Elected Officials Clash Over COVID-19 Response. Nine Texas mayors sent a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott requesting the authority to require residents wear masks to help stop the spread of COVID-19. At press conference yesterday, the governor said, basically, everything is going fine, and he took a shot at Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, claiming the Judge wants to “play sheriff.” In a response, Jenkins says he doesn’t want to jail people for not wearing masks, but blamed the continued rise in COVID hospitalizations and emergency room visits on the governor’s “decisions to accelerate opening and limit our local ability to enforce recommendations from the Governor or medical experts.” Those hospitalizations, he said, are only the “tip of the iceberg” of ever-spreading infection.
League Officials Push to Resume Fall Sports. A high school sports commissioner says the UIL is “absolutely committed” to proceeding with the fall sports season, even as student athletes at at least five North Texas high schools test positive for COVID-19. Dez Bryant has tested negative for COVID-19, despite working out this off season with Ezekiel Elliott, who was among the Cowboys players who tested positive for the virus. The NFL hopes to test and isolate its way through the pandemic reopening, but one coach has said there is no way teams can realistically adhere to the NFL’s guidelines and one players’ lawyer called NFL locker rooms “petri dishes.”
Shooting at Crowded Galleria Mall. What’s scarier, that a couple of 20-somethings got into an argument and pulled out guns and shot at each other, or that, according to a shooting witness, “The mall was busy, she said, and lots of people had been in lines waiting to get into stores”?
Busy Day for the Dallas City Council. The council will hold a budget workshop today, the first since the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the city’s revenue sources and protesters began demanding a “defunding” of the Dallas Police Department.
