Tiffiney Barfield-Cottledge, formerly a criminal justice professor at UNT Dallas, filed a handwritten, pro se civil rights suit against the University of North Texas in 2010 for discrimination and retaliation after she didn’t get picked for a few faculty positions, allegedly because she’s black. Chief Judge Sidney Fitzwater gave the…
Warren Buffett, the inimitable Jesus of Investing, got it wrong, he admits. Investing in the highly leveraged buyout of Texas utility TXU by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Goldman Sachs was a bad bet, plain and simple, he told his shareholders in a letter Saturday. And if things at the former…
Coal-fired power plants generated some 30 percent less electricity in January than they did during the same month in 2011 — a huge drop for a a workhorse fleet that has historically fed this state’s sprawling transmission system with a steady supply of baseload power since pretty much forever. Problem…
So, you’re an undocumented immigrant. Your great hope is to stick around, make a living and, some day, become naturalized. Unfortunately, our immigration laws are a tangled morass of inscrutability, insensible to the realities of a globalized world. You may have watched last week’s Republican debate in Arizona with a…
Energy Future Holdings’ end-o’-year popped up on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website late Tuesday, and, boy, is it ugly. Now, why should you care? Because Energy Future is the parent company of Luminant, Texas’s biggest generator of electricity. And TXU Energy, a huge retail supplier. And Oncor, the…
Danny Cantu, a diesel mechanic, sued the city of Dallas and a small army of Dallas Police officers back in January, claiming he was making a sandwich in the kitchen when they tossed a flash-bang grenade through his window. As the deafening explosion rang in the kitchen, he alleged that…
The University of Texas Energy Institute cast a skeptical eye on the likelihood that the actual act of fracking could result in groundwater contamination. Particularly in the Barnett Shale, where aquifers sit thousands of feet above the shale rock, head researcher Dr. Chip Groat reasoned that the danger of fracking…
Lubbock personal injury attorney Kevin Glasheen, who represented a number of Dallas exonerees and successfully lobbied the state legislature to more than triple the amount paid for each year spent wrongfully imprisoned, was found innocent Thursday of professional misconduct charges brought by the State Bar of Texas. Three of his…
Council member Delia Jasso is officially disturbed by ERCOT’s charts, particularly the bar graph showing a big gray empty space between the reserve margin we need to make sure the lights stay on during hot summer afternoons and the colored part that indicates how much generation capacity we’ll actually have…
In light of a few things — namely the one-year anniversary of the most widespread rolling blackout in Texas history; the razor-thin reserve margins that left the state teetering on the verge of more rolling blackouts during that hot-as-hell summer; and ERCOT’s assertion that there aren’t enough plants to power…
We watch a three-hour House State Affairs Committee hearing so you don’t have to! Seriously, though, the future reliability of the Texas electrical grid is really starting to freak state legislators the fuck out. The watchword these days is “resource adequacy” — bureaucrat-ese for “Remember those outages last summer and…
In Dallas and across the country, the astronomical number of deportation orders issued by immigration courts is at last beginning to fall. President Obama’s new strategy focuses on intelligent enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. Translated: We’ll show bad guys the door, but the undocumented student brought here as a child can…
This case has rattled through the halls of federal and appeals courts for eight years now — the Ghost of War on Christmas Past, a moaning hydra who’s been sliced, diced and now winnowed down to one remaining question on which a magistrate says three Plano families may proceed: In…
Allow us to re-introduce you to the octogenarian congressman who’s currently perched atop the catbird seat in the oversight hearings every fracker in America is watching with bated breath. His name is Ralph Hall. He’s the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. One of its subcommittees,…
The denizens of tony Southlake successfully defeated the fracking juggernaut, turning industry leaders like Chesapeake back at the city limit sign. Or maybe it was the low natural gas prices that did it. Tough to say, really. But what can they do when a derrick goes up a stone’s throw…
Texas breeding cattle chased the rain in 2011 to plains states such as Nebraska, South Dakota and Kansas — even all the way to Florida — tripling the amount shipped out of state the year before. That 150,000 head left this stricken country is only the latest metric by which…
Every once in a while, amid the stacks of semi-literate, pro se habeas corpus petitions, trademark suits and product liability complaints, there comes a federal filing so disturbing, so completely awful, that it leaves the reader with nothing but questions. This week, it’s Danny Cantu v. The City of Dallas…
Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to us either. A couple of weeks ago we asked if America could stop pretending that politicians and their benefactors in the energy industry actually give two shits about “energy independence” or “energy security,” or any of the other portent-laden, focus-grouped catch phrases they lob…
This little nugget slipped past us last week — somehow, it didn’t make headlines north of Austin — but it draws the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality into a legal tussle with the Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project over pollution permits it issued to Dallas-based electric utility Luminant…
Tool Verizon Theatre Friday, January 20 Hitting a Tool show is a little like stepping back into the mid- to late-’90s, in all the best ways. As we threaded a packed Verizon Theatre lobby before the sold-out Friday night show in an herbally-induced state of euphoric nostalgia, draining plastic cups…
There’s trouble brewing in the land of lofts, bros and trolleys. Owners of Uptown spots such as Thomas Ave. Beverage Company, The Nodding Donkey and Si Tapas say they’re getting squeezed by irascible homeowners who’ve had whole swaths of Thomas Avenue and Allen Street designated for residents only, leaving patrons…
Dallas Public Library system interim head Corinne Hill says she wasn’t pushed out. The decision to quit Texas for Tennessee and helm Chattanooga’s Public Library system was hers alone. But the city’s leisurely search for a new director — and a blown Thanksgiving deadline — sure “didn’t help,” she told…
