Responding to a fairly dismal report from the purveyors of the ACT test, the Texas Education Agency is searching for a silver lining in an otherwise irredeemable truth about the 2012 crop of high school grads: Only a quarter of them are ready for college. Because the figure bears repeating,…
A split three-judge panel of a federal appeals court rejected an EPA rule that would curb the drift of harmful power plant pollutants across state lines. The agency, the majority ruled, had overstepped its authority under the Clean Air Act. The legal challenge was mounted by a number of states…
It looks like the epitaph of Missouri Rep. Todd Akin’s political aspirations are written in a Sunday morning interview on a Fox affiliate in St. Louis. The staunchly anti-abortion, GOP Senate candidate said women rarely get pregnant from rape, a misconception repeatedly disproved in medical research. Instead of stopping there,…
A capital murder warrant has been issued for Abey Bilette Girma, 37, in the killing of the owners of Desta, an Ethiopian restaurant, at around midnight on Aug. 15. Yayehyirad Lemma and Yenenesh Desta were gunned down on the front porch of their home on Marquita Street after closing the…
Market seers think Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, which owns the state’s biggest power generating assets, might be engaging in a little prebankruptcy housekeeping. The latest sign? It’s repayment of an inter-company loan. Energy Future isn’t a single, vertically integrated giant like it was when it was known as TXU. It’s…
Ryszard Stroynowski sat bathed in the pale glow of his laptop screen. At 2 in the morning of Independence Day, as the final, fugitive firecracker reports of the night crackled across a sleeping Dallas, the 65-year-old physicist was wide awake. As he watched the live broadcast in his pajamas, his…
University of Texas prof Chip Groat’s ties to the natural gas industry raised a few eyebrows last month after a report he served as lead researcher on gave the hydraulic fracturing process a clean bill of health. “New Study Shows No Evidence of Groundwater Contamination from Hydraulic Fracturing,” the accompanying…
Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples sent a tweet to his followers Tuesday morning asking whether we’re “worried about the direction of our country.” Well, sure we’re worried about partisan gridlock in Congress, the widening chasm of income inequality and drought conditions that cover most of Texas and more of…
Gino Romano, alias Jonathan Lee Riches, alias Johnny Suenami, sued the Kardashian sisters, Kris Jenner, Lamar Odom and Mark Cuban in federal court. Why? Because they’re trying to kill him. Because he has a sex tape involving the Kardashians and Cuban. Because he witnessed it all from an air duct…
Earlier today, Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Horseman, Pass By, began auctioning off some 300,000 books from his antiquarian store, Booked Up. The taciturn man of letters said he does not want to burden his children with nearly half a million…
The announcement that Energy Future Holdings, the biggest generator of electricity in Texas, is going to issue $750 million in debt probably could have been timed better. Earlier this week, the company announced it was going to terminate the pensions of about a third of its workforce by the end…
There’s a reason State Farm wants to insure Johnson County homes against earthquakes. Injecting millions of barrels of fracking waste water loosens faults the way whiskey loosens tongues. Cliff Frohlich of the Jackson School of Geosciences deployed seismographs throughout a 43-mile grid in the Barnett Shale. They detected eight times…
A recent opinion out of a state appeals court in Dallas sheds no light on whether Scott Wiseman of Garland is a complete scumbag. It does, however, make one thing clear: Prosecutors, do not let your expert witnesses opine on the statistical likelihood that your victim is telling the truth…
A federal judge ruled Thursday that Farmers Branch’s voting system is depriving the Latino population of representation on the City Council. City leaders have 60 days to address the violation of federal voting law. Farmers Branch’s ethnic history has been troubled over the last six years or so. The town…
As of Wednesday, the wholesale price of electricity generators can charge during times of peak demand goes up 50 percent. And as it turns out, that’s probably a waste of money. Regulators are worried because it looks like we won’t have enough generating capacity to meet Texas’s growing needs. Problem…
A controversial Farmers Branch immigration ordinance will get a second chance in court after a sound rejection back in March, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Arizona’s controversial immigration bill will play a determining role. Farmers Branch has three times passed a “housing” ordinance which would require anyone renting…
Earlier this month, three East Texas hamlets with a collective population of fewer than 2,000 souls filed suit in a federal court in Oklahoma City to halt construction of the southern half of The International Pipeline Formerly Known as Keystone XL. The Keystone was to be a massive piece of…
Imbroglios don’t get more prosaic than this: A USDA newsletter suggests its employees practice “Meatless Mondays,” thereby shrinking their ecological footprint. Skip the Salisbury steak at the cafeteria and eat a plant instead. Take into account the ever-swelling asses of the American public and this isn’t such a bad idea…
Judging by a joint filing in a federal-court scuffle between Avalon Residential Care Homes and the City of Dallas, the end may be in sight. Dallas has for years struggled to strike a balance between regulating the city’s group homes without trampling their rights under federal housing laws. Safe to…
Back in February, I wrote about a heavily publicized report released by the University of Texas Energy Institute that billed itself as the authoritative guide for regulators wrestling with the extraction of natural gas from shale formations and the novel combination of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Injecting…
The Associated Press has news for the people who live above the shale formations experts say have transformed America’s energy terrain: Critics of the gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing are as guilty of hyperbole, or downright dishonesty, as the industry’s most ardent defenders. To wit: Josh Fox, director…
Like a good neighbor, State Farm wants to insure Johnson County homeowners against fracking-related earthquake damage. Cleburne, aka Lil’ San Andreas, has experienced a string of quakes this summer. Which is weird because, before 2008, the area had absolutely zero history of seismic activity. State Farm reps have reportedly been…
