The Rangers made a move Friday afternoon that would’ve been unthinkable at the beginning of the season. The team, reeling from the effects of seven losses in nine games, elected to designate Sam Dyson, one of the cornerstones of the team’s 2015 and 2016 division championships, for assignment, giving it…
And then there were three. Following the first round of voting May 6, 11 of Dallas’ 14 City Council races ended with one candidate getting more than 50 percent of the vote and, in doing so, avoiding a runoff. But the three races that remain on the board are the council’s…
Late Friday afternoon, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office issued the first warrant related to the ongoing investigation of potential voter fraud in a recent Dallas City Council race. Allegations of vote tampering dogged the contest between incumbent Monica Alonzo and Dallas County Schools board member Omar Narvaez. Prosecutors charged…
According to multiple reports from Cowboys beat reporters, national outlets and NFL.com, Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott turned over phone records to NFL investigators last week as the league continues to investigate several allegations of domestic violence against Elliott. The news, first reported by USA Today’s Tom Pelissero, indicates that…
Is there anyone out there who doesn’t get what Dallas’ aversion to most government-subsidized affordable housing is really all about? The best answer is in the two kinds of government-subsidized housing Dallas does like. One is government-subsidized housing for seniors. The second, as we are about to see downtown, is…
At the close of the 2017 legislative session, marijuana remains illegal to produce, possess, use or sell in Texas. While cities like Dallas have moved to implement cite-and-release policies, which allow police to send people holding marijuana home with a court summons, the state maintains its stiff penalties for drugs…
The bounty hunters had been staking out their prey for several hours at the Nissan dealership just off Interstate 30 in Greenville. Dressed casually, they claimed when they first arrived Tuesday afternoon that they were plainclothes federal agents trying to apprehend a suspect. They never presented badges. The pair, 33-year-old…
It’s a free country, so just say it: If Dallas wants to use legal means to push poor people into the suburbs – assuming no cattle prods – then Dallas can do it. It’s just too bad our city leaders have to be so smarmy-two-faced about it. We’re hearing a…
Anthony Robinson, a longtime employee of the Dallas County district attorney’s office, avoided federal prison Wednesday despite admitting taking a $200,000 bribe from a man attempting to keep his name off the sex offender registry. Robinson rose through the ranks to become District Attorney Craig Watkins’ chief investigator from 2007…
At about 4 a.m. on a Tuesday in May, a woman in her early 20s woke up to the feeling of a strange man lying on top of her. He’d broken into an apartment in the 2300 block of West Hickory Street in Denton, which has buildings filled with students who…
Dallas’ city officials, the city’s representatives in Austin, representatives for the pension and Dallas’ police and fire associations have been praised for coming together and hammering out a plan to kick the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System toward financial stability. Less has been said about the compromise’s costs to…
For a preview of what Democrats will face in 2018 – here, anyway – take a close look at the District 2 Dallas school board runoff election. The Texas and Dallas Democratic Party organizations think they are reproducing the early Tea Party grassroots successes of 15 years ago by providing…
As the 2017 Texas legislative session winds down, the way Texans will vote remains in flux. There’s a new voter identification law headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, but it’s unclear whether it will pass muster in federal court. A bigger voting rights issue, which threatens the state’s entire congressional…
Irving’s Matt Rinaldi celebrated being named one of the Observer’s worst representatives of the 2017 session with a bang Monday, when he called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a group of people protesting Texas’ new anti-sanctuary city law at the state capitol. During an ensuing skirmish on the Texas floor,…
Have you ever seen the Mailander House in Waco? Or the Gorman House? Surely, you’ve seen the Magnolia House. Each was renovated by Chip and Joanna Gaines on the HGTV show Fixer Upper. The Mailander house in Waco, renovated in Season 1, is beautiful and highly regarded, I am told…
In the late 1950s, my mother, a second-grade teacher, left her job in an affluent all-white suburb of Detroit to teach at an almost all-black school in Pontiac, Michigan. She believed that more cutting edge work was being done there in early education. Not long into her tenure at Bethune Elementary, she…
Nearly three months ago, during the first week of March, the Observer brought you the story of a lonely historical marker in Llano that was targeted by vandals. The state of Texas provides no money to pay for repairs to its historical markers, leaving the costs to the counties where the…
Senate Bill 8, the anti-abortion law sent to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk by the Texas Legislature late Friday afternoon, is a bunch of things rolled into one. It’s a ban on fetal tissue donation. It requires all tissue obtained during an abortion to be buried or cremated, and it…
In addition to being Memorial Day, Monday is also the 140th — and last — day of official business for Texas’ 85th Legislature. As the session wound down, the Observer evaluated the performances of representatives throughout North Texas. Here’s our list of the best and worst DFW had to offer this…
The Federal Elections Committee, like many in Washington, is a pretty partisan body, and usually the way it rules reflects this. But FEC issued a unanimous decision Thursday that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas failed to properly disclose the source of four loans given to his 2012 Senate campaign. In…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings doesn’t usually cast that long of a shadow on social media. He’s content to let his staff run his Facebook and Twitter feeds, which usually stick to general news posts about city business or mayoral appearances. Thursday afternoon, however, Rawlings decided to mix things up on…
I know politics is politics, and the game goes on. But sometimes a foul ball has to be called foul. I’m not accusing anybody of lying. I just want to make sure we set the record straight. On Tuesday night at a speech celebrating the fifth year of his campaign…
