Just last month, we learned that Dallas Animal Services had around 30 vacancies in shelter and field operations that urgently needed to be filled — this, despite a RIF process in October that saw 53 people laid off and replaced with temporary workers. At Thursday afternoon’s Animal Shelter Commission meeting,…
It’s not often we get invitations to flood the mayor’s office with phone calls — we tend to do that all on our own — but LGBT rights group GetEQUAL TX is planning a different sort of mass phone-in to Mayor Mike Rawlings’s office tomorrow. According to this here Facebook…
President and CEO of Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance Mike Faenza said as much yesterday: He knows he’s “at risk of looking like Don Quixote” here, but he really, really believes Dallas can end its chronic homelessness problem by 2015. Which is why earlier today he did his best to convince…
Bandele Tyehimba, who, with his wife Akwete, owned Pan African Connection, a 23-year-old South Dallas art gallery and meeting space, died in his sleep Wednesday night. He was 58 years old. We wrote about Tyehimba and Pan African just a month ago; at that time, the Tyehimbas were recovering from…
“When do we get to go home?” Alice Gossett inquired, a little irritably. She wore brown pajamas and soft purple booties. Tiny in her wheelchair, her feet didn’t quite reach the ground. “As soon as we get our treat!” the nurse answered, beaming at her. Gossett was not impressed. “Never…
If you need a new benchmark to measure just how broke you are, try “asset poverty.” Asset-poor households would be unable to survive for three months at the federal poverty level if some crisis caused them to lose their source of income. As Robert mentioned earlier, asset poverty is the…
The bride wore a strapless dress in shades of blue and white. The other bride wore a battered leather jacket, a shiny, pale pink tie and a snug gray beanie. Hendrix Scott and Jennifer McCluskey rode up to the second floor of the Dallas County Records Building on Main Street…
For months, Mayor Mike Rawlings has made it clear that he’s got his eye on Southern Dallas. This afternoon, as promised, was the first of three public presentations he’ll give on his Southern Dallas Economic Growth Plan, which played to a packed house of bigwigs at the South Side Studios…
In news that should make Rick Perry tingly all over, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order today denying the Center For Reproductive Rights’ request for a new hearing in their suit against Texas’s new sonogram law. The CRR had previously requested that the court hear the…
Let’s give credit where it’s due: you can’t ever accuse PETA of letting cold weather, common sense or good taste ruin the opportunity for a perfectly good publicity stunt. As promised, the group returned to their favorite downtown street corner, Main and Akard, this morning for what their press release…
You may recall that back in October we told you Fair Park had been named a Great Public Space by the American Planning Association. Well, during the council’s lunch break today, just after he got emotional about the children, Mayor Mike Rawlings gathered with the city council, Parks Board chair…
At this very moment the city council members are discussing whether they’d like to get into the bond business to help Uplift Education with its plan to sell tax-exempt bonds to help open a new charter school in the former Baylor offices Deep Ellum. (Sounds, so far, like the item…
It probably hasn’t escaped the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s notice that an awful lot of people are very, very unhappy with the organization lately. Just to drive the point home a little further, reps from MoveOn.org, CREDO Action and UltraViolet announced they’d be hand-delivering a MoveOn petition…
“Here they go again,” Reverend Kyev Tatum said. He laughed, but stopped abruptly. He was talking, of course, about the atheists. When we last caught up with the Dallas-Forth Worth Coalition of Reason, our local band of atheists, freethinkers and humanists, they were trying fruitlessly to get The Dallas Morning…
Urbandale is a surprise, a tidy, easily missed neighborhood bordering Pleasant Grove in southeast Dallas. There are liquor stores and tattered strip malls not far away, but here it feels lush, secluded. Trees with trailing limbs line a curving road. The houses, brightly colored and neatly fenced, sit on gentle…
Perhaps you’ve heard by now: The Dallas-based Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation (don’t bother clicking the link; the site’s not loading) will no longer be giving grant money to Planned Parenthood, a move Planned Parenthood of North Texas says comes after “anti-women’s health groups have repeatedly targeted and…
At this point, Deep Ellum could easily star in its own Rocky-style franchise, given how many times it’s been knocked down and still managed to stagger back to its feet. As we’ve mentioned, the latest worry for business owners in the area comes in the form of some 900 schoolchildren:…
The view from the foot of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge is about to get a lot cooler. This afternoon a spotless rented silver minivan pulled up at 331 Singleton, a vacant West Dallas office space with a large, invitingly blank outer wall. A group of four guys rolled from…
Mayor Mike Rawlings has a closed-door, no-press-allowed meeting this morning with 25 LGBT community leaders to discuss something that’s become, say, a small issue for him in the last week: his refusal to sign the “Mayors For Freedom To Marry” Pledge. Earlier this week Rawlings also elected to back out…
The woman popped up from the pile of blankets she had laid out on a dirty patch of sidewalk and took a look at the ring of people surrounding her. She patted her woolen beanie self-consciously. “Why you takin’ pictures?” she complained sleepily to a photographer. “I ain’t put my…
By 8 a.m., the news vans had started to arrive, parking on the street behind the cop cars, the Medical Examiner’s white sedan, the city of Dallas vehicle marked “Crime Scene.” They sank their tripods into the soft mud surrounding the house on Peavy Road, a nice-looking two-story with a…
The saga of Texas’s brand-new, Rick-Perry approved sonogram law continues. First, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a preliminary injunction issued by Judge Sam Sparks and allowed the law to go into effect. (That law, just to refresh, requires women seeking an abortion to look at a sonogram,…
