Texas Republicans have been complaining loudly since the Supreme Court decided that the Affordable Care Act passed constitutional muster. The law is a huge overreach by the federal government, it’s a “stomach-punch” to the economy, Obama is a socialist, etc. etc. There’s even quite serious talk about refusing a Medicaid…
I have a Google Alert set up for Mike Miles, e.g. DISD’s new superintendent, so that whenever his name is mentioned on the Interwebs, I get an email. The past couple of weeks, though, the inbox has been flooded not with news of the MarineArmy Ranger-turned-school reformer but with a…
The food industry has for decades leaned on an inexpensive and natural thickening agent: guar gum. It builds viscosity in ice cream, dressing, baked goods, and other foods you’ve likely eaten it in the past week (as well as makeup, explosives, and other things you probably haven’t eaten, ever). In…
View Larger Map About 4 p.m. yesterday, a man who a witness said appeared drunk, walked into the EZ Trip Food Store above and, according to police, began harassing customers. Specifically, he slapped one person repeatedly in the face before chasing them from the store. Upon his return, he began…
The Dallas Police Department would like you to know they’ve fired one officer and disciplined another, effective immediately, following two disciplinary hearings Thursday morning. The first one is pretty straightforward: Officer Kelly Schumpert was arrested in Forney for DWI in February of this year. An Internal Affairs investigation concluded she…
Remember last week when a bus crash shut down the Dallas North Tollway? Turns out the NTTA has video. Posted it this afternoon. No one died in the crash, so you can enjoy it guilt free…
A little while ago, WFAA reported that Methodist Dallas Medical Center had made a teensy error during a recent operation and transplanted a kidney into the wrong patient. The kidney turned out to be compatible and the patient is fine, but when Methodist discovered the mistake last week, it raised…
The graph above shows the number of babies delivered each year at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Notice the steep downward trajectory, from 15,800 in 2008 to a projected 10,700 in 2013. That’s a 32-percent drop or, in layman’s terms, a shit-load fewer babies. I noticed this almost a month ago, back…
View Larger Map Harry Engel loved his home right up to the day it killed him. The retired minister had grown up as an orphan, so he took particular pride in the modest Grand Prairie house he had shared with wife Wanda for 22 years. In February 2010, the couple…
On January 6, 2007, Linoshka Torres, 18, and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Luis Campos, parked his dad’s car in the driveway of an Oak Cliff mechanic’s house and vanished, keys still in the ignition of the red Ford Explorer, cell phones on the seat. It was supposed to have been a…
Paul Green was not in the best of health in 2009 when he was hired as a bus monitor by Dallas County Schools. He had been battling colon cancer for more than a decade and, several years before, had been diagnosed with hypertension and congestive heart failure. As a result,…
A team of Texas researchers recently published the findings of a scientific undertaking studying a condition plaguing 28 percent of Texas teens. Sexting. So now, when that half-cocked smile rolls across a teen’s face in line at 7-Eleven or when your kid checks his phone at the dinner table and…
At about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, Dora Fuller and her family were woken by smoke alarms. They quickly rushed from the home, on Berwick Avenue in Oak Cliff and called 911. They got a recording telling them all dispatchers were busy. So they hung up and tried again. And again. So…
The outcome was already determined, the stories already written, but the cameras and the recorders were out anyway, waiting for the judge to say the words. He was about to declare Richard Miles actually, technically, legally innocent of a 1994 murder, a shooting at a Texaco station near Bachman Lake…
Paige Chenault runs The Birthday Project, which partners with the Family Gateway shelter to throw birthday parties for homeless children. Which is way more patriotic than anything I did today. via Tiny Dallas…
View Larger Map An employee of Sewell Lexus on Monday happened upon a badly decomposed body police initially believed had been stabbed or shot in the back of the head. An autopsy has since ruled out homicide, and police are treating it as an unexplained death pending toxicology results. But…
Before the city of Dallas was contacted several years ago about accepting a few dozen mostly undeveloped acres along the edge of the escarpment in southwest Dallas, few outside the Niblo family knew what it contained. It had been settled as part of the Peters Colony, which was founded at…
Erika Perdue, the 41-year-old University Park woman indicted in May for collecting and sharing child pornography, has been kicked out of a rehab facility for attempting suicide, court records show. Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul D. Stickney ordered that Perdue be detained until trial, deeming her a flight risk…
In the early morning hours Wednesday, physicists in Switzerland may announce that they’ve discovered the elusive “God Particle,” aka the Higgs boson. For more than half a century, the Higgs has been the theoretical mechanism that imbued matter with mass after the Big Bang, so that the swirling chaos of…
Front page of the DMN this morning is a story to warm the heart of anyone who owns a car: The number of uninsured drivers in Texas has dropped and dropped hard, from 4.2 million to 2.6 million, all in a single year. That comes after rates have been hovering…
Pedro Hermenegildo didn’t have insurance, so he paid Dr. Ricardo Rocha in cash to repair a hernia, a fairly routine, outpatient procedure. But according to a lawsuit filed against Rocha in a Dallas County district court last week, Hermenegildo lost much more than his hernial bulge. The surgery was performed…
Given his high profile over the past few months and some much-publicized decisions, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Mike Miles has actually been DISD’s superintendent. Which he has, of course, but not officially and not full-time until Monday, when he took the reins in earnest. It was a busy…
