On August 15, 40-year-old John Burnette of Boyd climbed his way up to a three-sided, illuminated billboard he was supposed to service. The billboard, on a lot off of Division Street, is part of the Dallas Cowboys Stadium complex — No. 14, one of the Cowboys Silver Lots. Burnette opened…
Condoms, birth control — who needs ’em? Just don’t have sex, Texas says to its horny teens. Just hobble that unbridled desire coupled with a limited understanding of consequences and say ‘No, I’m saving myself for marriage.’ That’s pretty much the message, maybe paired with an infographic demonstrating where the…
Unfair Park dropped by the Democratic New Leaders Texas PAC meeting at The Kessler last night. The group is billed as a statewide network of Dems “nurturing and promoting the next generation of principled, capable Texas leaders” — like, for example, the affable and polished state Rep. Rafael Anchia, who…
Did high-powered, Lubbock personal injury attorney Kevin Glasheen do diddly-squat for the wrongfully imprisoned Steven Phillips, aside from filling out a one-page form with the State Comptroller? Or is Phillips an ungrateful client who stiffed his attorney on a $2 million legal bill, filed for $4 million in compensation through…
Waxahachie Daily Light! You’re on notice. Because when you get crossways with local firebrand Linda Lewis, protesters will march, media will descend, and comically high settlement demands will be made. Kentucky Fried Chicken got a taste back in 2006. Lewis claimed she found baby cockroaches sprinkled over her chicken sandwich…
It’s all but official now. We’ve strung together the 12 driest months in Texas history. State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon estimates we got 13.69 inches for the year. The average is 27. It’s been hell on ranchers, as we reported in this week’s cover story. And it may get worse. Texas…
On Monday we told you the story of Jason Clay Kennedy and the Brothers O’Brien, who, on February 5, disabled a Houston jewelry store’s alarm and video surveillance system and sawed through six inches of steel and concrete and made off with $6 million in 22-carat gold, Rolex watches and…
Somewhere out in the northeast corner of Young County, about 40 miles south of Wichita Falls, an aging cattleman cups his gnarled hands around his mouth, and from it comes his call, high and sharp and short. It snaps over mesquite and chaparral with the clarity of a rifle’s report…
At around 9, before the Dallas City Council voted on the measure that would direct all trash collected in the city to the landfill in southeast Dallas, more than 50 students and teachers at Paul Quinn College marched around City Hall chanting and wearing white T-shirts that read, “I AM…
None of the commodity-on-the-hoof gurus saw this one coming. They had predicted another fat increase in feedlot placements, not unlike July’s USDA Cattle On Feed report. Yet here we are, and the Beef Engine of America is in the midst of an historic drought, our forage exhausted, our ranchers culling…
Mike Modano, the highest-scoring American-born player in the history of the National Hockey League and the face of the Dallas Stars even after he signed to Detroit for a final season, stifled a sob as he bade farewell to those who shaped his legendary career, which included 12 70-point seasons,…
Mall shootings never start on time, and the “massacre” that occurred Tuesday afternoon was no exception. While about 50 7th- to 12th-grade Dallas Lutheran students arranged themselves inside Valley View Center in various states of death and grievous injury, 22 paramedics, 11 ambulances, one command center and a few battalion…
So, what’s our problem? Mostly, it’s La Nina, that little trollop. She’s been messin’ with Texas for a long time. And the relationship between her cool Pacific sea-surface temperatures and dry times here is pretty well established. For nearly 120 years, since we’ve kept any kind of reliable records, La…
There’s no denying it now: Gulf War Syndrome, characterized by memory loss, lack of concentration, neuropathic pain and depression, is a physiological illness, not a psychological one. A UT Southwestern study, published in the journal Radiology, used a specialized MRI that specifically measures blood flow in the brain and detected…
As my grandfather would say, “It’s drier than a popcorn fart.” We’re smack-dab in the middle of the worst one-year drought ever. The costliest too. Feed prices are nearly unaffordable. Stock tanks are drying up. But the final boot to the gut of the Texas rancher never came. It’s the…
We hear a lot about income inequality these days, as we do about our collectively clogged arteries. But it’s less often that we’re reminded of how one affects the other. A study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal does just that, tracking the connection between cardiac arrest and income inequality…
The jury’s still out, but the fact fetishists at the Texas Freedom Network seem to think that the recently enacted Senate Bill 6 may help neuter the historically science-averse state Board of Education. The law provides districts with state money for text books and tech devices like laptops and tablets…
Waste as opportunity, or waste as the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality? Unfair interference in the trash-hauling free market or the forward-looking future of refuse? Both sides have been hashing it out for a while now, but the Dallas City Council’s black members will get back to you on…
Rest easy, Friends of Unfair Park. ICE’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit is on the job. In the most recent sweep, they rounded up 27 dangerous immigration violators in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — criminals guilty largely of … overstaying their student visas. Not quite the stuff of Bruckheimer actioners…
Feed yards are glutted with the cattle of drought-stricken Texas ranchers forced to liquidate their herds, according to the most recent report from the USDA. Some 640,000 head were placed in feedlots in July, a staggering 56-percent increase from the same time last year. On a recent trip through counties…
I guess it’s just plain dumb luck that I happened to be drifting through tiny Dublin (population 4,000) on the one day a month delicious Dublin Dr Pepper is bottled. Now, for the uninitiated, Dublin Dr Pepper distinguishes itself from its Plano-based brethren in one key respect: It’s made with…
Steven Phillips, a man who spent 25 years in prison for a string of Dallas rapes he did not commit, was arrested in Carrollton for cocaine possession — an arrest that could cost him millions. When reached by phone, Phillips declined to comment. But according to the arrest affidavit obtained…
