March. That’s when the Dallas City Council will finally decide whether to ban single-use plastic (and paper) bags. That was the takeaway from today’s council briefing on the subject, the umpteenth since Councilman Dwaine Caraway launched his crusade last March. For the first hour of the meeting, it looked as…
When campaign fundraising totals for the Texas governor’s race were announced on Tuesday, Wendy Davis’ team celebrated that their $12.2 million haul bested Greg Abbott’s $11.5 million. Abbott’s team accused her of “fuzzy math” for counting $3.5 million donated to the Texas Victory Committee, which splits its funds between the…
On Monday, Dallas Police Chief David Brown briefed the City Council on changes the department’s use-of-force training regimen. Before, training sessions were required once every two years; now, it’s quarterly or bi-monthly. To oversee the training, Brown added several high-ranking officers to oversee the “use of force team.” The overhaul,…
The good news is that Luis Rocha, 70 is recovering from last Sunday’s random beating outside the Mockingbird Campisi’s. He’s well enough to give TV interviews, anyways, and quip of the men who broke a dozen of his ribs and left him in the Baylor ICU, “Maybe they wanted my…
If you were in a particularly charitable mood and didn’t know much about the situation, you might credit Misrael Perla with trying to save Alexandra Julia Moreno. He did, after all, rush the 20-year-old Irving woman to the hospital when he discovered her unresponsive in July 2012. But then you…
It’s been seven weeks since Marlize Munoz suffered a pulmonary embolism and collapsed at her home. It’s been clear for almost as long that she’s lost all or most of her brain function and is destined to exist, so long as her heart is kept beating, in a vegetative state…
Few people are kidding themselves that the $2 billion voters set aside for water projects in November will be sufficient to quench Texas’ growing thirst. The population is growing too fast and the prospect of drought looms too large. Coping with that will take some combination of new infrastructure, technological…
State Senator Wendy Davis’ campaign has experienced a couple of hiccups in recent weeks. Her attack on rival Greg Abbott for being in the pocket of payday lenders backfired after her campaign grossly miscalculated the industry’s contributions and neglected to mention that she had previously voted for the payday lending…
Mat Olson, the 26-year-old BMX daredevil who conquered the arches of the West 7th Street Bridge on Saturday, continued his victory tour on Monday morning with an appearance on News 8 Daybreak. There, he offered a rebuttal to the haters out there who have suggested that his stunt was irresponsible…
Full disclosure: I don’t follow Major League Soccer, and I’ve never been to an FC Dallas game. The one and only time I’ve been to Frisco was when my future wife dragged me to IKEA. So, when I say that the coming season doesn’t look promising, I’m not passing judgment…
Today, in the first of three public forums on taxi and limo regulations, City Council members learned what has been clear since Dallas began its crackdown on Uber: The system, particularly for taxis, is completely rigged. That’s partly by design. Historically, because cabs fill an important gap in the local…
When Texas passed its version of the castle doctrine in 2007, allowing homeowners to shoot burglars without fear of repercussions, support in the Texas Legislature was nearly unanimous; of 180 lawmakers, only 13 voted nay. Almost as many legislators (136) co-authored or sponsored the bill, as Democrats and Republicans alike…
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the Texas Horse Park, one of the many baubles approved by voters 15 years ago as part of the Trinity River Corridor Project, wasn’t very well conceived. If the unwillingness of donors to chip in private funds wasn’t proof that a fancy equestrian…
Fort Worth’s new “signature” West 7th Street Bridge may lack the flash of Dallas’ Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, but the pavement is perfectly serviceable for driving over and, as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s video from this weekend shows, the concrete arches are perfectly sized for bicycles. The rider in the…
The Dallas Safari Club’s decision to auction off the chance to hunt an endangered black rhino has sparked an impassioned and thoroughly fascinating debate about the ethical implications of big-game hunting and whether an animal’s age and inability to reproduce is enough to justify its death. That debate is officially…
Anyone who follows Dallas Police Chief David Brown on Twitter or Facebook knows that during the department’s semi-regular disciplinary hearings he posts details about the punishment handed down to misbehaving officers. A Dallas Police Association attorney briefly raised a stink about it last March, but the practice has generally been…
It’s not just cars Dallas dumps in the Trinity River. It’s tires, too — tons of them embedded in the muck and stranded along the banks. Particularly cluttered is the stretch of river between the Trinity River Audubon Center and Interstate 20. “They just dumped load after load of tires,…
It’s flu season, a fact you’ve probably noticed if you’ve experienced a bout of achy, feverish misery, or if you’ve seen the equally feverish news reports on the mounting death toll in North Texas, which reached 21 yesterday. To put this all in context, we spoke with Dallas County Health…
If it were possible for a human being to physically climb into bed with an industry, Texas attorney general hopeful Barry Smitherman would be under the covers with oil and gas interests in a nanosecond. He has more than proved his ardor during nearly a decade as an energy regulator,…
First, a spot of good news: Hillcrest High School has climbed off the Texas Education Agency’s annual list of low-performing schools. So have two other Dallas ISD schools, Francisco Medrano Middle School and John W. Runyon Elementary. Now for the depressing news: twenty-five DISD schools took their place, leaving the…
Chung Kim might look like someone’s kindly grandpa, but the 76-year-old has a helluva mean streak. His former boss knew this; when Kim was laid off from his job in 2001, he allegedly pulled a weapon. So did his neighbors, several of whom he allegedly threatened with murder over the…
At some unknown point in the not-too-distant past, after the advent of the internal combustion engine, human beings discovered that pouring volatile chemicals into underground burrows made it much, much easier to hunt rattlesnakes and other critters. The practice, aptly called “gassing,” caught on and has been in use in…
