the wagon again this morning. I came within a pubic hair’s breadth of reading an entire story about John Edwards’ sex life. That’s actually closer than just a hair’s breadth. Today’s story mentioned Lisa Blue, the Dallas lawyer and widow of Fred…
With Cinco de Mayo fast approaching, the Dallas/Fort Worth chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, is scrambling to remind Americans that if you’re going to undermine a holiday designed to celebrate a culture’s heritage, you don’t have to just do it by getting hammered…
Yesterday was First-Quarter Earnings Day for Dallas Morning News parent A.H. Belo, or as we call it in the newspaper business, So How Many of Us Are Getting Whacked on Christmas Day? Day. The news was pretty predictable: Total first-quarter revenue was $105 million, down 7 percent over last year…
This morning, two men stood in the same courtroom where they were convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to life in prison for a rape and shooting that happened almost 30 years ago. This time, both were smiling, as they were one step closer to exiting the criminal justice hell…
There was a day when I might have come up laughing at the big investigative package in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News on University of Texas Southwestern Medical School ex-president Kern Wildenthal and his expense account madness. It’s not just that the News “buried the lede,” as we say in the…
The scuffle between Texas and the feds over women’s healthcare was supposed to get real tomorrow, when Planned Parenthood was scheduled to be barred from being a provider for the state’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program. But earlier today, Federal District Judge Lee Yeakel granted the non-profit its requested preliminary injunction…
Before SMU prof Al Armendariz had even warmed the seat at his post as EPA regional chief, he was pilloried as an activist whose research into the air pollution caused by fracking operations made him unfit to run a five-state office overseeing some of the industry’s most important drilling grounds…
Alex Jones, host of Infowars and national guru of conspiracy theorists, recently took up the cudgel for free speech at Dealey Plaza on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Vowing to bring “tens of thousands” to Dealey Plaza next year, Jones said on today’s broadcast he hopes Dallas enjoys…
