Last summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put Dallas-based power generator Luminant on notice, warning the utility that its northeast Texas Big Brown and Martin Lake plants were in violation of the Clean Air Act. The company’s coal-fired plants, EPA contended, had been modified, resulting in a “significant” increase in…
Dan Patrick, a Republican state senator from Houston and Tea Party darling, has officially been in the lieutenant governor’s race for almost two months now. Patrick, like the other challengers vying for the seat, has positioned himself to the right of incumbent David Dewhurst, attacking him for being too moderate…
Irving’s leaders take exception to Jim Schutze’s allegory of Valley Ranch — and, by extension, the city as a whole — as the washed-up hag in the corner of a seedy bar, her sobs wreathed in cigarette smoke. They haven’t addressed it directly, but the narrative they’re spinning is starkly…
It’s not hard to find pit bull puppies for sale on Craigslist. The tricky part is finding a seller, like 38-year-old Bryant Everett, willing to make the trip from his home in Fort Worth with three of the pups in a crate in the back in hopes of getting $150…
Azmi Elqutob never had a chance to hand over the money. The 66-year-old was behind the register at his Smokie’s Food Store, his family’s Fort Worth bodega, when Frederick Jones rushed in with a 9 mm pistol and a bandana over his face and fired twice. Jones grabbed a fistful…
This week, the Plano City Council voted to build a new, $1 million outdoor skatepark. McKinney opened one earlier this year. Arlington has plans to build a dozen. And in Dallas there’s a tiny, cheaply built, prefab affair tucked away in a small neighborhood park seven miles east of downtown…
Minnie Graham, a 98-year-old great-great-grandmother, kept telling her family that people were hitting her at Garland’s Winters Park Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. When her loved ones found her eyes blackened and her arms bruised, they demanded answers. Graham, they were told, had fallen out of her wheelchair. Her granddaughters didn’t…
There’s no argument that Richard Lee Barrett has a drinking problem. When Grand Prairie police picked him up for drunken driving in July 2007, he already had one DWI offense on his record. A second conviction brought with it a year-long probation, which he proceeded to violate after three days…
In 2006, Plano police received a tip that a bookmaker there was illegally taking bets on pro and college sporting events. They began looking into the matter and had an undercover cop call the man up and put in one wager, then another. In relatively short order, Plano PD had…
The professional buzz kills at the Centers for Disease Control have no shortage of sobering alcohol statistics to aid their campaign against excessive drinking: 14,000 people die each year in drunk-driving crashes; 36,000 are killed by alcohol-related liver disease, hypertension, and other chronic illnesses; and another 5,500 are killed in…
Wendy Davis still hasn’t declared whether or not she plans to run for Governor. If she does, she’ll face a formidable challenge in Attorney General Greg Abbott, Rick Perry’s all-but-anointed successor. If she doesn’t, she faces a challenge that’s almost as formidable, winning re-election in a Republican-leaning district where she…
Bad news from Eat the Yard, the army veterans-turned-organic local gardeners who were on our cover a few weeks ago: they think that four of their seven gardens got hit with the toxic insecticides the city has been spraying to kill West Nile-infected mosquitoes. To be safe, Eat the Yard…
Here’s how The Dallas Morning News’ Gromer Jeffers Jr. introduced the new candidate for North Texas’ state House District 102 in a blog post this afternoon: Retired Army Capt. Samuel Brown announced Wednesday that he’s seeking the GOP nomination to replace Stefani Carter in the Texas House. And here’s how…
There was a time for Jason Halek when life was all luxury suites at Cowboys Stadium and showroom-fresh Hummers. Investors were pumping millions into his oil-and-gas start-up. Then everything, as it so often does when your business model revolves around misleading investors, sort of fell apart. The last few years…
We’ll never be able to pin down exactly what went down on Havenwood Lane on the night of May 4, when Fort Worth police mistakenly gunned down 72-year-old Jerry Waller at his home. Police say he was outside the garage; his family maintains that he was just a couple of…
It didn’t take a detective to follow the trail of dried blood to garage #15D, or to figure out that the stench coming from inside was from a rotting corpse. An employee of La Valencia apartments, a complex sandwiched between Stemmons and Walton Walker freeways just northwest of Love Field,…
Rhademes Solano’s plight first came to public attention in February, when he showed up at a public meeting in southern Dallas. Along with community activist Carlos Quintanilla, he protested the city’s plan to seize 23 acres he owns near the intersection of Intersection 45 and Great Trinity Forest Boulevard to…
In simpler times, video games and all that they had to offer were fully contained within a gray plastic cartridge. As a result, buying a used game required very little due diligence beyond a quick glance at the visible circuitry and making sure the game wasn’t terrible. The used gaming…
Alex Tanney completed more touchdown passes during his college career (157) than any quarterback in NCAA history, though you probably wouldn’t know it. Tanney spent his time as an undergrad in the obscurity of Division III, leading the Fighting Scots of Illinois’ tiny Monmouth College. Tanney is way more famous…
Five years after it was filed, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider trading suit against Mark Cuban is inching, slowly but inexorably, toward a showdown in court on September 30. Cuban, you’ll recall, is accused of illegally using confidential information when he dumped his Mamma.com stock just before the company’s…
Eventually, once the budget picture is a bit sunnier, the town of White Settlement is going to anchor Veterans Park with a grand memorial wall honoring the country’s soldiers. For now, that task is borne by a squat gray monument just south of the pond and a few hundred feet…
You can almost pinpoint the exact moment Rudolph Casillas realized he wasn’t going to get the cash. The note (“Give me all the money I have a gun”) and firearm (actually a pellet gun purchased a few minutes before, but no one had to know that) seemed to work well…
