In 2011, the Texas Legislature passed an awesome law allowing people to shoot feral hogs from helicopters, which was both the first and last time that feral hogs (to say nothing of the bill’s sponsor, current Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller) produced anything good. Otherwise, the creatures are a scourge upon nature and…
Money — i.e. making more of it — isn’t the only reason to go to college. The pursuit of knowledge, the opportunity for self-discovery, the chance to test the hardiness of one’s liver are also important benefits. But for people who have to make a living, college is in large…
In April, Pope Francis continued his run of saying pleasantly non-regressive things by declaring that men and women deserve equal pay for doing equal work. He called the fact that women are often paid less a “pure scandal” at odds with the Christian notion of radical equality. But here he…
It’s been more than five months since Barking Dog Avi Adelman, formerly of Lower Greenville, currently of what we’ll refer to as Greater Junius Heights, raced to the Santa Fe Trail to take pictures of a cop who collapsed. The cop revived, spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, and…
You are no doubt aware that Dallas has a gaping divide separating the northern and southern parts of the city. In very broad strokes, north is rich and white, while south is poor and brown. There are complex historical and political reasons why this is so, most of them tied…
Fariha and Mohammad Ashfaq’s marriage was brief. They wed in their native Pakistan in December 2007 but spent only a few months together before Mohammed returned to his home in Fort Worth. They lived together for a few additional months in Texas after Fariha acquired a visa in June 2009, but…
Back in March, The Dallas Morning News introduced us to Pam Mueller. Mueller, we learned, is a mild-mannered M Streets resident who has taken to renting out the other side of her small duplex on Airbnb, the short-term rental website that has, along with Uber, become synonymous with the “sharing economy.” “It’s more fun…
The Westwood School moved into its current location about 15 years ago, repurposing an Illinois Tool Works warehouse on Proton Road in a semi-industrial corner of Farmers Branch. The neighborhood was drab, all squat warehouses and blocky, single-story office buildings, but it was becoming a hub for North Dallas private…
Last week the city of Austin took the unusual step of suing the Travis Central Appraisal District, the body that sets property values on which local governments and school districts assess taxes. According to Austin officials, commercial properties were widely and consistently undervalued, handicapping the city’s ability to provide services and…
Monday, August 10 was one of the hottest days of the year. Government thermometers recorded a high temperature of 107 degrees. It was stupid, eyeball-searing heat any half-sentient creature — whose ancestors, after all, had the wherewithal to pass their genes along to subsequent generations — would presumably have the self-preserving…
There has long been fevered speculation in certain circles that a cabal of rich businessmen are conspiring with high-level city staffers to funnel taxpayer dollars into the southwestern corner of downtown Dallas in a massive secret real estate play. As evidence, these conspiracy theorists point to the strange confluence of public…
Yesterday afternoon Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk belatedly offered an explanation for her mysterious three-week absence from her office, announcing in a statement that she was battling a “serious episode of depression” and that, to more effectively cope with the disease, she would be taking an unpaid, four-week leave of…
Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the percentage of Texans without health insurance has dropped dramatically, from 27 percent in 2013 to 20.8 percent this year, according to Gallup. This is good news, as it means that a couple of million more people in the state have greater…
Tanya Ragan made her first foray into Downtown Dallas’ neglected southeastern corner in 2007 when she bought a piece of commercial property there. The Bridge, the city-funded homeless shelter, opened in 2008. In the seven years since, Ragan, who lives in a town home near the Farmer’s Market, has established…
The Bent Tree North neighborhood, a leafy collection of half-million-dollar homes adjacent to an eponymous country club in Far North Dallas, was the picture of calm on Wednesday morning. Tucked just out of earshot of the Dallas North Tollway, only the faraway whir of lawn crews and the purposeful swish,…
Last fall, Dallas County announced that it and the Dallas Police Department were going to pluck the lowest of low-hanging criminal justice reforms and implement cite-and-release, a policy that gives cops the option of issuing a citation to people suspected of certain class A and B misdemeanors — notably possession of…
Clarence E. Sullivan arrived in Ellis County in 1890 to seek his fortune. Though barely 18, he was already well-tempered by life. A runaway buckboard had killed his parents when he was a child, leaving him to be raised by an older brother who scratched out a meager living outside…
Last Thursday, during a routine stormwater inspection, city staff came upon an unsettling discovery: 300 to 400 dead fish in a West Dallas drainage pond on the landward side of the Trinity River levee near the Pavaho Pump Station. Workers plucked what fish carcasses they could safely reach — almost…
Dallas County used to be pretty damn proud of how it handled truancy cases. In a 2005 letter to then-Attorney General Greg Abbott, District Attorney Bill Hill wrote with evident satisfaction of the swiftness and ferocity with which students were punished for chronic absenteeism. In 1996, a year after Texas…
Since it went public with plans to build a high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston, Texas Central Railway has been adamant that it won’t be suckling at the government teat. The project would be entirely private, allowed to rise and fall on its own merits, as judged by the…
Marty Hiles had big plans for Ellis County. “A bunch of us — mostly retired, all former CEOs, executives, we’ve been around the world, done things, every one of us are veterans — we got together and we were looking and said ‘You know what? Ellis County needs to come out of…
Pop quiz: Aside from the obvious (i.e. poor judgment and inept management), what do the following events have in common? An employee of the city’s Trinity Watershed Management is helping organize her boss’s retirement money. To cover expenses, she solicits money from several companies that hold lucrative contracts with the…
