First Baptist, one of D Magazine’s downtown Dallas neighbors, just released a statement from pastor Robert Jeffress about the (apparent) murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose corpse may have been cut up with bone saws. Here you go:

Dr. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the 13,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, issues the following statement in response to reports of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi:

“Christians cannot proclaim the sanctity of life without strongly condemning the apparent torture and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Bible and bone saws don’t mix.”

It’s a catchy, alliterative statement. But is it true? Can the Bible and bone saws mix? This reporter would suggest they can.

Let’s say someone has contracted a flesh-eating bacteria through an open wound in one’s foot. What if the only way to save this patient is to amputate the leg? Presumably there is a laser that could be used to do the job. Alternately, an axe could be used. A skilled physician might also be able to save the patient by removing the leg with a chainsaw that had, of course, been first sterilized. Similarly, the patient’s leg could be fed into a wood chipper, until the diseased portion had been shredded, thereby saving the patient’s life. But this reporter, admittedly without any medical training, would surmise that such a procedure would be gross.

Which brings us back to the Bible and what sort of surgical instruments it may or may not properly mix with. And, yeah, a bone saw might work, in the right circumstances.

As for Jeffress and his press release, it’s a catchy bit of nonsense that has the pastor, once again, doing whatever he can to shine a national spotlight on himself. And that, dear friends, feels like a move that doesn’t mix with the Bible. Or at least not with Jesus. (Apologies if that sounds a bit judgy.)

When I sat down with Dallas ISD Trustee Miguel Solis last week to ostensibly talk about school buses, much more of the time was spent on the district’s broader goal to racially integrate. He called it “one of Dallas’ biggest challenges.” No surprises there: Long one of the most segregated urban districts in the country, DISD has been attempting to reckon with its history and produce a more successfully segregated future. Of course, that’s true for the city of Dallas, too, and these are not unrelated efforts.

As a whole, DISD, as others in this space have laid out, has made strides in the right direction. The district has seen the payoff of progressive programs like Accelerating Campus Excellence, or ACE, which evaluated the district’s best teachers and then incentivized them toward schools of need. Where the district had 43 IR—”improvement required”—campuses in 2013-14, it has just four on which the state bestows that unwanted distinction today.

But by way of adding a point to the discussion, I’d like to present a couple of maps, put out today in a new report by ProPublica, that illustrate the importance of the issue of school segregation.

ProPublica visualized state education data on school districts across the country. Caveat needed: They got the most recent numbers available, which only means that this stuff is still at least a couple years behind real-time (a lot of the data is pulled from 2015-16 school year, as discussed here). Zoom in, zoom out, explore by district or by individual school—there’s lots of interesting stuff to take in (although, beware that all that grey space just means the data was unavailable or inconclusive in those areas, particularly misleading when you take a wide-angle view of the country).

The maps I’ve singled out and screenshotted below show us the close entanglement between segregation and achievement.

AT&T says it has restored internet and cable service for customers across Dallas-Fort Worth after a fire at a Richardson center knocked it out yesterday. The company was originally telling customers that the facility took a direct lightning strike, but has since backed off that statement. For now, the cause is unknown. But the result was a fire, and near-citywide loss of internet. What really matters here is that you can get back to reading Twitter and putting off those TPS reports and whatnot. Happy Tuesday!

Oh, and here’s the latest map from downdetector.com one last time. Looking much better, but still not exactly clear skies:

The Internet Is Back! Those of us who access the information superhighway via AT&T got our service back around 10:30 last night. I myself was forced to eat dinner last night with family. We had a fire in the fireplace, and we talked about how our days had gone. IT SUCKED! #gimmescreentime

Prosper Fights Highway Plans. Speaking of highways, TxDOT wants to build one through part of Prosper. But the town must be reading some of what we’ve been publishing, because citizens don’t seem to want any part of the proposed U.S. 380. Prosperites, you tell ’em all about induced demand! Fight the good fight!

American Airlines’ Logo Is Lame. That’s what the U.S. Copyright Office thinks, anyway. It thinks AA’s logo is so weak that it has refused to grant the carrier a trademark for it. So AA is suing.

Gas Pipe Trial Comes to an End. A federal jury acquitted Jerry Schults and his daughter Amy Herrig of the most serious drug-trafficking charges against them for selling “spice” from their head shops. Schults and Herrig were, however, found guilty of one felony for misbranding the spice. They face up to five years in prison and will be sentenced later.

More Rain Today. Be careful out there, folks. Here are some roads that have been closed due to flooding.

Are you feeling more Bruno Mars or Alice Cooper?

Update (4:55 p.m.): Things continue to go poorly both for AT&T’s internet customers and the company’s PR team, which has sent an actually insane amount of responses to salty Twitter users this afternoon. Those tweets possess the same content as they did some four hours ago, which is to say very little. Still no ETA on when service will be restored. Below, the latest iteration of the downdetector.com service outage map. Doesn’t look too different from the one further down this post.

Original post: Many AT&T internet customers across Dallas-Fort Worth can’t get online today. So it’s not just you. The telecom and media giant has been fielding complaints from across the area about internet outages by telling customers that it had a facility get struck by lightning and catch on fire. CBS 11’s Mary Ann Martinez, via a release from the City of Richardson, reports that the fire occurred this morning just before 10 a.m.:

LATEST: From City of Richardson on AT&T data center fire that lead to outage in #DFW. #att #attoutage #dallas #fortworth pic.twitter.com/frmu2MdUVK

— MaryAnn Martinez (@maryanncbs11) October 15, 2018

And here’s a big splotchy map that shows the extent of the outages across the area, courtesy of downdetector.com.