Dallas-based Luminant, the electricity generation arm of Energy Future Holdings, got hit with a violation notice from the EPA Friday, accusing it of completing major modifications to its northeast Texas coal-fired plants, Big Brown and Martin Lake, without installing modern pollution control devices. The notice of violation says the modifications…
Last month, we wrote about a former Fairview Police officer who claimed the chief, Granver Tolliver, a fairly litigious former Dallas deputy chief of police, sexually harassed her repeatedly. In Lisa Mitchell’s lawsuit, she accused him of grabbing her by the ponytail and gesticulating crudely with his fingers during a…
Opposing counsel in a six-year legal battle over a proposed Farmers Branch immigration ordinance are trading letters to the judge, arguing, naturally, that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Arizona’s immigration law supports their side. Last month, the high court struck down the most controversial provisions of Arizona’s law save…
Our record-busting summer 2011 continues to be an object of fascination to climate scientists all over the world. Alongside floods in Thailand, drought in Eastern Africa and the European heat wave, the driest, hottest year in recorded Texas history has provided a case study for gauging the influence of climate…
On Tuesday, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced it would use a single drug — pentobarbital, a barbiturate — to carry out executions due to a shortage of one component in a three-drug cocktail. Overseas manufacturers of pancuronium bromide, a powerful paralytic, have halted shipments to the U.S., protesting…
Together, they have a population of fewer than 2,000, but the tiny East Texas hamlets of Reklaw, Alto and Gallatin have an outsized mission: To halt the southern portion of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, a conduit designed to ferry some 830,000 barrels of Canadian tar sands a day from an…
Parents of the victims of Joseph Garbarini, the pedophile who was sentenced to more than 60 years last October for the sexual abuse of kindergarten girls at Plano’s Hunt Elementary school, are suing the school district and the principal for ignoring the predator in their midst. An investigation of the…
A family of Johnson County landowners is suing Chesapeake, the country’s second-largest natural gas company, for allegedly cheating them out of royalties. Their lawyer, Dallas-based attorney James Holmes, says they can thank endlessly indulgent Texas laws and a taxing authority more inclined to look the other way. The complaint filed…
In the early morning hours Wednesday, physicists in Switzerland may announce that they’ve discovered the elusive “God Particle,” aka the Higgs boson. For more than half a century, the Higgs has been the theoretical mechanism that imbued matter with mass after the Big Bang, so that the swirling chaos of…
Pedro Hermenegildo didn’t have insurance, so he paid Dr. Ricardo Rocha in cash to repair a hernia, a fairly routine, outpatient procedure. But according to a lawsuit filed against Rocha in a Dallas County district court last week, Hermenegildo lost much more than his hernial bulge. The surgery was performed…
Friday’s Democratic primary run-off debate between Domingo Garcia and Marc Veasey for the 33rd wasn’t quite as bitchy as we had hoped, in that Garcia didn’t refer to his opponent, a grown-ass black man, as a “boy” this time, which is positive, right? At the beginning, hell, we even thought…
Texas electricity regulators voted today to raise the price cap on wholesale electricity from $3,000 to $4,500 per megawatt hour — the equivalent of powering roughly 330 homes for one hour — by Aug. 1. It’s only June and already the electrical grid is being tested by record peak demand,…
We at Unfair Park will never, ever tire of hearing Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Irving-based ExxonMobil, the largest private oil and gas company in the world, admit that the product he peddles has in fact caused the earth’s climate to change. This is the corporation that has for decades…
Six Republican members of the U.S. Senate — including Texas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn — have requested an investigation of the EPA’s decision to accuse a natural gas producer of contaminating a North Texas water well. In a letter sent last week, the senators asked the EPA inspector…
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down much of Arizona’s illegal immigration law Monday morning, leaving its most controversial, show-me-your-papers provision standing, and that only provisionally. Experts say the decision provides a road map to federal courts evaluating immigration laws enacted in places like Alabama, Georgia and even Farmers Branch, Texas…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Mark Stroman, a Dallas man adorned with Neo-Nazi tattoos, went…
Trouble seems to follow Fairview Police Chief Granver Tolliver wherever he goes. Back when he was a Dallas cop, soaring through the ranks to deputy chief, he became mired in an internal controversy over a vehicle accident in 1996. Department brass accused him of favoritism and of pulling the strings…
At a hearing Wednesday, Chairman Ralph Hall and his Republican colleagues put their powerful U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to its highest, most noble use: Namely, bringing the election-year hurt to the Obama administration for whatever perceived shortcomings reside in the committee’s broad wheelhouse. Reading from a…
Until five years ago, Farmers Branch (pop. 28,000) had about as much renown as “a speck on a flea,” the town’s former mayor once remarked. It was just one landlocked postage stamp in a melange of inner-ring suburbs. But as the turn of the 21st century came and went, it…
Dallas-based Luminant, the electricity generation arm of Energy Future Holdings, and a number of other utilities that own coal-fired fleets are attempting to head off an EPA rule that would curb the amount of nervous system-disrupting mercury, cancer-causing dioxin, arsenic and lead emitted from their smokestacks. At a time when…
President Barack Obama announced Friday afternoon that the Department of Homeland Security will no longer attempt to deport young undocumented immigrants brought here as children, signaling a compassionate shift in an immigration policy whose hallmark was aggressive enforcement and record-shattering deportation numbers. With a few big caveats, undocumented immigrants meeting…
Five months to go and Republicans are waking up to the awful realization that over the course of the primary season — the last five or six years, really — they’ve done their level-best to alienate the largest minority demographic not only in Texas, but in the nation. It is…
