A controversial new state law that would’ve required Texas abortion clinics to bury or cremate any fetal tissue removed during procedures will not go into effect as scheduled on Feb. 1. San Antonio-based U.S. District Judge David Ezra ruled Monday afternoon that the requirement would likely place “significant burdens on…
Two years ago in a gushing “interactive” story, The Dallas Morning News described the new Margaret McDermott Bridge across the Trinity River downtown as “heavy metal ballet,” saying the city’s second cable-stayed bridge, named for a wealthy Dallas socialite, was “as much art as engineering.” Maybe more ballet than engineering…
Forget the solar eclipse and get ready for the biggest, most beautiful and elegant moon of the last 156 years, one that’s only appropriate for the night after President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union Address. Early tomorrow morning, the Texas sky will play host to three phenomena that…
The race card is real. But it depends on who uses it for what purpose. Local case in point: Ten days ago, Dallas County Republicans sued in Judge Eric Moyé’s 14th District Court to get 128 Democratic candidates kicked off a March election ballot because, according to the Republicans, there…
A year has passed since the Dallas Observer first reported that a 32-year-old mother of five faced felony child endangerment charges for testing positive for marijuana use while breastfeeding. She said she’d been using cannabis to control her epileptic seizures because she could no longer afford her prescription drugs. Five…
Ted Cruz told a giant lie this week. Actually, it was more like a series of whoppers, designed to roll back his essential role in the 2013 shutdown of the federal government just as Washington emerged from Shutdown 2018. Cruz’s lie came the same week as his claim that anyone…
The Dallas city auditor’s office rolled out its final report late Friday afternoon on the four City Council incumbents voted out in last spring’s municipal elections. The results, which show hundreds of dollars in unaccounted-for meals and event tickets paid for with cash from city-funded officeholder accounts, don’t look great…
The first numbers for the city of Dallas’ cite-and-release program for marijuana enforcement are in, and they’re fairly consistent with the city’s marijuana arrest numbers when Dallas police officers were required to take those busted for pot possession to the county jail. Dallas officers have written 23 citations for marijuana…
At this week’s Dallas City Council meeting, one of those very odd moments occurred when the people up onstage seemed suddenly to fall into a weird other language, Martian or something, and the people out in the peanut gallery were all craning around looking, at each other to see if…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday that if it doesn’t step in to shut down the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program before the end of June, Texas might sue the federal government to end the program. Paxton’s statement came in an amicus brief…
Good Lord. I shrink from opening my Facebook page every morning for the heartbreak I know awaits me there. Wednesday’s was actually on my wife’s page, not mine, but she showed me, which is the same thing — a GoFundMe page for a man with kids, a cop, brother of…
Downtown Dallas appears set to get its first sizable block of affordable housing in nearly a decade with the building of a new residential tower near the newly reopened Dallas High School building on the Central Business District’s eastern edge. The project by Matthews Southwest, the developer behind the old…
A group of mayors led by New Orleans’ Mitch Landrieu, head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, skipped out on a scheduled meeting with President Donald Trump on Wednesday in protest of the U.S. Department of Justice’s threat to issue subpoenas and cut off some federal funds to 23 cities it…
The Harlem Globetrotters are in Dallas, preparing for a couple of their typically zany basketball exhibitions this weekend. The traveling hoops troop took advantage of some time at the Mavs practice facility Wednesday to show off their ball-handling with an assist from Mavs head coach Rick Carlisle and Dirk Nowitzki…
Nearly a week has passed since adjunct professor Daniel Mashburn’s odd actions in his astronomy classroom at Tarrant County College caused his students to flee and call campus police, and he’s still not sure why everyone freaked out. He says he was just trying to make learning fun. “One of…
Seventeen years ago, the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots finished the 2000 NFL season in the same spot, 5-11, well out of the playoff hunt. Both teams featured first-year coaches — Dave Campo for the Cowboys and Bill Belichick for the Patriots. Both teams, although they didn’t know…
Let’s not you and me try to answer the question of whether 2018 will see a huge, biblical, roaring, wrathful, tsunami-sized day of reckoning for Republicans in which they will be abraded from the surface of the earth. For the sake of conversation, we’ll take that as a given. And…
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued G6 Hospitality, the Carrollton-based parent company of Motel 6, in an Arizona federal court Tuesday afternoon. According to the suit, several of the company’s hotels gave guests’ names and personal information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017, leading to…
Josh Johnson had never seen pot trees before. They towered 14 or 15 feet in the air, their limbs blooming with marijuana flowers in the sunlight like rows of cornstalks. They weren’t nearly as tall as the Douglas firs covering the Pacific Northwest mountains nearby, but these plants would produce…
In a Jan. 9 article, the Dallas Observer spoke with Dallas County officials from pretrial services about the changes being made to help reduce the high number of poor people serving time in jail without being convicted of a crime.The changes were a response to the Texas Commission on Jail…
Starting next Monday in the Dallas Police Department’s South Central Patrol Division, a new kind of team will respond to mental health calls placed to 911. Instead of sending just police officers or paramedics, the city will dispatch a three-person team made up of a specially trained police officer, a…
Now that the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area is on the list of 20 finalists for the new Amazon second headquarters, I feel compelled to offer two observations: First of all, there is no such thing as a second headquarters. Companies are like people. It is in their nature to have…
