Monica Fuentes

As we reported last summer, the Texas Railroad Commission has agreed to take another look at a case of potential water contamination due to fracking in Parker County. It has been nearly three years since the agency, notoriously chummy with the oil and gas companies it is supposed to regulate, exonerated Range Resources.

But ongoing testing proves the regulator has good reason for giving the case a second look: The wells are loaded with natural gas in increasingly explosive quantities, and gas fingerprinting has sourced it to the Barnett Shale -- the productive zone thousands of feet below the surface that Range fracked.

"The leak continues and it's spreading," Geoffrey Thyne, an independent scientist who was commissioned to work the case with EPA, tells The Associated Press. "I can say, based on the current data, there are at least two other wells that show the same source ... which is the Range well."

Range has always contended that the gas is naturally occurring, originating in shallow, gas-bearing rock called the Strawn formation. But by comparing Strawn gas and Barnett gas with the gas found in several homeowners' water wells, Thyne has concluded that it isn't just bubbling up. This gas came from the Barnett, and its only conduit would be Range.

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Naming a street for Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the easiest way a city can express its approval of the civil rights movement. Aside from whatever pittance is required to update maps and street signs, it's completely painless, particularly since it doesn't require any actual effort to address stubborn residential segregation or racial gaps in income, education or geography.

For Arlington, though, that's a bridge too far. So, instead of devoting an entire roadway to the nation's preeminent civil rights icon, they're honoring his legacy with 16 tasteful sign toppers.

City leaders are celebrating the sign toppers as a major accomplishment. Mayor Robert Cluck is proud that they will be placed along Center Street, "the center of our community."

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Damn you, Flower Mound. In December, your mayor, Tom Hayden, stops a Town Council meeting and proclaims 2014 the "Year of the Bible," thus setting the stage for a battle
that can only logically end in Jesus and Richard Dawkins brawling in a no-holds-barred MMA throwdown -- an event we were very much looking forward to covering -- and this is how you react? With a nuanced and respectful discussion of religion in public life?

Especially when Daniel Moran, a nonbelieving UNT student and Texas House candidate, began organizing a protest of Thursday night's Town Council meeting, it seemed that fireworks were inevitable.

Moran accused Hayden of violating the constitutional ban on the establishment of religion, sure, but he did so politely and spent most of his energy lamenting that the mayoral proclamation had made non-Christians feel unwelcome in Flower Mound. Other opponents -- mostly nonbelievers, one self-identified Muslim -- generally shared the critique that the proclamation was divisive.

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Jesse Brister

It's not entirely clear from federal court documents when Jesse Brister earned the nickname "Bozo." Probably, it was around the time he became a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.

In any case, he's earned it. He proved it upfront when he joined an organization whose members have a tendency to get high on meth and murder each other, and he secured it on March 21, 2013, when he mailed a letter to U.S. Attorney Jim Jacks threatening multiple district attorneys, judges and, apparently, former U.S. Department of Justice criminal division chief Larry Brewer:

[p]roudly, I am writing this letter to this Federal Building ... but I am intending it to the Federal Department point blank. Our demands are simple; you have apprehended members of our family; Big Terry, Jive, Baby Huey, and others in our Dallas/Ft. Worth region... If your federal government does not drop the current charges on these ABT members my circle/family will start with DA's not involved in these cases, then Mr Larry Breuer (sic), then anyone else involved... We have a list of names Judges included.

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Around 2 o'clock this morning Charles Pace, a 74-year-old grandfather, went to Denny's on North Central Expressway to grab a bite to eat. Though just a few blocks from his apartment complex, he never made it inside. Before he could reach the door, he told police, he was jumped, set upon for no apparent reason by an unknown number of attackers.

Carter wasn't seriously injured. Officers found him lying in the Denny's parking lot with cuts to his face and hands, but he was well enough to be driven home without medical treatment. That's in contrast to Luis Rocha, another septuagenarian who was recently the target of a random attack outside Campisi's on Mockingbird Lane, a mile-and-a-half north of the Denny's. Almost two weeks later, Rocha remains in the hospital.

Police don't mention the Campisi's attack in their report, but the officers who talked to Carter wrote in their report that they believe he's the victim of the "latest 'Knockout Game.'"

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via Wired

There was a brief time, not all that long ago, when discountmedspa.com was the Internet's go-to place for gray market botulinum toxin, that Mansfield's Laurie D'Alleva could call herself the Botox Queen.

Then, Wired stumbled upon her site -- and the how-to videos featuring D'Alleva injecting the product into her face -- and discovered they could buy pharmaceutical-grade cosmetics like Renova, Dysport (aka "The Freeze") without a prescription.

"20/20" followed up with a segment two months later featuring a horror story from discountmedspa.com customer "Alex," a paramedic who nearly went blind after dosing herself with an injectable facial filler labeled "Vitalift," and a plastic surgeon who was concerned by discountmedspa.com's crudely packaged, mysteriously named products.

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Library of Congress

Some attention to hair, a bit of fashion sense, and poor kids all over Dallas could become wealthy overnight.

Today we should learn something more about Yigal Lelah, a real estate developer to whom the city granted $4.5 million five years ago to create a high-end mixed-use development across from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Lancaster Road in a poor part of southern Dallas.

That development never happened. The City Council wants to know where the money went. Today as we speak, city staff is expected to provide the council with an accounting.

See also: Dallas City Council Wants to Know What It Did With 4.5 Million of Your Dollars

The debacle across from the VA hospital was the brainchild of council member Vonciel Hill, who represents the district and pushed hard for the project. Her enthusiasm for the project reminds me of former Mayor Laura Miller and her similar conviction about immigrant-owned tire repair businesses in North Oak Cliff. Miller believed the way make North Oak Cliff prosper was to cleanse it of grubby tire repair businesses and replace them with Ann Taylor dress shops and Starbuckses.

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arbyreed

Dallas, we know you suck at coping with cold weather and that you would much prefer to step into a warm car on a winter morning. Trust us. We feel the same way. But leaving an unwatched car idling on a Dallas street is like wrapping a steak in bacon, throwing it to a pack of stray dogs, and hoping it doesn't get eaten.

Frankly, Dallas PD's auto theft team is sick of it. This afternoon, they passed along a friendly note reminding citizens that it's much harder for car thieves to take your ride if you don't leave the keys inside.

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David Cooke

This week, The Dallas Morning News is profiling the three finalists to become Dallas' next city manager. Yesterday, it was interim City Manger/Uber crusher A.C. Gonzalez. Tomorrow, it's Oakland City Administrator Deanna Santana's turn. But today? Today belonged to David Cooke, who recently retired as the head bureaucrat in Wake County, North Carolina.

The profile, penned by reporter Scott Goldstein, is agonizingly dull. He attended the University of North Carolina, where he discovered a passion for local government. He climbed the bureaucratic ladder until he landed the Wake County manager post 13 years ago.

Goldstein couldn't find so much as a smudge on him. No backroom deals with drilling companies. No attempts to slip a ban on Uber past elected officials. Just professionalism and competence.

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Yesterday we introduced you to Ron Martin, a man who was arrested by Frisco traffic cops for holding a sign toward passing motorists that said "Police ahead."

Officer Thomas Mrozinski (that's his police vehicle pictured above) was trying to catch drivers going over the speed limit that day. When he discovered Martin, he arrested him and charged him with an obscure ordinance covering sign regulations.

Martin had his day in court yesterday afternoon, hoping the charges would be dropped. They weren't.

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