In ’12, a parched Texas saw drought ease, but the cattle industry continues to reel from the hangover brought on by 2011, the driest year in its history. Meanwhile, oil! Dear Lord, he sent us another boom. The Dallas Fed describes what 2012 held for these iconic Lone Star pursuits…
One after the other, Cherokee County Sheriff’s deputies wearing straw cowboy hats dragged bearded, zip-cuffed young men toward a waiting van. Strands of snot and spit set flowing by doses of pepper spray dangled from their bowed heads. A company man wearing a hardhat trailed them, recording a video of…
On the night of December 16, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi, India was walking home from watching Life of Pi with a male friend. They paid 36 cents to board one of the private buses that serves as public transportation in India’s capital. The crew and passengers, six in…
On November 9 at a downtown Dallas law office, some 153,000 Internet domain names hit the auction block. The winning bidder was an entity known as Trans, Ltd., which put down $5.2 million and scooped up the names over the objections of their previous owner, Ondova, LLC. That auction never…
With the shiny new session of the Texas Legislature a mere six days away, your lawmakers are gearing up to debate some important issues, like handsy TSA agents and whether we should drug-test people who have the audacity to file for emergency welfare relief. But, as ever, some legislators are…
Even after the Cowboys capped off another disappointingly mediocre season on Sunday, there were some things to be thankful for. The team stayed in the playoff chase and kept things entertaining until the very end with an impressive string of come-from-behind victories. Dez Bryant exorcised his demons and began to…
On New Year’s Eve, nine minutes before the ball dropped on Times Square, police arrived at the Adolphus Hotel, Room 1809, to find the body of 28-year-old Patric Turner. It’s not clear from the police report if there were other people in the room, or drugs or alcohol, just that…
Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons knows well that money, particularly when doled out in large quantities to candidates and political action committees, is the grease that keeps our democracy running smoothly. So it was only natural that, when it came time for the Texas legislature to consider a measure that would…
The writing’s been on the wall, one supposes, since KKDA-AM, a.k.a. Soul 73, abruptly laid off Bobby Patterson and most of the rest of its on-air staff, but the terse announcement posted to the station’s website yesterday still comes as a shock: “Soul 730 KKDA is no longer broadcasting on…
An early-morning police standoff that brought out the SWAT team and shut down DART’s Westmoreland Station is now officially over: RT @keatonfoxnbc5: #BREAKING: Dallas Sheriff’s Office confirms suspect took his own life in this standoff in Oak Cliff.— NBC DFW (@NBCDFW) January 2, 2013…
We return to the story of Danny Cantu, the middle-aged diesel mechanic who was preparing a sandwich in his South Dallas kitchen in 2010 when a flash-bang grenade punched through the backdoor. Dallas Police streamed into his home and, depending on whose account you buy, Cantu’s face somehow got pulverized…
For those of you who have been following the ongoing, never-ending, multi-court battle of Texas vs. Planned Parenthood, we’ll make this quick: Planned Parenthood is out of the Texas Women’s Health Program. Again. For now. Now, let’s all heave a huge collective sigh and revisit the longer version of the…
If you’re in Fort Worth and you head down Loop 820 until you’re just about in North Richland Hills, you’ll find a little place called Redneck Heaven. The name is a self-conscious, somewhat tongue-in-cheek reappropriation of a term often used to disparage white Southerners — on the bar’s website, you’ll…
Back in November, Hurst 17-year-old Andrew Rodriguez was being arrested by Officer M. Jimenez on an outstanding trespassing warrant. Rodriguez was lying on the ground with his hands behind his back when another officer, Disraeli Arnold, decided to assist with the arrest. Arnold did that by taking a flying leap…
Man. How could it have ended any other way? It was such a familiar outcome that looking back on it seems disgustingly routine. Just when you put your tiny heart into hoping for this team to do well, it gets crushed as it has so many, many times before. One…
In another blow to the unions-killed-the-Twinkie-thereby-depriving-future-generations-of-a-real-American-childhood storyline — if that wasn’t already enough of a laughable oversimplification — the Morning News is reporting that Hostess was actually preparing for liquidation more than a year before workers with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union went on strike…
Last month, in one of the more bizarre stories to emerge from the Dallas Police Department in recent years, it came to light that the officer in charge burglary and theft detectives in the southwest and northwest patrol units, Lt. Regina Smith was moonlighting as a rapper using the handle…
At the very beginning of her column today on Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones, Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins sets the scene, and she sets it well. The Dallas Cowboys’ home locker room after a game is suffused by a bright halo of light from a wall of TV cameras…
Back in May, Houston attorney Robert Painter got a panicked dispatch from the president of Mongolia: A 70 million-year-old Tyranosaurus bataar skeleton that had been illegally smuggled from the country was about to hit the auction block, and the sale must be stopped. Painter leaped into action. He rushed to…
In an exercise in states’ rights fetishization, the Texas Legislature tasked Attorney General Greg Abbott with figuring out whether international organizations are usurping Lone Star sovereignty. If you’ll recall, there was an ugly scene leading up to the 2012 presidential election, wherein Abbott, chest out-thrust in his best chickenhawk approximation,…
George H.W. Bush, the country’s 41st president, has been in a Houston hospital for more than a month now, undergoing treatment for complications from a serious case of bronchitis. The 88-year-old was checked into intensive care on Wednesday “following a series of setbacks, including a persistent fever.” It was during…
The holidays can do strange things to people. Case in point: around 2:40 this morning, police were called to the 4000 block of Trinity Mills Road in North Dallas, where, per the police report, callers had reported that two white males were walking in a westerly direction whilst “throwing objects…
