Competing to be a host city for a global sporting event like the World Cup might seem like a feat akin to winning the lottery, but the city of Dallas, the FC Dallas soccer club and some soccer experts believe the city has a solid shot. “We’re very positive about the…
Charles “Big Charlie” Flores and Richard Childs were searching for money when they slid under the garage door of a one-story brick home on Bergen Street. The Black family had built it in the early 1960s when the one-block neighborhood of Farmers Branch was nothing but pasture. They had raised…
Pity Joppa. With a deep, proud history as a living, breathing freedman’s town, this little gathering of 500 souls in a crook of the Trinity River five miles southeast of downtown is one of the city’s most impoverished places. Still, so many powerful people are always trying to rob Joppa,…
Justin Irwin won’t forget Feb. 14. After losing friends and classmates to an gunman that day in Parkland, Florida, he marched in Dallas’ March For Our Lives to show his support for gun legislation. Irwin was in Dallas to speak at Parkland Moves Us, a March 25 event hosted by…
Jason Call had made it. He’s been tattooing for almost six years and appeared in five tattoo magazines, all sold at Barnes & Noble, and was on the cover of one. His clients travel from all over the U.S. to showcase his art on their bodies. He says he books…
Confessions of a liberal: I loved it, I swooned, I cheered out loud last week when Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren took a verbal flail to Trump’s HUD secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, at a hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. But confessions of an old man:…
Chronic pain patients and their doctors have been sharing their worries with the Observer since the Trump administration announced it was escalating the war on opioids. Some have appeared in articles, more in front of a judge. Some have taken to the streets to secure their needed medication for unbearable pain, paying…
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich, famous for inspiring Julia Roberts’ Oscar-winning performance in Erin Brockovich, is coming to North Texas. Brockovich, who blasted the North Texas Municipal Water District last week for using a common cleaning procedure, announced on Facebook on Tuesday that she’s visiting Plano the first week of April…
City staff is recommending that the city not remove the Confederate memorial next to City Hall, leave it in place instead and ameliorate its effect on the public by placing a plaque nearby with “contextual information.” At Wednesday’s City Council briefing on the issue, it looked as if a majority…
Most everyone in the case of John Doe Jr. and John Doe vs. the Episcopal School of Dallas agrees on this much: John Doe Jr., a student at the pricey private prep school in Northwest Dallas, broke school rules and drove off campus at lunch with a pal without permission…
The city’s Confederate war memorial, cozily situated between City Hall and the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, could be on its way out after a slim majority of the Dallas City Council expressed support for its removal Wednesday. Late last week, it looked like the towering statue might receive a…
After a Feb. 23 gas-leak explosion in Northwest Dallas killed 12-year-old Linda Rogers in her home, emergency crews and Atmos Energy evacuated the surrounding area, cut off gas service and began working around the clock to repair leaky, corroded pipes. As Atmos crews work to restore service, some residents in…
Amid the clamor Tuesday about environmental activist Erin Brockovich’s planned visit to town and a raucous Plano City Council meeting that saw one woman tossed from council chambers for shouting that the city’s water had “more chlorine than a pool,” the city and the North Texas Municipal Water District promised…
Monday afternoon, Cynthia Nixon, better known to most as Miranda from Sex and the City, announced that she’s challenging incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York’s Democratic primary. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Nixon’s a lifelong New York resident with a long history of supporting LGBTQ and public…
The Dallas City Council is debating a new housing policy. During this period of public input and debate, you should closely monitor your banking and credit card accounts, keep all valuables in a safe and locked place, ask any so-called Girl Scouts who come to the door selling cookies for…
Are you a recent college graduate in journalism or mass communications? Really? Didn’t want to learn computer coding, huh? Well, that’s OK because despite what you might have read on Twitter, America still needs reporters who can dig in, get the facts and break news. We at the Dallas Observer…
An op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times reminded me that somebody needs to write a book — maybe I’ll do it — called What White People Think Black People Think. The essay by David Leonhardt was headlined “A winning political issue hiding in plain sight.” It said political research…
Over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz found himself, as he has so often, near the center of the political universe. Not for a good reason, either. In a series of reports released by The New York Times and The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company bankrolled by Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer,…
On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of North Texas students are going to try to do what adults haven’t be able to figure out. They’re going to confront America’s gun violence epidemic in a way that actually gets something done. When the students take to the streets in solidarity with the victims…
There won’t be a recount after all. Just before noon Monday, former Dallas County District Judge Elizabeth Frizell conceded her hard-fought primary for Dallas County district attorney. John Creuzot, also a former district judge, is now officially the Democratic nominee for DA. He’ll take on Faith Johnson, Dallas County’s last…
A Denton County sheriff’s patrol sergeant posted a Craigslist advertisement looking for a “needy twink” who wanted to have sex, according to investigators who arrested the officer on charges of solicitation of a minor. “I’m near UNT,” 46-year-old Weston Jordan wrote in an ad posted Tuesday. “I will host and…
As things stood in November, the last time the Dallas City Council took up Dallas’ Confederate statue problem, it seemed the council was ready to accept the recommendations of the task force hastily assembled by the city this summer after a woman was killed during a fight over the fate…
