Our transportation overlords at the North Central Texas Council of Governments have been accused of massaging numbers to justify letting a company called the Texas Turnpike Corp. build a tollway from Dallas to Greenville that no one who lives in the way seems to want. The council of governments, aka…
A school bus parked in front of the Ivy Apartments yesterday afternoon and let out dozens of kids as reporters filmed B-roll and took photographs across the street. The news stations had already confirmed that this apartment complex in Vickery Meadows was where Thomas Eric Duncan stayed in Dallas before…
Since 1999, the guardrails manufactured by Dallas’ Trinity Industries have been credited with saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of drivers across the country. Trinity’s popular older guardrail design, called the ET-2000, is supposed to roll back when struck by cars, absorbing some of the impact and lowering the…
It started out as a case that wasn’t very dramatic or high-profile. Latoya Scott, a 26-year-old woman, was arrested by the Irving Police Department for an alleged fight at a mall. Prosecutors said Scott hit and scratched a woman she was dating. She was charged with family violence assault, a…
A few years ago, a private, Dallas-based corporation announced it would like to build a private toll road, all with its own money, connecting northeast Dallas County to somewhere around Greenville, running basically parallel to the Interstate 30 and passing near Lake Lavon and Lake Ray Hubbard. The Texas Turnpike…
Tim Headington, the oil billionaire behind the Joule Hotel, has a weird relationship with local preservationists. On the one hand, Preservation Dallas honored him with an achievement award last May for his work on the hotel, which sits in a restored 1927 building. On the other hand, Preservation Dallas Executive…
The Texas Department of Transportation’s sign regulations are so strict that the agency once said that even the commandments of the Lord would require a permit. But the woman who owned the Ten Commandments sign in question fought back, and it seems that TxDOT is finally putting its rules into…
Adults in Texas briefly thought they had won the lottery. Now they are struggling with disappointment, an unpleasant emotion. The Dallas Morning News reported about the plight of an Ellis County woman who felt “cautiously optimistic” that she was in possession of a winning ticket from the Fun 5’s game…
Before Parkland placed a patient named Todd Arko in what the feds described as “immediate jeopardy,” nearly costing the hospital its Medicaid funding, there was another, lesser-known hospital that the feds say also placed a patient in immediate jeopardy. Green Oaks is a private psychiatric hospital that in February 2013…
A kid who was suspended 10 days from high school is super awesome, according to a federal lawsuit filed by his parents. “He is currently taking honors classes and a higher level math class than most of his peers,” says a suit filed by his mother, Tiffany Macklin. The boy,…
Dallas County jurors last week spent about three hours deliberating before they awarded Martha Salazar $73 million, the largest amount of money any plaintiff has received so far in a vaginal mesh lawsuit. Most of the thousands of lawsuits that women have filed against Big Pharma over the devices are…
Behind the scenes of the USA Today list that says downtown Dallas has the best skyline on the planet, there is a team of three expert panelists who provided commentary on all of the cities for the winning skylines slide show. Of those three panelists, two of them are architects…
At some point next year, a Dallas-based toll company may get permission from the Texas Department of Transportation to build the only toll road in Texas that is totally supported by private finance. The exact route is something that the Texas Turnpike Corp. is still figuring out, but rural property…
Since 2006, the City House nonprofit has offered shelter for homeless kids and young adults in two houses in Plano, smack in the middle of residential neighborhoods. City House claims the kids’ neighbors never seemed to mind. How does City House pull this off? By operating out of existing houses…
Parkland has until November to fix its discharge policy and governing board, or the hospital will lose its Medicare funding, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced today. On the plus side, Parkland isn’t placing patients who dare visit the hospital in jeopardy anymore, according to the feds. “We…
Clint Peterson’s on-again, off-again girlfriend called the police on October 28 to report that he showed up uninvited to her house that morning and vandalized her car. She says she warned the dispatcher that Peterson also sometimes carried a fake gun and may have had it on him. The girlfriend…
Todd Arko relapsed to using cocaine when he was still on probation for possessing the drug, then decided he would rather die than go back to jail. At the age of 53, he tried to hang himself. The rope broke, crushing his heels as he collapsed to the ground. Arko…
Few people outside of public health advocates and consumer groups used to pay much attention to the Food and Drug Administration’s confusing, shadowy process for approving medical devices to the market. When patients find themselves suffering after a surgery that was supposed to help them — like, say, a hip…
If a pest control guy is making you feel terrified about rats invading your home, he’s probably just trying to sell you on his ability to kill all those rats. That’s the lesson, anyway, from another guy who sells rat-killing services. “If it feels like they’re trying to scare you,…
She was recovering in a postpartum room at Baylor University Medical Center this spring, exhausted from giving birth, when her husband gave her the good news. “We got the placenta,” he told her. “It’s in the cooler.” Now she just had to get it off the hospital property without being…
The homeless man identified only as Patient No. 5 was in a wheelchair, recovering from a suicide attempt and three broken bones when Parkland Memorial Hospital staff discharged him to a homeless shelter. He didn’t want to go. “The patient stated he did not feel safe going to the shelter…
Regulation of the mysterious chemicals used in fracking fluid used in drilling for oil and gas has been pretty much off limits to the Environmental Protection Agency ever since Congress in 2005 stripped the EPA of its authority to regulate fracking fluid under the Safe Drinking Water Act. In a…
