A Dallas County grand jury has indicted former Dallas City Council member Kevin Felder. Felder is charged with failure to stop and render aid, a third-degree felony, according to county records. Felder was arrested in February after an altercation with an 18 year old riding a scooter in South Dallas…
There is one end-of-year list that’s easier to put together than the rest. When it comes to identifying the most read news stories of the year, there’s no hemming or hawing, no debate in the office or even any critical thinking necessary. The decisions about what goes on this list…
A national civil rights group is asking a Texas court to rule against an anti-affirmative action organization that’s seeking to have the University of Texas’ admissions policy declared unlawful. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a Washington-based nonprofit, filed a petition in intervention last week in Students for…
I learned this week in a piece by Shawn Shinneman at D Magazine that the city of Dallas is paying lawyers to sue the Texas Attorney General in district court in Austin to get out of turning over Mayor Eric Johnson’s daily calendar. Let me just run that by you…
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, as everyone scrambled to figure out what a Donald Trump presidency would look like in reality rather than in their worst nightmares or wildest dreams, one thing no one could have predicted was the rise of a certain East Texas congressman. Louie Gohmert,…
The Dallas County Commissioner’s Court unanimously voted in favor of Dallas County continuing to be a place of initial resettlement for refugees. The resolution follows similar support from the city of Dallas and Fort Worth.
When I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times last week by William H. Webster (the only person ever to have been director of both the FBI and then the CIA), I wanted to believe every word, because essentially he was calling President Donald Trump an idiot, which…
Several hundred people rallied outside of Rep. Colin Allred’s offices in Richardson on Tuesday evening in support of the congressman’s planned vote for impeachment. For more than an hour, they chanted anti-Trump slogans and waved signs at passing cars. Some drivers sped off, others laid on their horns in solidarity…
Holiday gift shopping often entails walking the tightrope between creativity and desperation and, occasionally, falling off into one or the other. Companies, too, seem to enjoy threading the thin line in hopes of continuing to sustain our interest long enough that we pony up and buy whatever they’re peddling this…
In a broad sense, this is all Beto O’Rourke’s fault. If the former U.S. representative had just listened — to activists, party insiders, polls or basically anyone not living in his own head — and run for U.S. Senate rather that president, Texas Democrats would already be in general election…
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case involving the criminalization of homelessness, letting stand an appeals court ruling that an ordinance banning camping on the streets in Boise was unconstitutional. “As long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people…
Social media is doing its best to destroy the news industry. Temperamental algorithms shift page views — oxygen for publications like the Observer — up or down, seemingly on a whim. Anonymity means abuse flows freely from trolls to journalists, further wearying reporters working in newsrooms that have already seen their…
On Tuesday morning, three police cruisers shepherded two trucks through the empty streets of South Dallas. Every few blocks, the caravan stopped in front of a homeless encampment and a small army of men in white coveralls jumped out to clear it away. Tommy Renfrow, who had pitched his tent…
Hallelujah, the angels sing, after all. Well, my version of angels. My better angels are those local public officials who have integrity, intelligence and guts. They’re better than the ones who don’t, right? Last week a posse of better angels stepped up, including a few who were unelected citizens, and…
Dallas has the fifth highest rate of traffic fatalities in the country. This week, the City Council approved the creation of a task force to address the issue and adopted goals to reduce fatalities in the future.
Southwest Airlines workers will get a nine-figure piece of their Dallas-based employer’s settlement with Boeing, the airline announced Thursday. The settlement comes with the Boeing 737 MAX, a key component of both Southwest’s and American Airlines’ fleets, still grounded because of two crashes that killed more than 300. The terms…
East Texas congressman and friend of the Observer Louie Gohmert is, as one might imagine, having himself quite the time during the U.S. House’s impeachment hearings. Several times a day, whether any of his colleagues like it or not, Gohmert gets five minutes alone with the House Judiciary Committee microphone and…
Nearly a fifth of the nation’s youngest uninsured children live in Texas, a stark reminder that the state has some of the most restrictive policies in the nation governing healthcare benefits for its most vulnerable residents. More than 8% of Texan children under the age of 6 are not insured, according…
Six years later, the legal battle between Dallas and Kelvion Walker is over. Wednesday afternoon, the Dallas City Council voted unanimously to give Walker $610,000, settling an ongoing federal lawsuit over a 2013 shooting. In December 2013, Dallas Police Department officer Amy Wilburn shot Walker as Walker sat in the…
The mayor wants an answer to the city’s astronomical murder rate — twice San Antonio’s, four times Austin’s — right away from the city manager. I can think of a quick way to get there. Release the record of 911 calls from Jim’s Car Wash. Wait. I’m serious. This is about…
President Donald Trump had a Hanukkah reception at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. That would’ve been weird enough, given that the president told an Israeli American organization Saturday that they had “no choice” to vote for him because Elizabeth Warren would “take 100% of (their) wealth away,” but Trump…
There’s a condition, one you’ve probably heard of if you’ve happened on any right-wing media over the last three years or have any acolytes of the president in your social circle, called Trump Derangement Syndrome. The idea is that Democrats and progressives have been driven to the brink by President…
