Rakem Balogun and his son were asleep in their apartment early one December morning about two years ago when they woke up to the sound of a crash. Balogun, a North Texas activist, got out of bed and walked into his living room. From where he was standing, he couldn’t…
The 2019 offseason continues to be about anything but football for the Dallas Cowboys and their star running back, Ezekiel Elliott. Tuesday afternoon, Ronnie Hill sued Elliott and the team for interfering with police during the aftermath of a 2017 crash near the Cowboys headquarters at The Star in Frisco…
The other proverbial shoe finally dropped Tuesday. Two Collin County companies, set to be subject to Dallas’ new paid sick leave ordinance because of the amount of time their employees work in Dallas, sued the city with the help of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Dallas’ ordinance violates the companies’…
After having heard Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ interview with KTVT’s Bill Jones on Monday, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Cowboys not-so-kindly old owner might finally be getting it when it comes to the ongoing drama with running back Ezekiel Elliott. Jones, as children often do, expressed a…
Maybe Sen. Ted Cruz’s battle with big tech is more personal than we thought. Sure, he can wail to his heart’s content about supposed anti-conservative bias on the part of Facebook, Twitter and Google. Maybe that’s what he’s worried about. Or maybe Cruz is looking out for No. 1 and…
When the Texas Legislature wrapped up its session in May, lawmakers sent a series of bills to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk designed to put pressure on the state’s colleges and universities to do something about sexual misconduct on their campuses. The new requirements outlined in those bills come at a…
Over his lifetime, Barney Smith designed, decorated and collected roughly 1,400 toilet seat lids. The master plumber-turned-artist died Tuesday at the age of 98. From art and knickknacks to spoons, coins and stamps, human beings have amused themselves by accumulating large quantities of similar items for thousands of years. Janet…
A month ago, there was a legitimate question about what the Rangers should do at Major League Baseball’s July 31 trade deadline. They were solidly in contention for a playoff spot — albeit a wild card — and making fans and media alike wonder whether they’d undervalued what looked, at…
Former Mayor Laura Miller and former City Council members Scott Griggs, Angela Hunt and Philip Kingston may no longer be at City Hall, but their ideas are still there, because they were right. Like the river that runs through the heart of the city, those ideas will persist no matter…
Forget Cowboys training camp in Oxnard. Forget Ezekiel Elliott’s impending holdout, Dak Prescott’s contract worries and Jason Witten’s exhumation from cold storage. Definitely don’t think about Joey Gallo’s injured hamate bone, the trade deadline or how many games in a row the Rangers need to win to get themselves back…
More than 300,000 Texans could lose food assistance benefits under proposed changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, according to statistics from Governing Magazine. The estimated 302,800 Texans affected is the highest number of vulnerable SNAP recipients in any state in the nation, according to the magazine…
Here at your friendly Observer news vertical, our email inboxes are inundated daily with pitches about this report or that study, which purports to show, usually to some advertising end, something about North Texas. Most of them get ignored, but, occasionally, we’ll get some data that’s interesting enough to pass along…
Last week, D Magazine posted an interesting piece by Peter Simek about gentrification. The setup gave me pause. Something about the Jim Lake Co. telling me gentrification is good for me summoned unpleasant memories of my Grandma Alice and Pepto Bismol. My brothers and I suspected her of owning stock…
Mostly, Wednesday’s testimony from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller to the U.S. House Intelligence and Judiciary committees came off exactly as one would’ve suspected. Democratic members of the committees pushed Mueller to make definitive statements about potential crimes committed by President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign and his first…
Wednesday’s decision from a three-judge panel in federal court in San Antonio reads like a really good joke. There’s the buildup, in which they repeatedly blast Texas’ Republican-controlled legislature for its racially discriminatory 2011 redistricting, that gets you leaning in one direction. Then there’s the punchline that nearly gives you…
Walking to his ride-share pickup point and smoking a cigarette after a late show at the Twilite Lounge, a man, who has asked to remain anonymous, was approached by two men who asked him for a light. One of the men lit what looked like a blunt, appeared to take…
There was never any way Dallas was going to make it all the way to Aug. 1 without a legal challenge to its paid sick leave ordinance, but now it’s official: the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the conservative think tank helping represent business groups suing to stop similar ordinances in…
Our basic rights: that’s one thing. Very important. I’m a huge fan of basic rights. But I also don’t want people to get shot. So I’ve been wondering lately if here in Dallas we need to have a second conversation. If, like me, you really don’t want to get shot,…
A third, previously unidentified domino has fallen in the federal corruption case involving late former City Council member Carolyn Davis and low-income housing developer Ruel Hamilton. According to documents filed in federal court, the go-between for alleged bribery payments between Hamilton and Davis pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony…
There are a lot of ways Sen. John Cornyn could have gone after Dallas state Sen. Royce West, the newest entrant into Texas’ Democratic Senate primary. They could have suggested that West was out of touch after nearly 30 years in office, or maybe too close to U.S. Rep. Eddie…
Count this among the many, many times when discretion would’ve been the better part of valor. At about five minutes to 9 a.m. Monday, according to the time stamp on a dash cam video uploaded to YouTube, commuters heading north out of downtown Dallas on I-35 saw something they had…
A Dallas County jury has found a former Mesquite Police Department officer not guilty in his second trial for aggravated assault after shooting an unarmed man twice in the back in 2017. Derick Wiley’s first trial in 2018 ended with a hung jury. Wiley shot Lyndo Jones after responding to…
