Vote-by-mail for all Texans who want it is back on after a U.S. District Court Judge ruled Tuesday night that fear of the coronavirus is reason enough to ask for an absentee ballot. The Texas Attorney General’s Office and plaintiffs including the Texas Democratic Party have gone back and forth…
As Texas eased another round of coronavirus restrictions Monday, people across the Dallas-Fort Worth area — some of them, at least — headed to the gym. Gyms and fitness centers were allowed to reopen Monday with a number of precautions in place, including operating only at 25% occupancy, keeping at least 6 feet of…
Dallas County officials are reporting 14 new COVID-19 related deaths Tuesday, the largest single-day death total in the county since the pandemic began. Dr. Philip Huang, the head of Dallas County Health and Human Services, told the Dallas County Commissioners Court Tuesday morning that the county would be making the…
Texas has been mixing results from test results for active COVID-19 infections with numbers from another test for antibodies that shows whether those tested had the disease anytime in the past, according to a news report. The result is further muddying of the flood of numbers used to measure how…
Daycare centers, bars, professional sports and summer camps are the headliners of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s newly announced plans to continuing reopening the state as it navigates its way through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Childcare facilities and personal care businesses like massage parlors and tattoo shops can open immediately. Bars…
Mail-in voting, at least for the time being, is once again limited to Texans over the age of 65, those with physical disabilities or illnesses and those who will be out of the county in which they are registered to vote for the duration of early voting and election day…
Eduardo Flores was looking forward to next. He was looking forward to getting his cap and gown and sitting in a roomful of his friends, hearing his name called, walking across the stage and getting his diploma. He was looking forward to having proud family members take his picture. Flores,…
Let’s take a moment, as we start week 39 or so of COVID-related quarantine, to mourn the brain power we’ve collectively wasted worrying, hoping and strategizing about the potential return of sports. It turns out the key to getting baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer back on our TVs and back…
Refugees in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and the organizations that work with them worry that the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it’s causing will make life harder for an already-vulnerable group of people. “My parents’ work is no longer safe, and they don’t have many hours to work,” says…
Thanks to the design of the American healthcare system and Texas’ failure to expand access to Medicaid, the results of a new Kaiser Family Foundation study into COVID-19’s effects on access to health insurance aren’t surprising. It doesn’t make them any less of a crisis or Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s…
Wednesday’s twist in Texas’ ongoing, coronavirus-inspired battle over mail-in voting was Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton attempting to enlist the help of the Texas Supreme Court to stop counties who want to expand ballot access. In Thursday’s turn in the same sage, a state appeals court affirmed that, during the…
Texas’ mandatory end-of-year tests are canceled this year, but state education officials have come up with a way for parents to make their kids take them anyway. The Texas Education Agency is rolling out an optional online end-of-year test that school districts and parents across the state can use to…
The tug-of-war between Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins and Texas’ state leadership is getting rougher. Monday, Jenkins introduced the county’s own system for determining when it’s safe for residents to get back to their daily lives, thumbing his nose at Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is opening up the state…
As if things weren’t bad enough, get ready to have some intense Global War on Terror flashbacks. Monday afternoon, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins unveiled the county’s new, color-coded COVID-19 threat level chart. It’s a look, and a format, that should be familiar to anyone who remembers the days and…
Dallas County reported 253 additional cases of the novel coronavirus on Monday, tying its single-day record for new confirmed cases of the disease. The county also reported two new coronavirus-related deaths. Both people died at long-term care facilities where they were residents. The first, a woman in her 60s, lived…
There may be no crying in baseball, but a lot of us are getting close to tears without it. May isn’t the same without the building, or fading, hope of a nascent season, and there is growing uncertainty about whether the summer, or fall, will be anything close to normal…
During normal times, when schools aren’t shut down, Patricia Tamayo’s office is just off a busy hallway at O.D. Wyatt High School in Fort Worth. It could get noisy, said Tamayo, the school’s junior class counselor, but the location helped her build relationships with students. She could stand in the…
The Mavericks may be on indefinite hiatus, but Mark Cuban, the team’s owner, is still finding interesting ways to make news during the coronavirus pandemic. Cuban’s still paying the Mavericks’ hourly employees, even though the American Airlines Center’s empty. He’s been one of the leading voices on how the NBA…
Gov. Greg Abbott modified his executive order outlining the state’s coronavirus pandemic response to bar counties from jailing those who violate those orders. The move comes a day after a Dallas County judge ordered Shelley Luther, the owner of a North Dallas hair salon, jailed for seven days after she…
Tuesday afternoon, Dallas County Civil District Court Judge Eric Moye sent Shelley Luther to jail for seven days. Despite the paltry sentence, Luther’s case drew national attention because, over the past couple of weeks, she’s become a patron saint for the movement to free Texas from novel coronavirus-inspired restrictions. Luther…
There’s an idea that’s been going around among some of Dallas’ conservative politicians over the last month or so that goes something like this: If all flattening the curve does is spread the number of COVID-19 cases over a longer time period, thereby ensuring that the healthcare system isn’t overrun, and…
This is what drives me crazy about a lot of the public discourse on coronavirus. When did people get the idea that science is a democracy? For the last many weeks I have been writing about the coronavirus pandemic, and, because everything that goes up online these days leaks out…
