Good news if you’re Rachel Dolezal or Navin Johnson. State troopers, at the direction of the Texas Department of Public Safety, are now going to classify you as being a part of whatever race you tell them you are. The change comes after an Austin TV (KXAN) station discovered that…
Eleven weeks later, the Oak Lawn community is getting the police attention it’s been demanding. Since September 1, the area immediately surrounding the gay friendly Cedar Springs strip has seen at least 12 people attacked. Some victims were robbed and many ended up in the hospital. Geoffrey Hubbard, a bartender at…
The Cowboys did not do what they needed to do after Tony Romo went down with a collarbone injury during the team’s week two win against the Eagles. They needed to win at least two of the seven games Romo would end up missing. Even one would have been nice…
Two weeks ago, Ben Sandifer took off from his job as an accountant and headed down to City Hall to plead with the City Plan Commission to vote against rezoning a portion of the Texas Horse Park. He didn’t have a problem with the zoning change per se, which was…
As has been made abundantly clear over the last couple of weeks, some Texas Republicans are feeling pretty … well … pissy about Dallas changing some language in its 13-year-old-plus nondiscrimination ordinance. For the most part, they — here’s looking at you state Senator Don Huffines, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick…
Just talking about making any changes to Fair Park that might affect the State Fair of Texas is enough to get Dallas worked up. We do so love the fair. That explains why City Hall was packed Wednesday for a City Council briefing — just that, not even a whiff…
Dallas, a city that has repeatedly gotten in trouble for concentrating its affordable housing in poor, blighted areas, safely away from white people, is now being praised for housing poor people on a site that used to be contaminated with lead. So, hey, we’re finally doing something right. The Environmental…
Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez’s decision to change the way her office deals with undocumented immigrants held in the county jail keeps seemed simple enough. Some immigrants charged with certain nonviolent crimes would be released as soon as they made bail, even if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked for…
Please welcome back for a return engagement, Joe Pappalardo, who takes over as the Observer’s editor on December 7. Longtime readers with good memories — we’re pretty sure they exist — will remember Joe from his time as a staff writer here 15 years ago. He recalled us fondly, as…
Late at night in January 2014, a group of teenage boys walked into the bedroom of a neighbor without being invited, claims a Southlake police report. They asked for a grinder, which, the Southlake PD’s report explains, “is commonly used with marihuana.” The boys left and the neighbor called 911…
People who want to work for Dallas County and have a criminal record will now have a much easier time getting a foot in the door. The county will no longer ask questions about applicants’ criminal backgrounds on initial job applications. The move comes after a bill by Dallas state…
Demonstrating the frontier spirit of self-reliance so praised by Texas’ conservative lawmakers, at least 100,000 women have escaped an abortion industry reeling from a law that closed about half the state’s abortion clinics. House Bill 2, the tough anti-abortion bill the Legislature passed in 2013, has left large swaths of the…
Texas Governor Greg Abbott came out punching hard and fast after last week’s terrorist assault on Paris, making it clear Monday he would be doing everything he can to keep refugees from the humanitarian crisis in Syria, or at least not in Texas. “Given the tragic attacks in Paris and…
On Friday morning in the bowels of the Frank Crowley Courts building, Dallas County’s leading criminal justice policymakers reminisced about the bad ol’ days at the Lew Sterrett jail. County Commissioner John Wiley Price recalled the time five years ago when the county, faced with a choice between drastically trimming…
Kept my mouth shut until it was said and done. Best I can do for you, conflict of interest-wise. Now I have to blurt it out. I am so glad that damned house near me on Live Oak Street, the “wedding venue,” is down and reduced to rubble at long…
It’s not “balanced” journalism if you compare the right big toe to the left big toe but neglect to mention the elephant. The elephant in the room of school reform here and nationwide has always been seniority pay. With distinguished intellectual defenders like author Diane Ravitch as their standard-bearers and…
You’re forgiven if you have trouble keeping straight all the times that the Johnson & Johnson has gotten in trouble. In recent years, the pharmaceutical maker has faced an FBI investigation over a surgical device that caused doctors to accidentally spread cancer in women, multibillion-dollar criminal penalties for marketing a…
Trinity toll road … CONFIRMED! Hah. Not really. Relax. We’re just tossing out a little hip ‘net cultural reference for you to kick off our list of DFW’s favorite all-time vaporware. For those of you who have never played a PC game, let us ‘splain: Vaporware is a product, usually…
You can glean many lessons from the recent tension at the University of Missouri, the most trenchant being that life for minority students on many college campuses sucks, which college administrators seem ill-equipped to understand. And then there’s this: A new generation of social-media apps has emerged that provide young people…
Dez Bryant is understandably frustrated. His team, this year at least, is bad. The Cowboys are 2-6 and the team’s November has been dominated by Greg Hardy, after the release of further evidence in the defensive end’s alleged beating of Hardy’s ex-girlfriend. Thursday, Bryant took out a lot of that…
The easy argument to make is that people shouldn’t move to neighborhoods known for the nightlife and then complain about the nightlife. But have any of you intelligent, classy Observer readers partied in Uptown recently? Who among us really wants to go on the record defending Kung Fu Saloon, the Uptown…
Who in Dallas could better express the way Dallas worships things — football and otherwise — than members of the Staubach clan? What they have to say about woman-beating and the Dallas Cowboys football team, specifically player Greg Hardy, is doubly interesting. It tells us something about ourselves. It tells…
