Dallas County Sheriff’s Deputy Latorrez Jones gently smooths his dog Hawk’s ears and chest fur. Hawk’s jaws lock firmly on the thick burlap arm guard wrapped around Deputy Kevin Ross’ arm. As Ross pulls back, simulating an attempt to escape, Hawk’s grip holds steady. He’s been trained to bite once,…
Given the anti-choice laws being passed around the rest of the country — in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri and elsewhere — there’s a temptation for abortion rights supporters in Texas to take a deep breath. The 2019 edition of the Texas Legislature didn’t pass a total ban on abortion. Neither…
Ask 10 Rangers fans about Ian Kinsler, who retired last week after a decade-plus in Major League Baseball, and you’ll get 10 different answers. Most of them will be bad, something about his lack of hustle maybe or his propensity for popping up. Eventually, someone will bring up his comments…
It was quite a year for the Dallas police. The city recorded 200 murders, the most in over a decade. The governor sent state troopers to South Dallas amid complaints that the city’s police department is understaffed, drawing accusations of overpolicing from local community leaders. Not to mention the conviction…
Being a Dallas sports fan in 2019 is about hope. The good kind that comes from the city’s best-ever crop of young athletes and the bad kind that leads you down the path to still, after all these years, being disappointed by the Cowboys. One of these days, one of…
The headline was jarring: “Trump has veered dangerously from the conservative legacy of protecting our air, water and natural resources.” Conservative legacy? Veered? I must have missed something. I read the rest carefully. Trammell S. Crow, a wealthy environmental and education philanthropist who lives in Dallas, said in an op-ed…
Sunlight seeps into the small commercial kitchen in the Muslim American Society’s Islamic Center as Maissa Alkhadir stirs a steaming pot of rice and potatoes. Reaching to a shelf above the stove, she grabs a plastic canister of dried spices and sprinkles some into the pot. Once it’s done, she…
Among a few other things, 2019 in North Texas was the year of the crime story. On a weekly basis, cops, crime and courts took center stage, dominating local news, Dallas’ municipal elections and conversation. As the calendar turns over to 2020, let’s take a look at the stories to…
Aaron Dean, the former Fort Worth police officer who shot and killed a black woman in her home, was indicted by a grand jury for murder on Friday morning. Atatiana Jefferson, 28, was playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew in October when a neighbor called a non-emergency police hotline…
Going green just got a little bit easier for Dallas residents. This week, a non-profit dedicated to helping homeowners convert to solar electricity launched a Dallas operation.
You probably don’t need reminding, but we’ve been here before. A talented but underperforming Cowboys roster led by Jason Garrett has arrived at a mid- to late-December crossroads. Their record isn’t great, but a single win will get them into the NFL playoffs, a place where strange and stranger things…
Texas prosecutors aren’t giving juries the opportunity to put people to death and, even when they do, jurors aren’t going for it. Those are the big takeaways from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s annual roundup of Texas’ death row development. Only nine of the 21 executions scheduled…
A Dallas County grand jury has indicted former Dallas City Council member Kevin Felder. Felder is charged with failure to stop and render aid, a third-degree felony, according to county records. Felder was arrested in February after an altercation with an 18 year old riding a scooter in South Dallas…
There is one end-of-year list that’s easier to put together than the rest. When it comes to identifying the most read news stories of the year, there’s no hemming or hawing, no debate in the office or even any critical thinking necessary. The decisions about what goes on this list…
A national civil rights group is asking a Texas court to rule against an anti-affirmative action organization that’s seeking to have the University of Texas’ admissions policy declared unlawful. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a Washington-based nonprofit, filed a petition in intervention last week in Students for…
I learned this week in a piece by Shawn Shinneman at D Magazine that the city of Dallas is paying lawyers to sue the Texas Attorney General in district court in Austin to get out of turning over Mayor Eric Johnson’s daily calendar. Let me just run that by you…
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, as everyone scrambled to figure out what a Donald Trump presidency would look like in reality rather than in their worst nightmares or wildest dreams, one thing no one could have predicted was the rise of a certain East Texas congressman. Louie Gohmert,…
The Dallas County Commissioner’s Court unanimously voted in favor of Dallas County continuing to be a place of initial resettlement for refugees. The resolution follows similar support from the city of Dallas and Fort Worth.
When I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times last week by William H. Webster (the only person ever to have been director of both the FBI and then the CIA), I wanted to believe every word, because essentially he was calling President Donald Trump an idiot, which…
Several hundred people rallied outside of Rep. Colin Allred’s offices in Richardson on Tuesday evening in support of the congressman’s planned vote for impeachment. For more than an hour, they chanted anti-Trump slogans and waved signs at passing cars. Some drivers sped off, others laid on their horns in solidarity…
Holiday gift shopping often entails walking the tightrope between creativity and desperation and, occasionally, falling off into one or the other. Companies, too, seem to enjoy threading the thin line in hopes of continuing to sustain our interest long enough that we pony up and buy whatever they’re peddling this…
In a broad sense, this is all Beto O’Rourke’s fault. If the former U.S. representative had just listened — to activists, party insiders, polls or basically anyone not living in his own head — and run for U.S. Senate rather that president, Texas Democrats would already be in general election…
