Former FBI second-in-command Oliver “Buck” Revell of Dallas regularly makes the rounds of network and cable TV news shows to talk about everything from Internet security to international terrorism. A 30-year FBI veteran and international security consultant who authored the well-received autobiography A G-Man’s Journal, he’s a respected and knowledgeable…

Mary Thompson has her prey in sight. Thompson, a Dallas grandmother of six and co-founder of the women’s anti-gun-control group Second Amendment Sisters, is patrolling the hallways of Capitol Hill, looking for targets in her war against gun control. What better place to find her enemy, the gun-control lobbyists and…

As with other behemoth multinational companies, Irving-based ExxonMobil’s annual meeting is strictly a formality. Most of the crowd that packed the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in downtown Dallas to vote on shareholder resolutions last week were retirees who own relatively small amounts of company stock. The majority of big…

T he ugly battle that would divide a school started innocently enough, as such battles often do. It began with two unfortunate and seemingly unrelated injuries to children, the sort that could happen anywhere. But here, at Ascher Silberstein Elementary School in Pleasant Grove, they served as seeds, triggering within…

Outside Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in East Oak Cliff, a concrete retaining wall is emblazoned with big red letters touting the slogan “Mighty Mustangs” and the credo “Pride, Respect and Responsibility.” But the shabby condition of the ’60s-era building, which sits a few blocks away from the Corinth Street…

The call to a Dallas evangelist came from Cincinnati, Ohio. On the line was a Jewish man seeking spiritual answers — of the Christian variety. The Reverend Jim Sibley, a missionary for the Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board, took the call from the Hebrew soul searcher, who got Sibley’s…

Dallas’ garment industry has all but died, but critics say Plano-based J.C. Penney still has a connection to one of that sector’s most notorious practices. The national department-store chain is one of four major retailers that has yet to settle class-action lawsuits alleging sweatshop conditions in factories owned by their…

Over the last two years, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have purchased 63 dogs for use in federally funded experiments that began as far back as 1988. The canines, mostly foxhounds and mongrels, are trained to run on treadmills, and are then anesthetized for…

Like other organs of local government, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department adopted a strict no-smoking policy in 1988. Over the last two decades, such edicts have become routine and largely unquestioned in workplaces, exiling the nicotine-addicted to sidewalks. But Thomas Reilly, a sheriff’s investigator, charges that his department holds itself…

It’s an early Tuesday afternoon at Barbara Jordan Elementary School in South Oak Cliff, and Chet Baker, a tall and cheerful visitor dressed in a dark gray suit, takes off his jacket and makes this straightforward inquiry to Jeff Sughrue’s third-grade class: “What signal would you show if today is…

On the grass in front of the Dallas Independent School District headquarters last week, a small group of school support staff workers protested before an almost equally large gaggle of reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen. About 10 workers and their children, members of Local 100 of the Service Employees International…

Southwest Airlines, rated last month by Fortune magazine as the nation’s second-best place to work, may be less than gay-friendly. Both gay and straight employees of the Dallas-based airline were outraged in December when a vitriolic letter in the company pilots union newsletter blasted a corporate proposal to offer domestic-partner…

It’s close to midnight at Baby Dolls Saloon, a popular topless club north of Love Field near Bachman Lake, and the place is electrified. Dancers in nothing but g-strings gyrate on elevated stages as young and middle-aged men ogle them from below and shell out a steady stream of dollar…

Claude Albritton, owner of the celebrated McKinney Avenue Contemporary arts and performance space in Uptown, is steamed. Last year, city building inspectors forced him to heed zoning restrictions and scale back his plans to expand the MAC’s Kitchen Dog Theater. Because of the order, Albritton, one of Dallas’ top arts…

In a small, windowless meeting room at Fair Park’s Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, 20 people sit around an oval-shaped ring of tables and plan their strategy to make Dallas, recently rated the nation’s “best city for business” by Fortune magazine, a worker-friendly metropolis as well. The activists present,…

Washington Elementary is housed in an old beige brick building in a neighborhood near downtown Sherman, a blue-collar town of about 35,000 near the Oklahoma border. It’s in a part of the city where nearly every house needs a paint job, roofs sag, and the occasional worn sofa rests on…