One of Parkland Memorial Hospital’s new mothers recently showed up with her husband to collect their 6-week-old infant daughter. Like the thousands of mothers who give birth every year at the busiest maternity ward in the United States, the young couple was poor. Weeks of hospital visits while their prematurely…

Editor’s note: One thing you will notice about this story is the relative lack of information from the “other side,” in this case, the USDA. During six weeks of reporting, the Dallas Observer made repeated attempts to obtain comment from the federal agency concerning its new testing procedures and its…

A small herd of horses stops grazing and looks up at a pair of strangers hanging onto a fence at Samuell Farm. To the city dweller’s eye, they look well-treated. But they aren’t, according to a Dallas Park and Recreation Department committee. The horses, part of a horse-riding concession that…

Nearly two years ago, Pat Melton stood up in front of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board and vented. She was angry and, as an animal lover, she had good reason to be. Some of the 300 or so farm animals at an obscure city park were freezing and thirsty,…

Robert Bledsoe walks across a vacant lot just behind Main Street in the century-old town of Ladonia. Wearing a weathered baseball cap and dirty work pants, he steps onto the concrete foundation where the city’s railroad station once welcomed eight trains a day. The building is gone, but that’s OK,…

Fire ants continued to roam the beds of Flower Mound nursing home residents nearly two months after the state ordered the place cleaned, a state report obtained by the Dallas Observer late last week shows. Fire ants repeatedly stung a Cross Timbers Nursing Home resident while she lay in bed…

Carolyn Osborn vividly remembers the day in July two years ago when the nurse from Cross Timbers Care Center in Flower Mound telephoned. We have a little bit of a problem with your mother, the nurse said. She has a couple of ant bites. Don’t worry though; your mother is…

Texas state trooper Ted Smith sat in his patrol car north of Pottsboro, patrolling for drunk drivers near the American Legion Hall. It was a warm fall night, and Smith was poised to land a big one. Or so he thought. Just after 11 p.m., Smith saw a silver pickup…

The Russian musician who played at The Old Warsaw restaurant impressed Jim Blythe. When the music stopped, the Russian and the rest of his quartet took a break, sitting at a table near Blythe’s group.An immigrant, the Russian lamented that his job at a grocery store paid little and occupied…

At a glass-topped dinette table, beneath a framed painting of Jesus Christ, 15-year-old Quinton Dixon quickly eats lunch before heading out the door of his small Oak Cliff apartment. “Don’t stay out too long,” his mother, Ada Dixon, 48, cautions from the couch in the living room a couple of…