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So far, Brek Shea's trip across the Atlantic has been rougher than he anticipated. The former FC Dallas forward, who enjoyed mild fame in the states as American soccer's young hope, Adidas pitchman, and, of course, alt-weekly cover story subject, has spent his first season in the English Premiere League watching from the sidelines.

In three months, Shea made all of two appearances for Stoke City, neither of them particularly impressive. After that, he never even suited up as a sub. The team's manager -- who, by the way, was just fired -- has said Shea isn't "anywhere near" playing at a Premier League level.

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William Youkers was on parole in 2011 when he choked his pregnant girlfriend in Plano. He pleaded guilty, and the judge was lenient, placing him in a community supervision program. But three months later, he tested positive for meth. He assured Judge Scott Becker that he was turning his life around by taking community college classes and moving in with his mother. Becker wasn't convinced, though, and sentenced him to eight years in prison.

When his request for a new trial was denied, Youkers took his plea to the appeals court. There, he stepped onto ground that hasn't yet been tread in Texas courts: the judge's Facebook status.

Youkers discovered at some point after his trial that Becker was Facebook friends with the father of his pregnant girlfriend and had been throughout the trial. What's more, the father had sent Becker a Facebook message intended to sway the judge's decision in the case. At the very least, Youkers argues, this raises big questions about the judge's impartiality.

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Texas Lawyers May Soon Be Able to Serve Defendent Via Facebook

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It doesn't look so cute when it's spray-painted on your back fence.

The Promise of Peace Community Garden is in an awful location, shoehorned into a formerly vacant lot in a row of apartments and liquor stores just south of White Rock Lake, reachable only by a narrow sidewalk running along busy Grand Avenue. Nevertheless, the spot has served the garden's needs ever since it was established three years ago by school teacher Elizabeth Dry, who hoped that teaching the kids of East Dallas to grow their own food might help inspire a healthier future.

The location problem will soon be solved. As the Advocate reported earlier this month, Promise of Peace is in the process of relocating to a stretch of asphalt next to White Rock United Methodist Church. It's quieter there, away from the Grand Avenue traffic, and better suited for a community garden.

There's only one problem: Some of the neighbors aren't so happy.

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Digital rights advocates cheered yesterday after the state House passed a measure requiring police to obtain a search warrant before collecting personal cell phone data. Groups as diverse as the ACLU of Texas and the arch-conservative Texas Eagle Forum have expressed concern that current law, which allows law enforcement agencies to freely harvest cell phone location data, was antiquated and a violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches.

"Cell phones communicate location information constantly," as
Electronic Frontier Foundation-Austin vice president Greg Foster has previously explained it. "Now the details of your life - your employer, your hobbies, your relationships, your religion, political meetings you attend - can all be gleaned from customer data held by your phone company. And police don't need a warrant to get it."

Grits for Breakfast's Scott Henson framed the matter somewhat differently:

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From left: Mathis, Webb, Buckley and White.

Isaac Bugyendu was already dead when police responded to a shooting call Sunday night on Montana Avenue in Cedar Crest. The 25-year-old's body, pierced by multiple bullets, had been left in the middle of the road, barely a block from the Illinois Avenue 7-Eleven where he was a clerk.

Notably absent from the crime scene was Bugyendu's 2002 Chevy Cavalier, which he'd driven to work but was now missing. Find the car, police figured, and they'd find the killer.

It didn't take long.

At 10:30 Monday morning, just 12 hours after police recovered Bugyendu's body, police officers spotted the Cavalier driving nearby. Four men were inside. Devontae Webb, 17, was driving. His three passengers were Actavione Buckley, 21, Deon White, 18, and Kendrick Mathis, 18.

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This Thursday, the Boy Scouts of America will teach its young men a lesson as indelible as any they're likely to learn from a scoutmaster. Its national delegation will vote on a longstanding prohibition against gays in the country's largest youth organization.

BSA leaders have floated what they see as a compromise -- permitting gay scouts, but banning gay scout leaders. Yet it can't be often that the Family Research Council finds itself in agreement with The New Yorker, which have characterized the proposed policy as "incoherent," a "mixed message."

FRC, though, is opposed to gays in and out of scouting, and it can count as a supporter at least one influential former scout. In a webcast it sponsored, Governor Rick Perry referred to homosexuality as "pop culture," and the "flavor of the month," before vowing, "Not on my watch."

Citing scripture, opponents of openly gay scouts claim their sexual orientation violates both biblical law and the code at the heart of scouting. One Dallas church, however, would like it known that not all Christians agree with that interpretation.

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imugr

We're not sure exactly what Shawn Marion is driving here. It's clearly not a car in the traditional sense of the word, nor is it a tricycle, even though it has three wheels. It's kind of like a golf cart, except it appears to be able to reach highway speeds and doesn't appear large enough to store any golf clubs. We'll just take the lead of the Redditor who dubbed it The Matricycle and the other one who declared it the visual representation of his jump shot.

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Mavs Fans Really Outdid Themselves with Their Uniform Designs

(h/t Reddit)

Texas A&M Extension Service

First, the good news: Crazy ants don't sting. They do sometimes bite, but the pain is mild, and it fades quickly. Even better, they drive out their stinging cousins, fire ants, which have been tormenting Texans for decades. Now, the bad news: When entomologists say "crazy," they mean it.

"When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back," Ed LeBrun, an invasive species researcher at the University of Texas, told the Los Angeles Times. "Fire ants are in many ways very polite. They live in your yard. They form mounds and stay there, and they only interact with you if you step on their mound."

Crazy ants on the other hand? They swarm madly over anything and everything, whether it's outside your home or not. With no natural predators, their colonies grow to 100 times the size of those of the typical ant colony. Homeowners have been known to sweep them out of houses with a broom. Also, crazy ants have developed an expensive taste for electronics. Computer mice are one example, but also transformers and electrical switches, where the carcasses of large numbers of shocked ants can cause short circuits and clog switching mechanisms.

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Via.

Sometimes a chair is just a chair. Sometimes, when it comes in a suspiciously heavy package from Mexico, it's not.

To the naked eye, the UPS parcel contained nothing but an ordinary wooden folding chair and two paintings. Not precisely the "wooden frames" described on the shipping manifest, but nothing that isn't shipped across the country hundreds or thousands of times every day.

But U.S. Customs agents at the UPS distribution center in Louisville, Kentucky were suspicious. Partly because the Dallas-bound package was shipped from Mexico, and partly because, at 50 pounds, it seemed suspiciously heavy.

Agents ran the box through an x-ray scanner, which is how they discovered what was inside. They also discovered that some sections of the chair were denser than others, which was odd, seeing as the wood should have had a consistent density. Drilling into one of the dense sections revealed a white powder: meth.

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The suburbs stir up a lot of associations in the popular imagination. It covers territory as diverse as Leave It to Beaver and Blue Velvet. What the 'burbs don't usually evoke is poverty. For decades the war on poverty has been fought mostly in urban centers, but according to a new study out today from the Brookings Institute, the battlefield has shifted to their outskirts.

The report, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, surveyed 95 metropolitan areas in the U.S. The research shows that between 2000 and 2011, while the number of Americans living below the poverty line in cities rose 29 percent, the number living in suburban areas rose 64 percent. In Dallas-Fort Worth specifically, the number of suburban poor doubled between 2000 and 2011, from 224,443 to 474,023, giving DFW the 12th highest growth rate out of all the cities surveyed.

The study cites many factors for these trends: lack of affordable housing, job sprawl, immigration, economic issues. The authors note that these were causing an increase in suburban poverty well before the recession hit, but the economic downturn exacerbated the problem in some areas.

See also:
Cities Are Now Growing Faster Than Suburbs -- Except in Dallas, Of Course
Mark Cuban Takes to Forbes to Remind Us That He, Too, Was Once Poor

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