The black rhino is teetering on the edge of extinction, and it has been for some time. Their numbers have dropped precipitously over the past several decades, dwindling from several hundred thousand a century ago to a couple thousand a decade ago, partly from habitat loss but mostly from poachers…
The flier after the jump is for a fundraiser to benefit Railroad Commission of Texas Chair Barry Smitherman, who is vying to replace Greg Abbott as our next state attorney general. We point this out not because it is illegal or in any way surprising, but because it is legal…
The Motel 6 Fair Park is the type of place certain southern Dallas pastors fear will be neglected by app-based vehicle-for-hire services like Uber. It’s south of Interstate 30, offers weekly rates and is right next to a Furr’s cafeteria, which suggests a paucity of the affluent smartphone addicts such…
With the pace of modern life being what it is, it’s become all but impossible to find time for a leisurely sit-down meal or an old-fashioned holdup-style heist. Thank goodness then for the fast-food drive-thru, which offers fast, convenient service to on-the-go burger lovers and time-pressed armed robbers alike. Now,…
The stakes in the two-day trial over Planned Parenthood’s challenge to Texas’ new abortion restrictions, which kicked off yesterday in Austin, are rather low. Whatever decision U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel hands down will be appealed to the 5th Circuit, then the Supreme Court, leaving the law in constitutional limbo…
In defense of the teens in the above video, there’s not much to do in Plano post-midnight on a Friday. Certainly, though, they could have picked a less appalling target for their petty vandalism than an American flag belonging to a Vietnam vet. Garden gnomes spring to mind. “They ran…
The Aledo High School Bearcats didn’t want to score 91 points over Fort Worth Western Hills on Friday night, nor did they intend to hold their opponent completely scoreless. When the team glanced at the scoreboard as time expired and discovered they’d done both those things, the pangs of remorse…
KIPP Destiny Elementary opened with little fanfare this August in a converted Mervyn’s storefront across from Southwest Center Mall in Red Bird. The national charter school network, which already operates the KIPP Truth Academy middle school a few miles away, is saving that for Wednesday. That’s when tennis great Andre…
Chris Arnold has been uncharacteristically quiet. A usually prolific tweeter his account has been dormant for 10 days, and his voice has been missing from The GBag Nation, the midday show he co-hosts on 105.3 The Fan. CBS Radio hasn’t commented publicly on Arnold’s absence, but it’s no accident that…
They don’t last long these days in the media relations office at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. First, longtime public information director Michelle Lyons resigned last year after being demoted and accused of fudging her time sheets. This was after she responded to a media request from a blog…
Interim Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez is now acknowledging what’s been clear to everyone else for two months: City Hall really stepped in it with its Uber crackdown. “I made a mistake. Please accept my apology,” he wrote this morning in a memo to the City Council. “I regret the…
The Dallas Mavericks, with the advent of in-game GPS devices that tracks a player’s every twitch and movement, are already gleaning the last scraps of data available to measure on-court performance. Now it’s onto the next frontier: watching players while they sleep. The term of art that’s been coined for…
Uber, thanks in no small part to Dallas’ reactionary, lobbyist-led crackdown, has been getting a lot of love in recent weeks. Uber’s convenient, fast, chic, and fits nicely into the role of a dashingly handsome David taking on Yellow Cab’s Goliath. If this Uber love has geographic center, it’s in…
Less than two weeks after winning the fight to have DART offer domestic partner benefits, Resource Center Dallas is shifting its focus on a new target: the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The bank, one of dozen independently run regional reserve banks, does not currently include transgender protections in its…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown announced this afternoon he has ordered aggravated assault charges against 52-year-old Bobby Gerald Bennett to be dropped. Bennett is the mentally ill man shot on Monday by Dallas police officer Cardan Spencer. In an affidavit, DPD said that Bennett had approached officers with his knife…
Well, looks like we get another fun off-season in Arlington! Yay! Nolan Ryan has resigned/retired from the Rangers effective October 31, and everyone has their thoughts on why this happened and what it means. I am one of those people. Why did it happen? One, some, all, or none of…
More plaintiffs are lining up to take a crack at Chesapeake Energy, this time joined by the city of Fort Worth. It’s the second major North Texas city to file suit against the first player to make a big splash extracting natural gas from the Barnett Shale. Arlington brought its…
Richard Keiper has built a life in Boyd, Texas. The Facebook photos posted by his wife show him at birthday parties and family gatherings often cradling his granddaughter with the awkward caution of someone not quite accustomed to caring for a creature so small. The 67-year-old doesn’t look the part…
The Los Angeles Times put out an article today suggesting the U.S. might be better off swapping Texas for England if it wanted to avoid the particular Texas brand of Republicans shutting everything down for their own special reasons. While as a resident of Texas I cannot possibly approve of…
In the wake of last month’s hunt for a serial rapist targeting South Dallas, the smart money said that the first lawsuit would come from Alan Mason, the mild-mannered insurance salesman whose name and picture were plastered across the media after he was mistakenly identified by police as a “person…
When Shannon Herrin’s teenage son found his mom dead in her garage in August, Mineral Wells police were perplexed. There was no evidence of murder — no trauma, no signs of a struggle, no one with any apparent reason to want her dead — and yet there was the indisputable…
In a new book that’s been making the rounds this week, federal appeals court judge Richard Posner expresses regret for writing a 2007 opinion upholding Indiana’s tough voter ID statute, which he now describes as “a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than…
