Morning Roundup: Dem Bones edition

Good morning, Houston. Want to hear something weird? Investigators say a North Texas man had a stolen bone implanted in his neck. The man, Jim Livingston, had a herniated disk in his neck; in 2005, a surgeon replaced it with a small bone from a donor. Everything was fine until last year, when Livingston got a call informing him that the bone was believed to have been stolen from a body at a funeral home — it seems the company that provided it, Biomedical Tissue Services, paid off funeral-home owners in exchange for being allowed to harvest bone and tissue from dead bodies without anyone knowing. "It was very surreal," Livingston told WFAA. "At first I asked them if they wanted the bone back. It wasn't really an option, given it was grafted into my other neck bones." Indeed. Livington is suing BTS, hoping for stricter safeguards against similar situations and the release of records from the original owner of the bone.

>> String of wheel thefts at Hobby: Rising airfares are bad enough, but some travelers at Hobby Airport have had something else to contend with lately: When they got home, they discovered that someone had stripped their cars of their tires and rims. The cars — all parked on the top level of the Hobby garage — had been jacked up, apparently while security guards weren't looking (the garage has no security cameras). "We're certainly sorry it occurred," Mike Mancuso with Hobby security told KPRC. "There's no guarantee [about security]. We do the best we can." In the next few months, Hobby will benefit from a $20 million security package approved by City Council; part of the $5 million in security upgrades for the airport will go toward installing security cameras in stairwells, elevators and the parking garage. Not a moment too soon, sounds like.

>> Mayor: I don't like high-rise proposal: Mayor Bill White has weighed in on a plan to build a 23-story high-rise residential building on the site of the Maryland Manor apartments at Bissonnet and Ashby — and he's not too happy about it. Opponents say the project could cause traffic nightmares on Bissonnet and in the neighborhood surrounding the site, which consists mostly of single-family homes and small apartment buildings, and White seems to agree: "I will be prepared to use any appropriate power under the law to alter the proposed project," he said in a statement. What's unclear is exactly what White can do: Area homeowners say they hope his statement alone will carry some weight. "Hopefully, his weighing in with similar concerns as the residents will be help convince the developers it's in their best interest to compromise on some of the more extreme elements of the proposal," neighborhood resident Jamie Flatt-Hickey told KTRK.

>> Today's weather: The good news is that we should have a relatively dry end to the week — there'll be a 30 percent chance of showers today, with the weekend looking nice and clear. The bad news: It's still hot. Expect an afternoon high around 92 today, with a low tonight in the lower 70s. Fall, where are you?

News, where are you? Oh, right — this way ...