The Parker County district attorney is keeping an eye on the Legislature’s special session. Next month, Jake Evans’ case is scheduled to go to trial. The 17-year-old kid from a gated community in Aledo is accused of methodically gunning down his mother and his little sister then calmly phoning 911…
Electricity issues may not get as much ink as abortion-ban legislation here in Texas, but there were a few bills filed this session — more like kale than red meat — that sure as heck would have had a bigger impact on your pocketbook. They were common-sense and pro-consumer protections…
Pollution woes and lagging sales have driven battery maker Exide into bankruptcy for the second time in a decade. For the city of Frisco, the timing couldn’t be more inopportune. In exchange for shutting down an Exide smelter that had been pumping lead and arsenic into the air and nearby…
It’s that time of year again, when the feds single out Texas’ precariously thin power reserves. Even California — a state not known for electrical reliability — is projected to experience fewer problems with its power grid as the summer heat drives residents to their thermostats. A reserve margin is…
Buried in an unheralded weekly U.S. petroleum balance sheet released Wednesday was a milestone that not so long ago seemed unimaginable: We pumped more oil out of the ground than we imported for the week ending May 31. The difference between oil production and imports wasn’t huge — about 80,000…
So many questions remain unanswered regarding the fatal shooting of a motorcyclist in police custody Tuesday evening. Who is he? How did he manage to bring a gun into the back of a Highland Park police SUV, and to fire it after he’d already been placed in handcuffs? What we…
The city of Frisco plans to build a 275-acre, $23 million “Grand Park.” It will be a regional attraction, a center to the city, replete with a festival green, a park for the kiddos and a “grand promenade” reaching out into a man-made lake with fountains of cool water. The…
The workers bearing the disproportionate brunt of the recession are young, underemployed or unemployed and struggling to gain a foothold at a critical stage in life. In Texas, the overall unemployment rate is 6.8 percent. The number of unemployed, aged 16 to 24, is more than double that, a report…
Landowners along the nearly 500-mile southern section of the Keystone XL pipeline say contractors have been excavating long-buried lengths of pipe to repair apparent defects. They’ve documented stakes jutting from turned-up dirt near the pipeline right-of-way through East Texas that read, “anomaly,” “dent” and “weld.” They’ve seen sections of excavated…
Unless Governor Rick Perry uses his veto, Texas is set to enact the most stringent email privacy protections in the country. The legislation, passed unanimously, would require state law enforcement agencies to secure search warrants before accessing emails. Previously, Texas mirrored federal rules, which make a nonsensical distinction between recent…
For a time, coal was moribund, on life support. We thought perhaps the country was permanently shrugging off its dependence on the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Coal-fired power plants were being mothballed en masse. The share of electricity generated by them fell 25 percent between 2005 and 2012. This…
In October of last year, at around 11:15 p.m., 17-year-old Jake Evans placed a 911 call from his upscale home in Aledo, a tony suburb just outside of Weatherford. “It’s weird,” he said, his voice eerily calm as he spoke with the operator. “I wasn’t even really angry with them…
Harold Simmons, the Dallas billionaire and owner of a West Texas radioactive-waste dump, won yet another tailor-made piece of legislation Tuesday. When all seemed lost, and his bill was hung up on a technicality — a point of order pushed by Representative Lon Burnam, his lonely, perennial opponent — the…
This Thursday, the Boy Scouts of America will teach its young men a lesson as indelible as any they’re likely to learn from a scoutmaster. Its national delegation will vote on a longstanding prohibition against gays in the country’s largest youth organization. BSA leaders have floated what they see as…
Randy Travis, the wiry, multi-platinum-selling country crooner with a golden voice that carries enough bass to rattle your silverware, had a tough 2012. In February, he was cited and arrested for public intoxication in front of a Sanger church during the wee morning hours. Later that year, he strode into…
Oncor, the Dallas-based sticks-and-wires utility, has collected half a billion dollars from ratepayers since 2007 for federal income taxes. But according to a report, the IRS hasn’t received a dime. In fact, most of that cash has gone to its struggling parent, Energy Future Holdings, which is marching inexorably toward…
Last Saturday, the folks taking in the new George W. Bush Presidential Center were briefly under the frightening misimpression that it had come under terrorist attack, as reports of an “active shooter” put the center and SMU on lockdown. Among the visitors were Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The…
Even with two seats in limbo, the complexion of the new Dallas City Council looks decidedly unfavorable for Trinity East, the would-be fracker from Fort Worth that paid the city millions for the rights to its natural gas. Because the Plan Commission voted against the company’s drilling permits, four “no”…
It was always one of the pieces in Eric Williams’ story that didn’t quite fit a narrative with an otherwise tidy motive for murder. The disgraced former justice of the peace had appealed his April 2012 conviction on burglary charges, prosecuted vigorously by slain Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland…
The final chapter appears to have been inked in the long, sorry saga of flow control, a moneymaking scheme that placed City Hall’s imprimatur on the idea that southern Dallas isn’t much more than a trash receptacle for the rest of the city. This week U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor…
Last fall, Huawei, the Chinese telecommunication giant whose U.S. base just happens to be in Plano, was the subject of intense scrutiny over fears that it might serve as a Trojan horse for cyber-spies in Beijing. Huawei, for its part, did little to allay fears by dummying up during a…
The Boy Scouts of America is proposing to lift its ban on gay youths, but to leave it in place once those gay Scouts become gay adults. This compromise — gays Scouts, no gay scoutmasters — apparently is an assault on the very foundations of scoutdom. The Family Research Council…
