On January 1, Texas took over the Women’s Health Program, booted Planned Parenthood out and dyed the website several shades of Pepto Bismol pink. Despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, Health and Human Services Commission officials continue to claim there’ll be more than enough doctors for every…
American Airlines has had a rough go of it in recent years, what with its ongoing bankruptcy, a knock-down fight with its unions, and the general hatred of the flying public. Today, on the heels of its first quarterly profit in a while, American announced that it is turning over…
Conventional wisdom and mountains of anecdotal evidence suggest that old people are really, comically bad at doing things: driving; operating those newfangled pocket telegraph thingamajigs; gauging other people’s interest in the details of their goiter surgery; continence. We can go on. This is low-hanging fruit. But researchers at the University…
Last Thursday, an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency received a tip from someone in Brownsville, Texas: A Dallas-bound freight shipment described on shipping manifests as a collection of scales and metal plates actually seemed to contain something else entirely. The shipment was picked up that day from International Welding…
Six years ago, SMU religious studies professor Mark Chancey teamed with the Texas Freedom Network to produce a report on the Bible classes that were proliferating in the state’s public school classrooms. Chancey’s not-very-surprising finding was that these classes were not so much even-handed, academically rigorous surveys of the text…
Israel Keyes, an itinerant construction worker and Army vet, spent much of the past decade crisscrossing the United States, carrying out kidnappings, robbing banks, and murdering at least eight people, according to Time. His crime spree came to an end on March 13, when he was pulled over in Lufkin…
Two years ago, Joey Dauben was full-time small-town muckraker, publishing the Ellis County Observer and a string of other small papers, blending investigative stories with vicious gossip and baseless speculation at a rate of speed that thrilled and enraged his target audience. He focused intensely on child pornography and child…
In a midday press conference, President Obama laid out proposals to combat gun violence. You can read them in full here. In a nutshell, he called for background checks on all gun sales and bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Rick Perry wasted no time in issuing a proclamation…
Last year, Mark Cuban swooped in at the last minute to save the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade, thereby ensuring that the gutters of Lower Greenville would flow with beer and other liquids for a 33rd consecutive year. The parade had run into trouble as the event — and…
Smoking rates in the U.S. are plummeting. According to the CDC, there were three million fewer smokers in 2010 than in 2005. The factors contributing to this decline are are fairly obvious: improved educational efforts; cessation programs; higher cigarette taxes; tighter state and local anti-smoking laws; and a growing stigma…
We’ve long wondered why EPA backed off of a lawsuit against Range Resources, the driller accused of contaminating a Parker County man’s water well with natural gas and levels of benzene, a carcinogen, above safe drinking water standards. It issued an endangerment order against the company in December 2010 –…
At 5:30 yesterday afternoon, two dogs attacked 29-year-old Jermaine Jones as he walked down Copeland Street, a few blocks southeast of Fair Park. Jones swung at one of the dogs, a gray pit bull, but missed. The other dog, a brown-and-white mutt, then moved in for the kill, biting Jones…
A lot has happened to Barrett Brown since heavily armed federal agents raided his Dallas apartment and threw him in jail: The Anonymous-affiliated hacktivist was indicted on charges of threatening an FBI agent via loopy YouTube rant, then doxing said agent by publishing his personal information on the Internet; his…
Yesterday was the deadline for state and local candidates to report their fundraising totals for the last six months of 2012, which meant a flurry of last-minute clicks on the City Secretary’s website. The reported figures first real glimpse at candidates’ fundraising prowess and a suggestion of which candidates are…
On the morning of September 6, in what no doubt seemed like a wonderful idea at the time, Kenneth Smith, Jr. called police at Philadelphia International Airport and told them a passenger was carrying drugs onto a Dallas-bound flight. When it became clear that the call-taker wasn’t taking his tip…
Irma Grazdan and her two dogs, Binky the chihuahua and Boomer the Jack Russell terrier, checked into the Warwick Melrose the day before Thanksgiving. She was in town from Houston to visit family and had decided to stay at the Oak Lawn hotel in part because of its pet-friendliness. Fox…
Gerry Cauley, the chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the national, industry-funded grid-integrity watchdog, is pretty worried about Texas. Power-reserve margins here have slipped below the levels recommended to meet peak demand, and future projections show it will only get worse. What’s more, he says in a…
Update at 12:29 p.m.: The Morning News Tanya Eiserer reports that Silva has confessed to the murder, telling police that, “I killed him because he put a flower on my door and tonight he had on a red hat so I decided I was going to kill him.” Original post:…
It seems like only yesterday that erstwhile DISD communications chief Jennifer Sprague blew into town alongside new superintendent Mike Miles. With a $185,000 a year salary, the 31-year-old Sprague’s name quickly became a synonym for “overpaid and under-qualified,” and after about six less-than-spectacular months on the job, she quietly left…
Nearly two years ago, the City Council approved a scaled down version of the Margaret McDermott Bridge, the second of the signature Santiago Calatrava-designed spans across the Trinity River. That was accompanied by a promise by City Manager Mary Suhm that no city funds would be used for the project,…
Over much of the past year, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and local law enforcement agencies have been carrying out the largest offensive against pill mills Texas has ever seen. Dubbed “Operation King of the Pill,” the effort involves dozens of officers swarming medical offices suspected of illegally distributing addictive…
Domestic violence killings were on the rise in Dallas last year, which might be one reason why Mayor Mike Rawlings called a presser Monday afternoon. Another could be the fact that exactly a month has passed since a deeply troubled young man slaughtered 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut, most of…
