Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Multiple wildfires scorching the Texas Panhandle had merged as of Thursday morning, creating the largest wildfire in state history at more than one million acres burned. The forest service said the largest of the fires, the Smokehouse Creek fire in Hutchinson County, was an estimated 1,075,000 acres and 3% contained as of 9 a.m. Thursday. The 687 Reamer fire, which stood Thursday at roughly 2,000 acres, burned into the Smokehouse Creek fire, the service said. According to...
A fiery explosion in the Texas Panhandle killed more than 18,000 cattle and critically injured one worker in what is being described as the deadliest barn fire for cattle on record. Fire tore through the holding pens of Southfork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt on Monday night, as the cattle were waiting to be milked, authorities told local news outlets. A dairy farm worker rescued from the building was taken to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition. Investigators have not...
DALLAS - In recent years, Mark Cuban's vision for a new arena has included a 20-story Madison Square Garden-like structure with window views of Dallas and fans arriving in autonomous cars. Now his plans are substantially larger in scope, grandeur and - he believes - economic windfall for Dallas and Texas. And himself, naturally. "My goal, and we'd partner with Las Vegas Sands, is when we build a new arena it'll be in the middle of a resort and casino," Cuban told The Dallas...
DALLAS -- In "Star Wars," Luke Skywalker grows up on the hot desert planet Tatooine. His family owns a moisture farm that uses devices called "vaporators" to pull drinking water from the air. But while vaporators are a figment of science fiction, the technology that makes them work may be moving closer to fact. Researchers from Xianming "Simon" Dai's lab at the University of Texas at Dallas are developing technology that can pull water from the air. They recently published a p...
Jerry Jones said it Sunday night after Sunday's 40-3 deconstruction of what used to be the Minnesota Vikings. And I am inclined to believe every word of it. "I think we've had adversity. We very easily could have some more adversity,'' the Cowboys owner said. "But I sure do think what I see out here right now is a team like you could go get a Super Bowl with.'' If you're of a belief that's nothing more than Salesman Jerry talking, I would advise that he rarely throws out...
AUSTIN, Texas — What used to be a novelty has now become commonplace in Texas politics – the $1 million check. In the past 16 months, Gov. Greg Abbott’s received six such donations. His Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, pulled down four $1 million checks in seven months. The rush of seven-figure checks demonstrates the no-limits nature of the state’s campaign finance laws and a growing national spotlight on Texas, experts say. Texas is one of 11 states that don’t limit individuals’ campaign contributions in races for sta...
DALLAS - Other than removing his name from the Cowboys' marquee, a non-starter, Jerry Jones' best fan-friendly moves are fairly obvious: Fire Mike McCarthy. Hire Sean Payton. Of course, we're preaching to the choir here. Jerry loves himself some Payton. For all we know, the 58-year-old retiree, who announced Tuesday he's leaving the Saints three years ahead of his contract, had been holed up on Preston Road the last couple weeks, swilling Jerry's bourbon. At least it would...
ARLINGTON, Texas – The NFC East title was secured before kickoff. All that was left was the game. Dallas didn’t mess around with Washington. Instead, the Cowboys took charge early by scoring six first-half touchdowns, using that cushion to roll for a 56-14 victory on Sunday night. With that we have five things of note from the blowout victory: Defense, defense and more defense What more can be said about the defense? DeMarcus Lawrence had a pick-6, avoiding a sliding Washington quarterback Taylor Heinicke from crashing int...
Ten years ago, when power plants in Texas succumbed to freezing temperatures and triggered rolling outages, Texas lawmakers took action. They passed a law requiring power plants to file plans with regulators on their annual preparations for winter weather. The regulation didn’t prevent this week’s outages. As lawmakers again investigate power plant outages in frigid temperatures, they will likely think about tougher laws for power plant operators and grid operators, as they should. But we hope lawmakers will also con...
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has called for an investigation into why the Federal Aviation Administration certified the Boeing 737 Max and whether the agency is getting too close to the corporations it regulates. The Texas Republican is right. After two of the new 737 Max airplanes crashed, aviation regulators around the world grounded the planes. The FAA took longer to do so, and Cruz said at a speech to the Texas Lyceum that’s a concern. Cruz held hearings on the state of aviation safety in his role as chairman of the Senate s...
The government shutdown has no end in sight because our leaders in Washington don’t seem to want an end that doesn’t amount to political humiliation of the opposition. But imagine for a moment that President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer could see their way to a compromise that Americans would support and that would greatly benefit this country. To us, it would look like this: The president would get the funding he seeks to enhance border security, including some 230 mil...
Political incivility is too rapidly devolving in America into harassment and violence. The news of explosive devices being mailed to President Barack Obama and the home of Bill and Hillary Clinton is the latest in a string of incidents that reveals an ugliness in our political culture that is leading us ever closer to tragic and destructive consequences. We wrote in June of our dismay over the breakdown of civility in today’s political culture. The seemingly expanding incidents of violence and its lesser cousin, harassment, o...
In the melee that is the debate over mass shootings, we can’t help but return to a singular thought: There are a great many reforms that could make a meaningful difference and win broad support, if only they could get a fair hearing. So we were encouraged to see Texas Gov. Greg Abbott respond to the shooting at Santa Fe High School by holding a series of roundtable discussions with important stakeholders. With the governor now announcing proposals out of those discussions, we are both heartened by what we are hearing and c...
It’s easy to forget how young the Silicon Valley companies that dominate so much of our lives really are. One need be only a freshman in high school to have been born in a time before Facebook existed. And a baby delivered on the day Google was incorporated would turn 20 only this September. In just the single lifespan of a teenager, those two firms — along with many other competitors and allies — have generated riches and international clout to rival the nation’s grandest commercial enterprises. Ad sales made Google...
Imagine learning that you have only minutes to live. That was the challenge posed by an irate Hawaii resident for whom the notion wasn’t a conceptual exercise, but a terrifying reality. A million and a half Americans in the Aloha State were scared out of their gourds this month — as would be any of us — to receive a stark state-issued warning on their cell phones: MISSILE THREAT INBOUND ... THIS IS NOT A DRILL. It was neither threat nor drill, but human error. And it has provided rich fodder for television comedians, but to H...
Everyone gripes about air travel. The complaints are universal: bare-it-all security checks; shoving matches over cabin bin space; economy seats increasingly reminiscent of a miniature medieval torture cell maliciously called the “little ease.” Oh, for those glamorous jet-set days of yesteryear, when fliers were treated like royalty starting at airport curbside. Can modern air travel really be called an improvement? Yes, in the starkest and most critical terms: You’ll get there in one piece. Year’s-end reports show 2017 wa...
DALLAS — Two decades ago, Harris County planners predicted with chilling accuracy just how devastating a storm like Hurricane Harvey would be to the Houston area. Far lesser storms, they determined, could wreck a large swath of the city and its western suburbs. In a report dated May 1996, engineers for the Harris County Flood Control District concluded the area’s reservoir system was severely insufficient and imperiled thousands of properties. The report’s authors proposed a $400 million fix: constructing a massive undergroun...
It's hard to take seriously the thousands of people who have signed a petition urging Texas to amicably divorce the rest of the union. Even in the fiercely independent Lone Star State, this idea is roadkill. While the signatories are exercising their right to free speech, this idea is just plumb screwy and an odd rejection of basic American principles. Besides, as in any divorce, shouldn't we worry about the children? The Texas petition says the United States is suffering from economic troubles stemming from the federal...
F or five days this month, Texas presented its best arguments for why its Voter ID law does not discriminate against minorities. The federal government offered its own critical assessment. The political nature of this national debate over access to the polls, which largely pits Republicans against Democrats, predictably resulted in widely divergent analyses. Before we address the particulars, a reminder of what's at stake: The importance of this case extends beyond our borders because Texas and other Republican-controlled...
F or five days this month, Texas presented its best arguments for why its Voter ID law does not discriminate against minorities. The federal government offered its own critical assessment. The political nature of this national debate over access to the polls, which largely pits Republicans against Democrats, predictably resulted in widely divergent analyses. Before we address the particulars, a reminder of what's at stake: The importance of this case extends beyond our borders because Texas and other Republican-controlled...
The drama was impossibly lost in the cobwebs of history, dating back 120 years this Juneteenth. Not even the descendants of Isaac "Ike" Bruce knew the account of his close call with vigilante justice in the raw, young state of Texas. In important ways, the case has eerie parallels with stories of justice gone awry today, both disturbing and uplifting. Rough-hewn Texas of 1892 did not take crime lightly. Twelve men were hanged that year in official executions, nine of them black. Texas was also a hotbed of lynchings, and 1892...
