For the past three-plus years, Dallas County District Judge Carlos Cortez has been fighting to keep potentially damaging allegations about his personal life secret. On Wednesday, Cortez lost the fight. A Texas appeals court decided that, even though none of the allegations against him resulted in a formal determination of…
Two thousand years ago, give or take, the Romans nailed Jesus to a cross and left him to die. Since then, he has become the centerpiece of one of the world’s dominant religions, revered by billions, inspiring wars and reconciliations and serving as a muse for innumerable works, both quotidian…
Hussein Mohamed took a hard road to America. Born into a minority clan in a nation rife with ethnic conflict, the boyish 24-year-old with gangly limbs and intense brown eyes describes fleeing his village in Somalia in 2012 after gunmen threatened to kill him. Mohamed says he was forced to…
A lot of words were spoken at today’s joint meeting of the Dallas City Council and Dallas ISD board of trustees. Most were on point, for or against the call to draft a home-rule charter. Some were illuminating. Almost all were delivered with passion. It was, all in all, a…
When the Frisco Police Department discovered the body of 10-year-old Arnav Dhawan in his Frisco home, they said, he was lying in a dry bathtub with a cloth wrapped around him, surrounded by plastic bags. His mother, Pallavi Dhawan, had arranged him that way, and police claimed in a press…
You know the debate over public schools in Dallas has gone squirrely when retired teacher and education activist advocate Bill Betzen stands before the City Council and offers implicit approval of Mike Miles’ tenure as DISD superintendent. Betzen, speaking in advance of a council discussion on the home-rule proposal for…
If you didn’t stay up late on Monday night to witness the “Blood Moon,” fear not. The cosmos have conveniently scheduled three reruns over the next two years. Can’t wait six months? Observer freelancer Mike Mezeul II has you covered. He’s the guy who shot the time-lapse photo you’ve probably…
Sandy Vasquez and her 13-year old son, Ethan, were driving west through the M Streets Tuesday morning, apparently en route to school at William B. Travis Academy, when a stolen minivan ran a stop sign and broadsided their Nissan Versa. The car, as the photos show was demolished. Vasquez was…
With sex crimes, particularly those relating to children, the fair administration of justice sometimes takes a backseat to the urge to punish. Just glancing at the headline of the Tarrant County district attorney’s announcement of a 70-year prison sentence for failing to register as a sex offender might suggest 69-year-old…
Dallas Midtown, the mixed-use wonderland that will replace the decrepit Valley View Center, will have everything a modern urbanist could want. If everything lives up to developer Scott Beck’s vision, there will be several thousand apartments and condos, hundreds of thousands of feet of office and retail space, artists to…
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has consistently said that fracking has no significant impact on air quality, not in the Barnett Shale. Not in the Eagle Ford Shale. Not anywhere. It was news, then, when a TCEQ-funded study, performed by the Alamo Area Council of Governments, a San Antonio-area…
Rodrick Tippett got off relatively easy for the pair of burglaries he committed in 2009. After six months behind bars, the judge changed what had been a six-year penitentiary sentence to six years of probation. The fact that one of his victims had been his sister does not appear to…
If there was one thing Dallas City Hall would have been wise to take away from the fracking debate, it’s that you shouldn’t mess with Raymond Crawford. He’s the slight, balding, professional needlepointing David to your Goliath. City Hall, however, isn’t so good with lessons, which is why Crawford has…
Endorsements from southern Dallas’ Democratic heavyweights (i.e. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, state Senator Royce West, County Commissioner John Wiley Price) and the natural advantages of an incumbent in a down-ballot race weren’t quite enough to propel Dallas County misdemeanor court judge Etta Mullin to reelection. She won just 36.4 percent…
Saturday, April 5, was drag night at Garlow’s, Gun Barrel City’s one and only gay bar. It also happened to be the night when a half dozen or so of Gun Barrel City’s finest showed up in the parking lot and began pulling over departing patrons for failing to use…
On March 20, 2012, a year before her filibuster against abortion restrictions catapulted her to national stardom and a gubernatorial bid, state Senator Wendy Davis had the singular distinction of having her Fort Worth office firebombed. Davis wasn’t in her office, and no one was injured, but the bag that…
The Perot Museum of Nature and Science is either very bad at building and managing staircases, or is just a convenient entity to blame when people suffer accidents on those staircases. A lawsuit filed last week says that Myung Oh fell down the museum’s concrete steps and injured his neck…
Maybe, just maybe, Dallas has shaken its reputation as the country’s worst city for cycling. Bicycling magazine hasn’t mentioned it in a couple of years, anyway. The city has, however, earned another not-so-welcome distinction. It’s the “least outdoorsy” city in America, according to Outside magazine. We are, apparently, less outdoorsy…
How many dogs and cats are there in Dallas? It’s a hard, maybe impossible figure to nail down with any certainty, but extrapolating from the Humane Society’s U.S. pet-ownership statistics, the number is just north of 600,000. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s pet-ownership calculator gives a slightly smaller but comparable…
The Texas Rangers’ decision to rechristen their stadium the Globe Life Park in Arlington was easy enough to ignore. However lame the name might be — and it’s really, incredibly lame — no one could stop fans from calling it Rangers Ballpark. The blue-and-white Globe Life sign facing outward from…
The accusations leveled last week by Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston were serious: Dallas PD was relaxing standards for its driving- and firearms-training courses to allow unqualified recruits to become cops. More serious, certainly, than his assertion that keeping cops from shooting people, or allowing Avi Adelman to legally…
Severe storm are possible Sunday afternoon/evening!! Large hail, damaging winds & tornadoes are the concern!! pic.twitter.com/ZApq3MBnFv— Pete Delkus (@wfaaweather) April 11, 2014 Last weekend, I was correct about the weather. It was dreadful. The weather, that is, not my forecasting. There’s no stopping me now, not after I’ve got a…
