Who doesn’t love Love Field? Easily negotiated, convenient, it’s everything that Dallas-Fort Worth International isn’t. But it’s always had that dingy, regional-airport feel. Said interim Aviation director Mark Duebner, “Compared to what we’ve been working with — our 1950s terminal with few amenities — this will be worth the wait.”…
In a 2010 lawsuit filed in federal court, Dr. Tiffiney Barfield-Cottledge claimed the University of North Texas lobbed her application for a faculty position into the dustbin because she’s black. And because they were retaliating against her for allegedly griping to the media. In recompense, she sought a $250,000 settlement…
Dallas Detective Eddie Lopez pushed a photo across the table in a tiny interrogation room. “All I care about is finding this guy right there. It’s that simple. I know you know where he’s at.” A huge, manic grin spread across Seth Winder’s face as he laughed nervously. It vanished…
In the rarefied halls of Cornell, the atmospheric-science equivalent of the gauntlet has been thrown. At stake is nothing less than the suitability of one of the most plentiful, domestically producible forms of energy in North America to replace a fuel speeding climate change and emitting tons of known carcinogens…
The days of lease-bearing landmen making it rain on the Barnett Shale are over. The industry became so proficient at fracturing the rock thousands of feet beneath the surface and extracting the gas trapped within that they glutted the market. Gas prices took a swan dive and have stagnated ever…
Dallas backup wide receiver Kevin Ogletree was planning on stiffing his housesitter for more than $16,000 in expenses incurred while he was out of town during the lockout, according to a lawsuit filed in Dallas County on December 30 by the son of longtime Cowboys strength and conditioning coach Joe…
These days it seems as though both political parties are doing everything they can to disenfranchise one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country: Hispanics. While the GOP ratchets up anti-immigrant rhetoric and champions Arizona-style immigration legislation, the Obama administration racks up record yearly numbers of deportations amid promises for…
As we near the end of 2011, let us now look back on the year (without much fondness) and take stock. We racked up one of driest years in recorded history (more on that in a moment). The livestock and agricultural industries took a shuddering blow that, when the final…
Over the course of the last month, both ERCOT and the North American Energy Reliability Corporation have warned of outages as early as next summer, due in large part, they say, to new regs issued by the EPA aimed at reducing the amount of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants…
If you’re planning on traversing Oak Lawn somewhere between Cedar Springs and Maple, don’t. Pictured above is the sedan that plowed into a utility pole not long ago. As I just discovered during the drive into the office, Dallas Police have a huge swath of Oak Lawn completely cordoned off,…
You’ve probably heard that an international contingent of physicists in Switzerland is this close to identifying the Higgs boson, aka the “God particle.” Currently, the Higgs is the theoretical mechanism that explains how matter obtained mass following the Big Bang. The theory is that it imbued the basic building blocks…
“Jesus didn’t want us to have a trial this close to his birthday,” Steven Phillips’s attorney, Tom McKenzie, said yesterday. He was joking, we’re pretty sure. His point: That the prospect of an ex-wife now 20 years divorced from Phillips cutting a slice out of the roughly $4 million paid…
Steven Phillips spent 25 years in prison as an innocent man for a string of rapes he didn’t commit. He was exonerated in 2008 based on DNA evidence. He has always said life is much more complicated outside prison walls. Better, sure, but complicated. Add around $4 million dollars in…
For folks in Dallas, where the council-appointed gas drilling task force is running to stand still, or in Southlake, the subject of a recent cover story on towns grappling with urban drilling, this EPA report released today tying fracking to groundwater contamination in Wyoming probably doesn’t mean much. We get…
Emissions of cancer- and central nervous system defect-causing toxic air pollution put Texas power plants atop the pile of serial polluters, a report based on EPA data finds. Nationwide, pollution controls such as smokestack scrubbers have reduced the rates at which air toxins are pumped into the air we breath…
Texas cattle country lost some 600,000 head this year — a 12-percent reduction in the herd — driven by a drought that withered grasses and baked river beds and stock ponds. It’s the kind of en masse decline the likes of which this state hasn’t seen since drought ravaged the…
It’s been nearly six months since U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton issued a memo to his subordinates, which we’ll translate from bureaucrat-speak for you: Look, we got scarce resources, so don’t head out into the field looking to pop every Tomas, Diego and Enrique you find without…
Ever since the EPA announced new pollution regs that would come down hardest on dirty power plants, there’s been considerable Sturm und Drang from the industry, who’ve been making all sorts of dire predictions about rolling outages resulting from burdensome, onerous, expensive federal regulation. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation…
On Tuesday we told you about a report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — an entity tasked by the feds with ensuring the lights stay on — that singled out Texas as a state that may not have the electrical reserves to meet peak demand by 2013. Officials…
It was early November when watchdog group Downwinders At Risk found out that Dallas-Fort Worth had set off air-quality monitors more times than Houston in 2011. Yep, America’s petrochemical hub violated EPA standards less often than we did. Depressing, right? As you may recall, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality…
Get ready for more rolling blackouts, because according to a grid reliability report, Texas won’t have the juice to meet peak demands by 2013. The study, authored by grid reliability enforcer North American Electric Reliability Corporation, says Texas operators may either bring old plants offline as they retrofit them to…
Thirty miles northwest of Dallas, there is a suburb the outside world scarcely touches. There is no evidence of recession here, no stagnating unemployment. In 2008, Forbes named it the most affluent neighborhood in the country. The next year it was named one of the richest ZIP codes of its…
