In 2006, with the controversy over its ultimately successful bid to house the Bush Presidential Center very much brewing, SMU set to work establishing the Embrey Human Rights Program. It was a pioneering effort that aimed to raise awareness of global social justice issues and perhaps inspire students to pursue…
By most measures, the Stone Bridge at Bear Creek in Euless is a typical mid-priced suburban apartment complex. There’s covered parking and a couple of swimming pools. What little green space there is is well-manicured. The building facades are done in a bland but tasteful red brick. To spot the…
Daren Marcus Bell was visiting his cousin in Arlington on January 17, 2012, when he found a stray pit bull. He was looking for a dog and decided to keep it, a fact he didn’t mention to his girlfriend until she arrived to pick him up. She was not quite…
Jaime Moreno-Gutierrez and Roberto Moreno-Gutierrez just wanted to reduce their carbon footprint. Or maybe they just wanted to save on gas costs. Either way, they sold their gas-guzzling 2004 GMC Envoy and set off from their home in Killeen on March 31, 2011, and headed for Plano, where a dealership…
Sometime last month, Domingo Garcia launched his bid to become the next president of LULAC, the nationwide Latino civil rights advocacy organization. He started a campaign page on Facebook on March 8 and sent an open letter to the group’s members at about the same time. “Today LULAC is at…
The ongoing legal war of many fronts among Dallas-based Luminant, the state of Texas, the EPA and environmentalists is mostly a war of incremental victories.This week, EPA arose victorious. Next month or year? Anybody’s guess. Just know that this time, nobody (except the EPA) is totally happy with the ruling…
From time to time, we’ve been bringing you updates on the single greatest lawsuit ever filed in Dallas County: the Liberty County couple suing “Angel,” a self-proclaimed psychic (as if there’s any other kind) and a host of media outlets over reports they had a bunch of bodies buried at…
Halid Amer played a small but significant role in the collapse of the housing market late last decade. He had help, to be sure, from slews of unqualified borrowers, overleveraged banks, absurdly loose credit and free-handed monetary policy, but it was the actions of Amer and people like him that…
During six years with Tom Thumb, Shaun Garcia says he worked hard, rose up the ranks and earned a reputation as someone who could turn struggling, theft-plagued stores around. He started as a stocker at the Lewisville store then quickly earned a series of promotions, first to assistant night manager,…
Maybe you’re not a Yiddish speaker, but you need a handy illustration of the concept of “chutzpah.” In Spanish: cojones. Or in English, if you insist: king-sized brass balls. If you need a real-world demonstration of this cross-cultural concept, you have only to look at how your state-level bureaucrats have…
Over the past several years, in shopping malls and storefronts across the country, entrepreneurs have begun operating what are called sweepstakes parlors. They look and smell like miniature casinos, and they’re lined with terminals featuring electronic games that bear an uncanny resemblance to slot machines, video poker and other games…
Russell Weinstein was waiting on a train at Arapaho Center DART station one afternoon last February, en route to the first day of a new job, when he was caught in the middle of a shootout between police and and a gun-wielding bus passenger. Weinstein was relatively lucky. Another bystander…
Back in January, a grand jury declined to indict 19-year-old Ryan Romo, the former Highland Park High School student accused of rape by a younger classmate. The girl alleged that Romo raped her in the back seat of his car following an October Ghostland Observatory concert at the Palladium Ballroom…
After leaving the Mavericks as the club’s all-time leading scorer, pre-Dirk of course, Rolando Blackman has bounced around a bit. He spent a couple of seasons with the Knicks and a couple more playing in Europe before finally retiring to the sidelines. Some of those sidelines were at the American…
Greg Abbott’s acting strangely. It wasn’t even two weeks ago that the Attorney General seemed to have given up his day job suing the Obama administration and just started trolling liberals full-time. But then, in a turn that was completely unexpected, Abbott was seized by an bout of reasonableness The…
Serving people with lawsuits or divorce papers can be a tricky business. Maybe they’ve moved. Maybe they haven’t left much of a paper trail. Maybe they just don’t want to be found. Chances are slim, after all, that they’ll be delighted with what the process server brings them. But this…
Dear Deion: There was a time when your Prime Time swagger was endearing. Back when you were still effortlessly shutting down opposing receivers as a Hall of Fame defensive back, your brash self-confidence, unfiltered by any hint of superego, played as charming. You’ve also proven yourself a passable used car…
You only thought you’d heard the last of the nightmarish Carnival cruise-turned-floating toilet ride that gripped the global media for days last month and exhausted every imaginable “poop deck” pun. But no. In Dallas federal court today, 17 Texans who were aboard that ill-fated voyage have filed suit against Carnival…
CBS 11’s Ginger Allen broke the story last July: Gracie Robinson, a premature infant born in a Dawson State Jail toilet after guards allegedly refused medical treatment while her mother was in labor, died at four days old. It was one of a string of deaths tied to inadequate medical…
The now-five-year old insider-trading beef against mercurial Dallas Mavs owner Mark Cuban isn’t going away anytime soon. Chief Judge Sidney Fitzwater rejected Tuesday a motion to dismiss the federal case against him, which alleges Cuban dumped his stock in an Internet search engine after getting tipped off by the CEO…
Curiously absent from the otherwise thorough Wikipedia page on Scott K. Ginsburg, the Dallas-based digital media entrepreneur and founder of Boardwalk Auto Group, is any mention of insider trading judgment the SEC won against him in 2002 for illegally passing non-public information on EZ Communications, Inc., a radio conglomerate, to…
The District Attorney’s office very excitedly announced today that a federal judge found no merit in Al Hill III’s allegations of misconduct against Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins. The allegations stem from a dispute Hill had concerning legal fees he owed his former attorney Lisa Blue, a prominent Dallas lawyer…
