Good morning, Houston. Did you know that we're now in a bold new Fluorescent Age thanks to Mayor Bill White and his colleagues in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and El Paso? The collective His Honors gathered in San Antonio on Friday to name the compact fluorescent bulb the "state bulb of Texas." If that doesn't make you want to switch to CFLs, try this: December is Compact Fluorescent Light Month in Texas. What's so...
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Results tagged “fbi”
From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • 28 miles per hour seems to be the magic speed when cruising downtown. • Insurance regulators approved a 10% hike in coastal wind insurance rates, that's an increase of about $84. • Rice University has transplanted over a dozen oak trees, including some over 100 years old, in order to make way for new dorms. • The Dynamo take on DC United...
Houstonist rolled back our clocks on Saturday afternoon (proactive folks that we are). Today, we've jumped into the Way Back Machine to let you in on a Flick your folks may have seen in the theater - The Sugarland Express. This 1974 film is the big screen major feature debut for flash-in-the-pan Steven Spielberg. The fledgling film maker uses stars Goldie Hawn and William Atherton (the annoying reporter of Die Hard fame) to tell...
Good morning, Houston. If you ever stop to think about all the ordinances in effect in the city — admit it, you do — you probably wonder just how much space all those laws would take up if they were written down. Well, now we know: around 5,000 pages. That tidbit comes from the Chronicle's Matt Stiles, who recently reported that the city approved a new three-year contract with the Municipal Code Corp. of...
We've covered a few distinctive thieves in the last few months: the cell phone bandit, the bicycle bandit, the dapper bandit, the bad hair bandit — and now there's a new one: the bossy bandit, who was reportedly quite rude when he knocked over a west Houston bank last week. According to FBI officials, the man walked into the Wells Fargo branch on the Katy Freeway near Highway 6 at around 5 p.m. last Tuesday;...
Looks like no one really expected David Ritcheson to jump from a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend: The Chronicle is reporting that Ritcheson told a couple of friends he was thinking of jumping the night before he did so. "I'm going to jump first thing in the morning before anyone is awake," Ritcheson told two friends, according to a 10-year-old North Texas girl who overheard the exchange. The child, Landee...
Well, here's something to be proud of: Houston's homicide rate is now the second-highest among large American cities, according to FBI figures released Monday. Keep in mind that this is the homicide rate we're talking about — Houston's was 18.2 per 100,000 residents last year, putting us second only to Philadelphia and ahead of Dallas (fifth place), which has had a higher homicide rate than Houston for each of the last 11 years. The numbers...
Good morning, Houston. As faithful Houstonist readers, you know we have trouble resisting a good crime report, so we were nearly beside ourselves when we read about the family that might have set a grocery store potato chip display on fire in February. Seriously. It happened at a Sellers Brothers on Telephone Road on Feb. 10, and surveillance video — which you can see if you follow the link — shows a young man...
Good morning, Houston. Have a roach problem? How about turning it into a windfall? The Houston Museum of Natural Science is offering 25 cents per roach for the first 1,000 live, healthy American cockroaches people bring in. No kidding: a whole quarter for trapping and transporting a roach! The roaches will be used for a museum display on insect sanitary engineers — seems the critters, which are often associated with filth, are actually known...
So you know how Lakewood Church pastors Joel and Victoria Osteen have taken a vow of poverty, right? Yeah, yeah, we're kidding — but if you're anything like Houstonist, you've wondered at one time or another exactly how much the Osteens are worth. (Go ahead, admit it.) Turns out we're not the only ones: Reginald McKamie, the attorney for Continental flight attendant Sharon Brown, asked a judge yesterday to make the Osteens' net worth public...
KHOU is speculating about whether U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could return to his hometown of Houston if he ends up getting the boot in Washington. Gonzales, a graduate of MacArthur High School in Aldine, was a partner with Vinson & Elkins from 1982 to 1997, when he became the Texas secretary of state (from there, he was appointed to the state Supreme Court and then became White House counsel to President George W. Bush;...
The FBI is on the lookout for a bank robber they're calling the "Desperate Dad" — a guy who robbed an Uptown Wachovia Bank branch last month, claiming that he needed the money because he had lost his job and had a baby at home. The man walked into the bank at 4906 San Felipe at 12:37 p.m. March 6, walked to the teller counter and pulled a chrome pistol from a navy blue zippered...
Things are apparently progressing — slowly — in the lawsuit against Victoria Osteen filed in September: The Chronicle is reporting that the attorney for a flight attendant accusing Osteen, the wife of Lakewood Church pastor Joel Osteen, of assault wants to have the interior of the airplane where the incident occurred photographed. This all goes back to Dec. 19, 2005, when Osteen reportedly went ballistic about some liquid that had been spilled on her first-class...
Good morning, Houston! Two, four, six, eight ... yeah, whatever, we weren't cheerleaders. But those of you who were (or those of you who are cheerleader fans — no more needs to be said about that) should be excited to know that Houston is one of the finalists to be home of the Cheerleader Hall of Fame. We're up against Ohio, Kentucky, California, Florida and another city in Texas for the Hall of Fame,...
This week, City Council will consider new rules for cab drivers and the companies that employ them, including requiring cabbies to pass a test covering Houston's layout and city laws that govern the taxi industry. There used to be such a test, the Chronicle reports, but councilmembers voted it out in the 1990s.
In an interesting example of public-private partnership, Target Corp. has offered to help pay for security cameras to be installed around Houston to help the officer-short HPD out. It seems a little odd at first glance, but it turns out Target is no stranger to the law-enforcement game: Turns out Target has one of the most advanced crime labs in the country at its headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was initially set up to deal...
An interesting, but gruesome, story is developing about a MS-13 gang member who's now in custody in Houston: According to authorities in Honduras, 26-year-old Albin Zelaya decapitated his ex-girlfriend's parents because their daughter broke up with him.
Update on the story of Isiah Ramirez, the 2-month-old whose mother misplaced him en route from Houston to San Antonio this weekend: A couple in Buena Park, Calif., turned the baby in to authorities today, according to the Chronicle.
Talk about parents who shouldn't be parents: Houston FBI agents and San Antonio police are working to find a 2-month-old boy whose mother apparently misplaced him while she was on drugs. We only wish we were kidding.
Bank robbery, threatening note, getaway vehicle — yeah, we've heard it all before. But what made a robbery at the Wachovia branch at 235 W. 20th St. unusual was that the bandit arrived and fled on a bicycle. Yesterday afternoon, the man reportedly rode up to the bank on a bike, walked in, approached a teller and handed over a note demanding money and saying he was carrying a bomb. According to KHOU, "the robber...
The recent driveby at Westbury High School and the stabbing of one Lamar student by another in Ervan Chew park in June aren't just isolated incidents, it seems. It's looking more and more like they're a trend, and a troubling one at that: both the numbers of teenage homicide victims and the numbers of felony-level violent crimes commited by teens are up significantly over last year. Thirty three juveniles have been victims of homicide through...
There's a northwest Houston homeowner who we're sure is still embarrassed about something that happened yesterday: He shot at FBI agents arresting someone at his house, having mistaken them for robbers.
Speaking of things you don't hear about every day — we were, weren't we? — the Coast Guard is continuing its search today for a man who went overboard from a Carnival cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico this weekend. A passenger on the Carnival Conquest reported seeing the man, 42, fall from a cabin balcony at about 11 p.m. Saturday, near the end of the ship's week-long Caribbean cruise. The ship was...
KHOU reports today that the FBI is on the lookout for Gerardo "El Gallo" Salazar, the alleged ringleader of a human trafficiking group responsible for kidnapping young women and forcing them into prostitution in several locations across Houston. Five men have already been convicted in the case, but Salazar, the sixth, went on the run — and officials believe he might come back to Houston, if he isn't here already. “The human trafficking business is...
Good news for you Texans fans planning to attend this weekend's game: The FBI said the threat to blow up seven NFL stadiums, including Reliant, was a hoax. The online threat, you'll remember, made the news Wednesday after the Homeland Security Department put local officials and stadium owners in the cities named in the threat — Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, New York, Oakland, Miami and Seattle — on alert. But it turns out the bomb threat...
Wallace Smith, a 27-year-old Houston man, was charged today with murder in connection with the shooting death of a man on a local sidewalk Monday Two people were injured this afternoon when a car slammed into an office building off the North Freeway A KHOU news crew went to a southeast Houston apartment complex yesterday to check out reports of rising crime and ended up witnessing a guy getting beaten with a baseball bat Ronald...
The Chronicle is reporting that ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was arrested and accused of public intoxication in Dallas earlier this month — but he won't go to jail for violating the terms of his bond. Skilling was arrested in the early morning of Sept. 9 in the 3600 block of McKinney Avenue; he wasn't drinking at the time and didn't resist arrest. Public intoxication, a Class C misdemeanor, carries a fine of up to $500; Skilling got a $385 ticket and was briefly held in a city jail.
Even with Houston's crime spike at the end of last year, we still have a long way to go before we catch up with Dallas: According to the FBI, Houston is the seventh safest city in the United States — and guess who tops the list for crime per capita? That's right: the Big D. Crime statistics from the nation's 10 largest cities came from the FBI's Uniform Crime Statistics report for 2005, which compares...
Today, much local and national media coverage will deal with the 9/11 anniversary. Here are a few things you might want to check out: The Chron carries an AP article on national remembrances; if you're looking for more extensive coverage, check out The New York TImes, where you can read articles from today, revisit coverage from the days after 9/11 and get into the excellent Portraits of Grief sketches of the World Trade Center victims....
The recent spate of gang violence in Houston, much of it related to the violent gang MS-13, has convinced the Houston Police Department and the FBI to take action. The number of gang-related crimes in the first half of 2006 is up more than 5 percent from that number in 2005, reports KHOU, with an increase of over 92 percent in the number of murders. The new initiative will include 10 FBI agents, as well...