Native son Beto O’Rourke has plenty of catching up to do if he hopes to win his home state’s Democratic presidential primary, according to a new poll from Emerson College and The Dallas Morning News. Texas’ Democrats would prefer O’Rourke ran for U.S Senate against John Cornyn rather than president,…
Texas 2020 just got even weirder. Late Monday afternoon, former Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, an Observer and tea party favorite, announced she is running for Congress. Van Duyne, most recently an appointee of President Donald Trump to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, will seek the Republican nomination…
Beginning next year, Texas will require nearly all high school seniors to apply for federal financial aid before they graduate, whether they plan on going to college or not. One state to the east, education officials in Louisiana created a similar requirement three years ago. Nearly all high school students…
Whatever happens over the next 15 months, whether President Donald Trump gets reelected and continues his slow-burn destruction of American political norms or a Democrat wins the White House and immediately begins trying to throw 2017-20 way down the memory hole, one piece of the president’s legacy that will endure…
Last week, NBC5 television handed our new mayor, Eric Johnson, his first easy home run pitch to show he can be a leader. A news host asked the mayor to talk about the roiling controversy in heavily poor and minority South Dallas over intensive patrolling of city streets by state…
July is likely to be the hottest month ever recorded on earth. And while the planet has been heating up, so too has been Texas’ renewable energy industry. For the first time in the brief history of wind power, Texas produced more energy from wind than coal, by a small…
The 21-year-old man accused of shooting almost 60 people in El Paso Saturday morning has North Texas ties. Patrick Crusius, identified as the suspect by multiple media reports, graduated from Plano Senior High School in 2017 and lived in Allen, according to Collin County state Rep. Jeff Leach. Police received…
The Dallas Morning News and NBC5 won a three-year campaign Monday for the release of Dallas Police body camera footage showing the last minutes of 32-year-old Anthony Timpa’s life. The video shows the events of the detainment and death of the unarmed man on Aug. 10, 2016. According to the…
The Dallas Police Department needs help. Whether it’s 600 more police officers, better staffing policies, higher salaries or some mix of all three, no one at the department, on the City Council or in the community would dispute that something’s got to give, given the public perception that the city…
Texas Speaker of the House Dennis Bonnen danced with the devil. Now it seems like he might get burned. For the better part of a week, Bonnen has been dealing with the fallout of a totally unforced error that could lead to his losing his role as the third most…
Last week’s proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could result in more than 300,000 Texans losing food aid. Of those people, many are children who are eligible automatically for free or reduced school lunch because their families receive food stamps. Advocates worry that some of those students will…
Researchers at two Texas universities are launching a project to document investigations into teacher misconduct in the state for the last two decades. David Thompson, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Catherine Robert, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, are building a…
Big changes are coming to The Dallas Morning News’ website in September, as the struggling newspaper company teams with the Washington Post in an effort to improve its website. Word of the change came as the Morning News’ parent company A.H. Belo Corp. released its second-quarter financial statement. The good…
Earlier this week, The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial under the headline, “Dallas businesses that become criminal hubs must be held responsible.” The newspaper gave City Hall a pat on the back for filing suit against a Texaco station in far East Dallas: “Ratcheting up pressure against property owners…
The thinking behind former Mayor Mike Rawlings’ “Grow South” campaign was that City Hall needed to encourage investment in the city’s historically segregated and economically shortchanged areas. But what was standing in the way in the first place? Multiple causes are commonly invoked, from active racism to passive unawareness of…
Rakem Balogun and his son were asleep in their apartment early one December morning about two years ago when they woke up to the sound of a crash. Balogun, a North Texas activist, got out of bed and walked into his living room. From where he was standing, he couldn’t…
The 2019 offseason continues to be about anything but football for the Dallas Cowboys and their star running back, Ezekiel Elliott. Tuesday afternoon, Ronnie Hill sued Elliott and the team for interfering with police during the aftermath of a 2017 crash near the Cowboys headquarters at The Star in Frisco…
The other proverbial shoe finally dropped Tuesday. Two Collin County companies, set to be subject to Dallas’ new paid sick leave ordinance because of the amount of time their employees work in Dallas, sued the city with the help of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Dallas’ ordinance violates the companies’…
After having heard Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ interview with KTVT’s Bill Jones on Monday, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Cowboys not-so-kindly old owner might finally be getting it when it comes to the ongoing drama with running back Ezekiel Elliott. Jones, as children often do, expressed a…
Maybe Sen. Ted Cruz’s battle with big tech is more personal than we thought. Sure, he can wail to his heart’s content about supposed anti-conservative bias on the part of Facebook, Twitter and Google. Maybe that’s what he’s worried about. Or maybe Cruz is looking out for No. 1 and…
When the Texas Legislature wrapped up its session in May, lawmakers sent a series of bills to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk designed to put pressure on the state’s colleges and universities to do something about sexual misconduct on their campuses. The new requirements outlined in those bills come at a…
Over his lifetime, Barney Smith designed, decorated and collected roughly 1,400 toilet seat lids. The master plumber-turned-artist died Tuesday at the age of 98. From art and knickknacks to spoons, coins and stamps, human beings have amused themselves by accumulating large quantities of similar items for thousands of years. Janet…
