Dallas Police confirm that they were called to the radio station KHVN Monday after Dwaine Caraway and John Wiley Price got into a physical altercation. Price and Caraway were at the station for a debate ahead of their March 1 primary battle for the Democratic nomination for the District 3…
Dear Respected Supreme Leaders of the City: I see what you’re up to. I applaud your motives and the goal you seek to achieve. Your motives are my motives. Your goal is my goal. But I still think you’re kind of retarded. All of a sudden and out of the…
Late last week, DART provoked a bit of a fervor when the transit agency’s police chief told The Dallas Morning News’ Brandon Formby that the long awaited security cameras finally being stalled on DART’s light rail trains would be equipped with facial recognition software. DART is a lot of things,…
Between now and May 4, Tent City’s 300-plus residents will have to find a new home. The city set the deadline late Thursday after intensive discussions with the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, neighbors and homeless service providers. The encampment, which sprawls for about a mile beneath Interstate 45 just southeast of…
Ethan Couch, the affluenza-afflicted drunk driving teen who killed four people in a 2013 Tarrant County crash, is finally getting his day in adult court. Couch’s juvenile probation would’ve expired in April, on his 19th birthday. Friday morning — in front of his father, Fred Couch, and the families of…
United Development Funding is having a no good, terrible, very bad month. A visit from FBI agents yesterday is the latest trouble for the embattled firm. During the first week of February, Kyle Bass, who runs Dallas’ Heyman Capital hedge fund, shorted UDF’s Nasdaq stock, basically betting that UDF’s stock…
In Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House, written in installments in 1852 and ’53, the central character is not a person but a lawsuit, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” which Dickens describes as an endless and bottomless morass of “trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration [and] false pretences.” The suit ensures that “whole families…
Texas horse racing, if you believe the people most dependent on it, is now doomed to die a slow death. Thursday morning, the Texas Racing Commission, in a 5-4 vote, decided to take a rule allowing historical racing terminals at Texas horse tracks off the books. Historical racing terminals are…
Ostensibly, all the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs was doing Wednesday was addressing Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s charge that, between sessions, the Texas Senate take a look at protecting religious liberties in the state — something that, it should be noted, means different things to different people. That happened…
Richard Gladden might be considered a superhero among civil rights activists if he weren’t representing one of the most despised segments of the population: sex offenders. The 55-year-old attorney has been defending them in court for more than a decade, fighting for their rights in a society hell-bent on taking…
Police broke up a phone scam in Georgia, aimed squarely at North Texas, that originated in a Georgia prison. The result is that the Flower Mound Police Department closed 53 officer impersonation cases Wednesday. Each of the cases involved inmates using a Flower Mound officer’s name in an attempt to…
Tent City, the sprawling homeless encampment beneath Interstate 45 just southeast of downtown, has claimed its second victim in a month. Dallas police responded to a stabbing call at Tent City just before 6 p.m. on Tuesday. There, in a patch of dirt near Hickory Street, they found the body…
The first place the mind wandered following the death of Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was, for a lot of people, conspiracy. Even the Observer was not immune. The second obvious place, especially for those who live in Texas, was the effect the jurist’s death might have on Whole…
For once the typical Texas shoot-first personality turns out to be a plus. We’ve been having a lot of daytime coyote sightings in my part of East Dallas lately, so I’ve been reading up. Robert Timm, a University of California wildlife specialist, has found that coyote attacks on pets are…
Avi Adelman is a free man. Dallas Area Rapid Transit informed Adelman on Tuesday that the agency is dropping criminal trespassing charges. Adelman, a self-described citizen journalist and well-known gadfly, was arrested by DART police while photographing an incident at Rosa Parks Plaza, a transit hub in downtown Dallas. “A…
The elephant in Dallas ISD’s living room is segregation. Has been for decades. Before 1970, when Sam Tasby sued to force the district to integrate, the issue was the Jim Crow-style separation of blacks and whites. Since then, it’s been the flight of whites (who now account for 4 percent…
Dallas is at the edge of a wonderful and terrible moment. Nobody else is going to be able to help us, because nobody outside the city will get it. We’re about to finally try to crack the hard nut of racial segregation and concentrated poverty in our city. The trick…
The GOP’s 2016 South Carolina primary is doing what primaries in the Palmetto State are wont to do: getting really, amusingly nasty really quickly. The home state of the patron saint of dirty tricks, the Boogie Man himself, Lee Atwater, wouldn’t have it any other way. Monday morning, Texas Senator…
Tanya Ragan insists on meeting at night. “DPD shift change around 11 p.m.,” she explains in a text message. “It is a different world at sundown.” It’s 10 p.m. when she pulls out of the parking lot of the Green Door, a pub in a building she owns by the…
There are plenty of conspiracy theories floating around out there claiming political opponents murdered Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to open up a seat on the court. Radio talk show host Alex Jones, never one to pass up an opportunity to stir the pot, said he feels this happened “in his…
The dirty old man in the wrinkled raincoat lurks behind a tree with a bag of candy in a neighborhood just like any other neighborhood. Seconds, minutes, hours have passed on a day like any other school day and still he stands and waits, hungrily licking his lips when the…
To untrained ears, it can sound strange, sometimes even a little threatening. Ted Cruz or one of his representatives, out on the campaign trail, will say something that sounds a lot like someone pushing for theocracy — like someone who views the constitutional separation of church and state as a…
