Sanpha Sesay was asleep when he got the phone call, late on the night of July 18. As a reporter during the worst of Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s, Sesay had grown accustomed to tragic news at all hours—rebel advances into the capital city, massacred villages, mass amputations—but…
Even before their meeting last Thursday afternoon, City Plan Commissioners had decided to hold off voting on XTO Energy’s second application for a gas drilling site in Dallas — leaving time for the city council to figure out what to do with XTO’s first application, maybe even delaying that call…
Forty-seven years ago today, Temple Bowley was headed for a weekend getaway with his family when he found Dallas Police officer J.D. Tippit lying dead beside his cruiser at 10th Street and N. Patton Avenue in Oak Cliff. He used the radio in Tippit’s car to alert dispatch, then helped…
Fifteen years ago, the Pittsburgh Penguins had Jean-Claude Van Damme to keep them safe. In a few months, Cowboys Stadium and the rest of North Texas will have THOR, a one-stop shop for fighting crime and responding to any emergency that could arise during the Super Bowl. Built by Intrado,…
If you’re not sitting down here in the Council Chambers at City Hall right now, then you’re missing one of the fine ways to spend a Thursday afternoon in Dallas: sitting in on a meeting of the City Plan Commission. We’ve already covered student foot traffic across roads near schools,…
The Dallas Bar Association’s eighth annual Community Symposium for Justice in Education is ongoing today at the Belo Mansion, but a break for lunch offered a chance for Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Michael Hinojosa to share his thoughts on the state of things. The reason the district was in…
Of course you’ve heard that George W. Bush has a new book out in stores, and this morning, you couldn’t help but hear he was getting started building his new library, too. Onstage under a big tent on the Southern Methodist University campus, Bush was shifting excitedly from one foot…
Sitting in a white patio chair on the porch of her 86-year-old house Sunday afternoon, Yvette Laster can look directly across the street to the new Jubilee Park community center, the $6 million building named for Walt Humann and T. Boone Pickens that opened to great fanfare in September. For…
Back on October 21, you’ll recall that the City Plan Commission narrowly voted to deny XTO Energy’s application to set up gas drilling along Mountain Creek Lake. The City Council’s likely to have their final say sometime next month, but in the meantime, XTO’s gearing up for yet another day…
Over on Unfair Park, we’ve been covering this morning’s announcement that the city’s spending $1.3 million to rework two blocks of Lower Greenville Avenue with narrower streets, extra parking and extra flower planters and trees. (Check out the plans here.)But one property owner nearly overshadowed that news with their plans…
As you may have read here earlier, Angela Hunt and Pauline Medrano debuted their new plans for Lowest Greenville Avenue earlier today: a street-narrowing game-changer replacing two lanes of traffic with new parking spaces, trees and flower boxes to be implemented straightaway, at the low, low introductory price of $1.3…
In his two decades in law enforcement, Michael Meissner’s made the rounds of small Texas towns. From Crandall to Caddo Mills, he’s worked in 18 police departments in the last 20 years, according to a January story in The Dallas Morning News.As detailed there, and in a suit filed October…
Earlier this week, Robert wrote about state Rep. Eric Johnson’s October 28 letter to Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, in which Johnson wondered whether the district had exhausted all its options for building a new O.M. Roberts Elementary. Johnson also wondered, by the way, whether the DISD wouldn’t…
There’s a kid running around sucking the helium out of the red, white and blue centerpiece balloons here in the Palomar ballroom, and just like that, over the last hour or so, somebody’s let the air out of the party here.While the crowd’s still going hard for Boehner on the…
With a monster show of force, and a little help from the weather, Dallas County Republicans have made their presence known tonight, bringing Central Expressway and Mockingbird Lane to an absolute standstill pulling their Large Vehicles into the Hotel Palomar for their election night cash-bar bacchanal. We’ve heard from a…
I’m about to head over to the Palomar for the Republicans’ cash-bar shindig, while Sam’s pulling pay-as-you-go drinking duty at the AAC with the Dallas County Dems, and Ex-Intern Elliot’s eating free pizza with Stephen Broden in Uptown. But before the short pour on this long night (at least, for…
Just last month we got word of the McRib’s long-awaited return, beginning in a blessed few locations — trackable online with the McRib locator — and finally reaching its ribby fingers nationwide today, Election Day, appropriately enough. Whether or not you’re swayed by Mayor McCheese’s latest sex scandal, you may…
Gas drilling opponents from around North Texas rallied around director Josh Fox and his documentary Gasland Friday night at the Angelika, in support of local activists who’ve been fighting the first drilling proposals within Dallas’s city limits. Jim Schermbeck of Downwinders At Risk — who organized the screening — said…
With a mighty set of booms that echoed throughout downtown, Mayor Tom Leppert and his pastor Robert Jeffress made room for the opulent new face of First Baptist Dallas this morning, reducing four buildings to a heap of rubble at the foot of the old 120-year-old sanctuary. As a crowd…
Today’s the greatest day of the year around City of Ate headquarters, where most of us are decked out in costumes of varying degrees of good taste, reminding everyone else in the building why they’re sorry to have us here on the seventh floor. Best of all, it means this:…
Two weeks ago, I suggested that with the ASIS International security industry expo around — with a few million surveillance cameras lining a showroom full of lasers, booby traps bodyguards — the Dallas Convention Center was easily the safest place in town. At the time, though, I had no idea…
You can travel the world with Mary Ellen Mark. Through her lens, you’ll gain an intimate understanding of people you’d never dare approach on your own–acrobats in an Indian circus, teenage addicts and prostitutes in Seattle, Marlon Brando on the set of Apocalypse Now. In nearly half a century of…
