Every now and then, a student walks up to Yazan Naseef in the hallway at Plano East High School and tells him exactly what he thinks of him and his religion. I know how you guys really are, the student says, before railing about how Muslims all want to kill…
The notices began filing into YouTube TV’s subscribers’ inboxes Thursday morning, just after, or just before, the streaming TV service sent out a preemptive tweet. “Starting February 29, 2020,” the email’s third paragraph read, “you will no longer be able to watch live, on demand, or recorded content from your…
The new federal public charge rule took effect temporarily this week, significantly expanding the number of factors immigration authorities weigh when considering green card applications. While the new regulations will absolutely affect Dallas area green card applicants, immigration advocates caution that the rule applies to a very small number of…
Shaquana Persley, Shavon Randle’s mother, told jurors Thursday that her daughter had just celebrated her 13th birthday with a hotel pool party, two days before she was kidnapped, shot and killed in an alleged post-drug robbery revenge plot. “They had some fun,” Persley said, smiling as she remembered her daughter,…
Dallas Area Rapid Transit has announced plans to expand GoPass, its smartphone ticketing platform, to Tulsa. It will mark the agency’s first such partnership outside North Texas. Mark Enoch, chairman of the agency’s public affairs committee, which reviewed the agreement Tuesday, called it a “great milestone.” The agency has sought to recoup…
Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation, already passed by the Senate and more than a century in the making, that would designate lynching as a federal crime. The vote was 410-4. One of those four was East Texas’ Louie Gohmert, a frequent subject of the Observer. Gohmert…
Close your eyes, hold your nose, turn around three times, stamp your foot and say “charter schools.” A vision will appear. No, really. I just noticed it, over on my personal Facebook. Personal Facebook is where the action is for me now. Over here on the Dallas Observer, it’s so…
The big thing, before we peer down the rabbit hole, is that none of the numbers — none of the polling, none of the early vote totals, nothing — is as important as each and every person who is eligible to vote getting out there and casting a ballot over…
Stacy Bailey and the Mansfield school district have settled a 2018 lawsuit that accused district administrators of suspending her for being gay. The district will pay out $100,000 and train staff members on LGBTQ issues but denies any wrongdoing. It will also scrub Bailey’s record of any reference to the…
Thanks to federal Food and Drug Administration regulations, finding flavored Juul disposable nicotine pods in Dallas became a chore earlier this year. That doesn’t mean Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is satisfied. Tuesday, Paxton announced that his office is leading a bipartisan, 39-state investigation into Juul Labs, the company behind…
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas made good on a threat it’s been making for months Tuesday, suing seven East Texas towns in federal court over the towns’ decision to declare themselves sanctuary cities for the unborn. Waskom, which kicked the whole sanctuary cities movement off, is a defendant,…
Are you a socialist if you don’t want families to get blown up in gas well explosions? Is it socialism to try to get your city to live within its means? Clearly, the term socialist will get a stiff workout between now and November. I got a wake-up earlier this…
When voters in Dallas County head to the polls for Texas’ March 3 primary, they’ll be using a new electronic system to cast their ballots that’s designed to combine the ease of electronic touch-screen voting with the security of paper ballots. But recent research has shown that the type of…
For months, Parkland Hospital administrators have been touting a new focus on tackling health disparities in Dallas’ poorest ZIP codes. Now, they’ve released details about how they’ll do it. The hospital is hiring community health workers and plans to deploy them in southern Dallas to help fight heightened mortality rates,…
The basic outlines of the argument could have been surmised from any number of Dallas City Hall disputes that have gone down the last couple of decades. One faction on the City Council wants to do something that they believe could — maybe, they aren’t really sure — do something…
Two years after pushing one of its weekly meetings to the afternoon to better accommodate residents who can’t easily get off work on Wednesday mornings, the Dallas City Council is one step away from moving all of its City Council meetings back to their traditional 9 a.m. start times. Monday,…
Jason Witten isn’t ready to retire again. The legendary tight end, a year removed from his return from the Monday Night Football broadcast booth, said last week that he intends to play in 2020, regardless of whether the Cowboys want him back. Which leads us to this list. No matter…
Many adults in the United States wrongly believe this year’s census will be about citizenship status, and some worry about participating because of it, according to two recent studies. Dallas-area immigrant and refugee organizations say that concern and confusion are symptomatic of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce immigration to…
We here in Dallas must reserve some place in our hearts for the old-school white-shoe Republicans, because, after all, their leader and standard-bearer, Bush XLIII, lives quietly here among us. Perhaps it is appropriate that our city’s only daily newspaper is the one that has devised the template for white…
Days after the Irving-based Boy Scouts of America announced its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, children with the organization set up their tents at Camp Wisdom, one of Texas’ oldest campsites, for a weekend-long camporee. On the second day of the camporee at Camp Wisdom, scouts yelled as they yanked and…
For more than a year, Dallas has been sitting on a report addressing the city’s trash problem. It lays out recommendations for reducing litter and illegal dumping — problems concentrated in historically underserved communities in southern Dallas. Now, according to a top official, the city will be implementing them. The…
It may be a small step, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is putting a little of his money where his mouth is on criminal justice reform. Thursday afternoon, the governor announced a specialized clemency application process for Texas Department of Corrections inmates who were victims of sex trafficking or domestic…
