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Jan 16, 2025 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
Texas Parks and Wildlife is urging Texans to stop feeding birds at area parks, take down bird feeders, and remove any bird baths. In case you missed it, bird flu is in Texas and has been since at least December, but this month, officials are raising alarms. Last week there were multiple dead ducks found at a pond in northwest Austin, adding Travis County to a list of others with confirmed Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, aka the bird flu.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
State Representative Venton Jones, a Democrat from Dallas, started Texas’ 89th legislative session on the right note: Love. Jones proposed to his long-time partner, Gregory Scott Jr., on the House floor at the Texas Capitol after being sworn in. “Our love symbolizes resilience, and our story reminds us that love can and will always overcome hate,” Jones, who is the Texas House Democratic Caucus Whip and Vice Chair of the Texas LGBTQ Caucus, said in a press release.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
After the CIA released historical documents proving that the agency surveilled Mexican American and Puerto Rican civil rights activists during the civil rights era, Rep. Joaquin Castro and other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have requested the FBI do the same. The letter, dated Jan.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly shifting toward a Republican-favored strategy for his leadership of social media giant Meta, announcing on Tuesday that he’s replacing a trusted fact-checking program with community notes, removing restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, and moving the company’s “trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S. content review to Texas.” The changes mirror many of those made in recent months by Elon Musk’s X...
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Dec 19, 2024 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
They say there’s magic in new beginnings. Our story starts about 20 miles northeast of downtown Austin, over a railroad crossing, and down a two-lane road. Go past an archway of giant tree limbs and toward the end of a long gravel driveway. There sits the Refugee Collective’s Farm in Elgin, where new beginnings are as plentiful as fresh produce. The week before Thanksgiving, the sun was shining against a bright cerulean sky over small plots of garden beds full of Afghan leeks and mustard greens.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
For most of her life, Lulu Francois believed her family history was a mystery lost to time. That changed when, during a Christmas gathering seven years ago, an aunt revealed she sometimes visited a small, unkempt cemetery in Comal County. There, migrants of Mexican descent are buried on a German ranch — including Francois’ great-grandmother, Paula Ribera, and her infant son, Marcello. Francois was shocked: She grew up in a tight-knit family in San Antonio.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
Six months after the prestigious Dallas Black Dance Theatre chose to f*ck around — by wrongfully firing all of its dancers just days before the season was set to start — they’re now finding out the hard way that worker’s rights are protected by law. The theater reached a $560,000 settlement with the National Labor Relations Board on Sunday to compensate the 10 fired dancers as well as another three dancers whose offers of employment were rescinded, according to The Dallas Morning News.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
While the rest of the Longhorn football entourage makes the trip to Atlanta for the SEC championship game, Bevo will stay home in Texas. Why? The SEC said the sidelines didn’t have room for Bevo XV’s 1,700 pounds and 58-inch horn span. “With the narrow sidelines, location of multiple sets for television and camera carts, there is not enough space. While we want to honor tradition across the conference, the space limitation is a reality,” SEC officials told ESPN.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
What was supposed to be a postpartum checkup turned into immeasurable grief for a 20-year-old Texas woman, when she learned that doctors had sterilized her without her knowledge in September 2023. Rachel Richnow is suing Christus St. Michael Hospital in Texarkana, she told The Dallas Morning News, after the hospital removed her fallopian tubes during what she believed was a routine C-section. “It came as a shock.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
thebarbedwire.com | Leslie Rangel
During a time where California-based companies like Tesla and SpaceX have made Texas their playground, the $10 billion Texas brand Dickies is running the other way. Dickies was founded 102 years ago in Fort Worth for the “American Worker.” Now, it’s leaving to “revitalize” its brand. The move is quick and sudden. City leaders were “blindsided by the announcement” with “no opportunity to try to change the company’s mind,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
