Pop quiz: Which presidential candidate, whose name will appear on the ballot in all 50 states, paid his way through college as a door-to-door handyman? Which one earned the nickname “Governor Veto” by rejecting more than 750 bills passed by his state’s legislature? Which one competed in a re-enactment of…
On paper, Allen Chiu seemed to be a very big Nordstrom fan. Over the course of 22 months starting in January 2010, the Dallasite and his brother Andrew of California ordered more than $23 million of merchandise through the upscale department store’s website. That won’t go as far at Nordstrom…
Last week, Superintendent Mike Miles proposed giving teachers $750 in incentive pay for the coming school year. “Last year, we asked the teachers for a lot,” Miles said, per the Morning News. “We asked the teachers to extend the number of minutes that they are teaching, and to increase the…
It happens, on average, 12 times per year in the United States: some lucky woman gives birth to five children, not spacing them comfortably over the course of several years but getting them out all at once. It happened in the span of five minutes in Dallas on Thursday, when…
It didn’t take long after the news came out for Stonelake Capital Partners to abandon an attempt to transform the short stub of La Vista Drive between Skillman and Live Oak in Lakewood into a pedestrian mall. Neighbors, it turns out, were none too happy with the proposal. Pat Carr,…
If you saw cascading streaks in the sky this weekend: don’t panic. It wasn’t the beginning of a Spielberg film. It was just the annual Perseid meteor shower sending space rocks through Earth’s atmosphere. Mike Mezeul, who you may remember from such sites as this one, was poised about five…
Dallas County escalated its war on mosquitoes today, with County Judge Clay Jenkins declaring a state of emergency and requesting that five planes be made available from the Texas Department of Emergency Management in order to begin spraying pesticide aerially over North Dallas and the Park Cities. The outbreak of…
On the Dallas Police Department’s Facebook page this afternoon, Chief David Brown announced in a lengthy post measures to “positively impact officer safety and improve public trust and confidence.” The announcement comes in the wake of the July 24 shooting death of James Harper and a spate of other officer-involved…
In early June, Governor Rick Perry was quick to announce that no state of his would be taking any of that tyrannical federal money to expand Medicaid coverage. Yet court documents filed by outgoing Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Suehs claim that the state’s new, Planned Parenthood-free Women’s Health…
Mitt Romney did himself no favors in Iowa when a spokesman told the Des Moines Register the candidate would “allow the wind credit to expire, end the stimulus boondoggles and create a level playing field on which all sources of energy can compete on their merits.” In Iowa and much…
NPR ran a story on Wednesday about David Barton, the Aledo-based pseudo-historian who has built a career arguing that America was established on Christian principles. It found that his claims aren’t particularly hard to debunk. For one, Barton has only a bachelor’s in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, with…
At the beginning of the year, the SPCA moved out of its 40-year-old digs on Riverfront Boulevard and into a shiny new facility off I-30 and Hampton Road. The move served two purposes: For one, the SPCA had outgrown the outdated Dealey Animal Care Center and needed a larger, more…
At the corner of Corinth Street and Park Avenue, in a neighborhood of rundown homes and produce houses a stone’s throw from Heritage Village, is the old bakery Herschel Weisfeld bought 15 years ago to convert into a live-work space for artists. The apartment units are in the back and…
For four days last October, the Magnablend chemical plant along Highway 237 in Waxahachie burned. A flammable gas cloud had formed during the blending process and had been ignited by a spark of unknown origin. As the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality determined, “It appears that the incident could have…
Last we checked, the downtown Omni is doing pretty well. Better than expected, as a matter of fact, as it finishes its first season this week after hosting conventions for such groups as the American Chemical Society, the American Society for Microbiology, salsa-swilling library scientists and presumably some non-scientists as…
The announcement that Energy Future Holdings, the biggest generator of electricity in Texas, is going to issue $750 million in debt probably could have been timed better. Earlier this week, the company announced it was going to terminate the pensions of about a third of its workforce by the end…
Just south of Dallas along Highway 67 in Midlothian is perhaps the country’s largest concentration of cement plants. TXI, Holcim, and Ash Grove all operate facilities within a couple of miles of each other, and the emissions they pump into the air tend to waft over Dallas when the winds…
Update on Aug. 10: Got an email response from Nalini Samuel, who works in Prabhakar’s office. Haven’t been served yet. Would love to comment- completely untrue- shakedown to get money. Ask her about her criminal record- Dr. Prabhakar is pro life. Original post: Christina Garcia began working as an $11-per-hour…
Speaking of pork, the nonprofit, one might say PETA-like, organization Mercy For Animals, is none to happy with where Walmart gets theirs. Which at least partially explains why the group plans to have a caged, bloody pig at the Walmart Neighborhood Market at Central and Hall Street this morning at…
A few months back, the Susan G. Komen For the Cure, the Dallas-based, Nancy Brinker-founded organization that has single-handedly made breast cancer a cause celeb, thrust itself squarely in the middle of the abortion debate when it announced plans to cut funding from Planned Parenthood. Brinker walked the decision back,…
Bobby Ruffin, Jr. was only 14 when a recruiter from Ashford University called. The Birmingham, Michigan, boy thought he’d clicked on a link promising help finding money for college. It was actually just a lead generator for the for-profit, online school’s sales staff. At the time, Bobby was an A…
The Texas Education Agency released its Adequate Yearly Progress report for 2012 a bit ago, and DISD and about three-quarters of its individual campuses missed the mark, just as they did last year, and the year before, and the year before. Much of that can be attributed to tougher standards…
