When Dallas City Council members first entertained the idea of doing away with the city’s 18-year-old bike helmet requirement two weeks ago, they left promising to give the proposal “strong consideration.” At this morning’s meeting of the Quality of Life committee, it became clear that they will do way more…
Joel Burns probably isn’t the only person in Fort Worth irritated that The Weather Channel’s app shows pictures of Dallas when it delivers forecasts for Cowtown. But the soon-to-be-former Fort Worth City Councilman, whose 2010 “It Gets Better” speech went viral, is the only one to merit a bitchy response…
Your friendly neighborhood strip club, it’s safe to say, is no fan of the $5-per-patron “pole tax” the Texas legislature saw fit to levy in 2007. Its displeasure has been expressed in two ways: by refusing to pay (the tax has so far raised less than a third of the…
Dallas knows how to do car ownership. It’s kinda sorta embraced Uber and Lyft. But short-term car rental? That’s to be determined this summer, when the city dips its toe into Zipcar. The inaugural neighborhoods — downtown, the Arts District, Uptown, Oak Lawn and Mockingbird Station — have been selected…
After the Denton City Council had its butt handed to it in court by oil company EagleRidge last Fall, Denton civic leaders decided to pretty much stop fighting EagleRidge altogether and let it drill close to a few residential neighborhoods. Residents complained, but the city said it had no choice,…
Rickey Dale Wyatt walked out of Judge John Creuzot’s Dallas courtroom on January 4, 2012, finally a free man. After 31 years in prison, his 1981 aggravated rape conviction was set aside after Creuzot and District Attorney Craig Watkins’ Conviction Integrity Unit agreed that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence at…
State District Judge Jeanine Howard quickly backtracked on her sentencing of a convicted rapist to volunteer at a rape crisis center after we called her office last week to ask what would happen if no rape crisis center wanted to accept him. “She’s going go back and modify those conditions…
There comes a time in any sustained protest movement when internal disagreements over tactics, over what ends justify what means, over the acceptability of compromise in the name of progress, reach a boiling point. It happened during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. It happened in the during the…
In late March, the parent of a high school cheerleader emailed a tip to the Observer. Last fall, she wrote, Dallas radiologist Dr. James Summa was arrested at a Mesquite High School football game and charged with improper photography for snapping pictures of underage girls. We confirmed the arrest with…
Few people in Dallas ride bikes for transportation. Dallas is a car city, and it will probably still be a car city when future archaeologists comb through the ruins of human civilization and pull our desiccated husks from fossilized car frames. Everyone knows that, but Dallas is far from the…
Earlier this week, the Dallas County District Attorney’s office mysteriously dropped all felony charges against Columbia Packing Co. and its vice president, Joseph Carl Ondrusek Jr., for dumping pig blood into a tributary of the Trinity River in January 2012. Counting last month’s dismissal of the charges against Donny Ondrusek…
On Wednesday afternoon, as the Dallas City Council gathered in a Trinity River Audubon Center conference room overlooking a shrunken pond and sea of marsh grass, there was a solid thunk of bird hitting glass. No one seemed to notice, save for maybe the security guard standing at attention with…
Johnson & Johnson is known as the family company. Except for when it sells defective medical implants that destroy patients’ genitals.As I reported in last week’s feature story, over 17,000 women, including some in Dallas, are suing Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, Ethicon, for its transvaginal mesh products. The…
It was the winter of our discontent, 2009. A season of bank failures, massive layoffs and $5-a-gallon gasoline. Finally, a fractured country could at least agree on one thing: This had to change. So President Barack Obama set out to deactivate the next bomb awaiting the U.S. economy, the one…
OK, we need a new word here, people. Help us out. Something that describes a simultaneous feeling of great joy and nausea, laughing with delight while urping up a little bit at the same time. That word, whatever it might be, describes the reaction here at Unfair Park headquarters to…
The exciting part of the Virgin/Southwest/Delta feud for America Airlines’ two up-for-grabs gates at Love Field (i.e. Richard Branson crowd-surfing and doing tequila shots at The Rustic) is over. Today was the excruciatingly boring part when the Dallas City Council spent a couple of hours debating who it thinks should…
Synthetic marijuana — K2 and its chemical analogues — is the scary-new-drug du jour in Dallas, having sent somewhere close to 100 users to local emergency rooms in the past week. Even scarier: This represents a spike of only 50 percent. Baylor alone treats 70 fake-weed overdoses per month. Parkland…
On Tuesday, some 18 years after shooting 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent in the back and stuffing her body in a deep freezer, and three years after Jack Black played him in the Hollywood retelling, Bernie Tiede walked from a Carthage courtroom a free man. The former mortician, now 55, had been…
Global climate change is real, it’s caused by people, and it will have a significant, often unpredictable impact on the United States and the human beings who live here. Those are the takeaways from the third-ever National Climate Assessment, an 840-page, congressionally mandated tome released by the White House on…
We interrupt your usual weekly news messages to bring you an early weather report. We do this partially because the weather for this weekend looks pretty boring, as long as you consider your internal organs melting to be boring, and because Thursday brings the best chance of Pete Delkus rolling…
If Fred Jackson wins his bid for Justice of the Peace in the upcoming Democratic Primary, lawbreakers should prepare to face a man packing a hard, award-winning body under his judicial robe. Here are other things they should prepare for: a DWI conviction when he was a cop in which…
There is a YouTube clip, jerky and brief, posted by his mother, showing Wilmer-Hutchins High School’s Troy Causey Jr. going head-to-head against Madison’s Johnathan Turner. Causey opens the game with a put-back jam. Turner responds with one on the other end. Two months later, on March 23, Dallas police say…
