Accusations, with accompanying audio, have been flying throughout the city of Dallas’ fight with the Khraish family. At stake are the fates of the tenants of the hundreds of rent homes that the Khraishes own in West and South Dallas. The city, through Mayor Mike Rawlings and West Dallas City…
Most of the good stuff already happened in the primary. Since North Texas’ local and federal electoral districts are so gerrymandered, the real election fights are usually of the intra-party variety and happen in the spring. DFW does not have a single competitive U.S. House race, and both of Texas’…
Nina Pham’s time as poster child for Ebola is coming to an end, a little more than two years after contracting the Ebola virus while working as a nurse at Dallas’ Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Monday afternoon, Pham and Presbyterian’s parent company, Texas Health Resources, announced that they’d settled Pham’s lawsuit…
Christine Schenk’s daughter was walking their two dogs when she found Max living as a stray in their neighborhood. As fluffy and lovable as Max is, he still doesn’t have a permanent home. With two other dogs and a cat, there simply isn’t enough space for the five-year-old Great Pyrenees…
As early voting starts across Texas this week, the remainder of the state’s early voting law is still largely inscrutable. Sure, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has slapped down the state for implementing a voter ID law that the court ruled unduly effected the state’s poor and minorities,…
Police are searching for Zuzu Verk, a 22-year-old student from North Texas attending school in Alpine, Texas. Her family has traveled from Coppell to West Texas to be close to the search, which has been ongoing since Oct. 12. On Friday, police increased the reward for information to $50,000. …
Figuring out the Slumlord Battle Requires Us to Look Beyond Stereotypes
Project Veritas unleashed a maelstrom on Hillary Clinton’s campaign last week when founder James O’Keefe’s two-part investigation “Rigging the Election” appeared to show two Democratic political operatives, Robert Creamer and Scott Foval, discussing political dirty tricks to win elections. O’Keefe has center stage, but it’s executive director Russell Verney who…
We know you’re busy. Here’s a quick roundup of the news off the week from the Dallas Observer. DISD is Buying an Anti-Bully App They Claim Works When Students Don’t Use It In its first year, Principal Reny Lizardo says that the app averaged 5 to 10 reports a month…
Dear Stoner: I’ve been smoking pot for a few years, but in the last six months I’ve started smoking more as I drink less (I’m 25). My parents have always been against marijuana, but I want to be honest with them if I continue to partake. How should I break…
On Thursday, Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) announced a Mesquite resident became the 50th case of West Nile infection in Dallas County in 2016. This is a milestone moment, and one we’ll commemorate with a roundup of news from this season of the mosquito-borne disease. The Zika virus…
Khraish H. Khraish, the landlord locked in battle with the city over houses in West Dallas that the city says are substandard, says he met with Mayor Mike Rawlings and City Council Member Monica Alonzo Thursday morning to offer a settlement including the sale of more than 300 properties to…
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has made himself perfectly clear: An order he issued in August to stop the Obama administration from enforcing guidelines that would push school districts to allow transgender students to choose which restroom and locker rooms they use applies everywhere in the U.S. Texas Attorney General…
Dallas police reported two shootings by officers in the past five days, both of them working plainclothes investigations. Yesterday at about 9:40 a.m., a plainclothes cop working the 3500 block of Virginia Boulevard spotted what he was looking for — a vehicle that he believed has been carjacked the night…
Dear City Council Members Who Fought For Tougher Rental Housing Standards: It’s not your fault. The mess that Mayor Mike Rawlings has stirred up with landlords and tenants in West Dallas is not the product of the rental housing reform that you passed last month. Nor is it evidence necessarily…
What might have driven 30-year-old murder suspect Charles Bryant to kill 21-year-old Texas Woman’s University student Jacqueline Vandagriff, then partially dismember her body and set it aflame near the shores of Grapevine Lake in early morning hours of Sept. 14? It’s a question The Dallas Morning News reported a Tarrant County…
“I don’t want to talk about bad guy,” the 5-year-old told Cook Children’s Hospital psychologist Phillip Breedlove. Her adoptive parents, John and Georgiana Tufts of Denton, told one of her peer’s parents that she came from an abusive family in Poland. But in late August, police in Denton were interviewing her …
Bullies beware: There is an app coming to Dallas Independent School District. And taxpayers beware, officials there say they know it works because students aren’t using it. The app is called Safetips, and it’s been the focus of a three-year test run at a single school in Arlington, Carter Jr. High School…
The accusation against Khraish H. Khraish, who with his father owns hundreds of cheap rental houses in South Oak Cliff and West Dallas, is that he’s a slumlord who doesn’t maintain his houses within the requirements of city building codes, subjecting tenants to vicious living conditions. So how is it…
Mark Miller, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, took the stage at Gilley’s last night to warm up the crowd for Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate Bill Weld. He propped up presidential candidate Gary Johnson and railed against the two mainstream opponents, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with a…
Crying Jordan is one of the weirdest, best, memes on the internet. Born out of Michael Jordan’s tearful Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech, it plasters the greatest basketball player of all time’s crying mug on anyone or anything that’s had a particularly tough moment. It’s a little cruel, but…
Let’s get real about what’s really going on with the Khraish family, called slumlords by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and WFAA Channel 8 for shutting down 300 low-rent houses in West Dallas and South Oak Cliff. This is a land play. The city has offered no provision, no contingency, no…
