The so-far bloodless battle between open carry advocates and the city of Arlington continued Tuesday evening with a debate over whether guns should be banned at City Council meetings. Open Carry Tarrant County members, who showed up at Arlington City Hall by the dozens, said no. The Arlington City Council…
For all the roiling arguments surrounding Dallas ISD — over governance and closing achievement gaps and teacher pay and whatever else two adults might possibly disagree on — there’s one topic over which there is little debate: Dallas ISD does magnet schools right. Just in case you needed a reminder,…
Jerry Temple is not the guy you want living in the apartment above you. Especially if you rely on a wheelchair, own a flat-screen TV and value your life. In Temple’s case, the unlucky neighbor was Kenneth Alberts, a 59-year-old disabled man who lived alone in a Grapevine apartment complex…
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated incorrectly that the teacher leading one of Conrad high’s autism units, Aimee Kelly, had been fired for alleged misconduct toward a student. She has not been fired, but is on paid administrative leave and her boss has recommended that she be fired…
Dallas PD’s remarkable seven-month streak of not fatally shooting a suspect ended on Monday afternoon, when multiple officers gunned down a man outside Southwest Center Mall. Police say that Michael Mayo, 30, led them on a chase through the Red Bird area that ended in the mall parking lot. There,…
For a city run by a former librarian for most of the past decade, Dallas’ libraries haven’t gotten a lot of love. They were an easy target for the recession-era budget slashing of 2008, and despite an increase in materials funding last year, still haven’t recovered. Friends of the Dallas…
Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston is not happy with the Observer right now. “My issue is you reported one side and you didn’t get the other side,” he told us this morning. One side, the side we did get, was staked out by Dallas Police Chief David Brown when…
We were debating going with the more straightforward headline “Here’s a Shirtless Photo of Leonys Martin,” but we decided something a bit more artful would scare off fewer people. Make no mistake: That is about a shirtless Texas Rangers outfielder Leonys Martin, but it has a backstory. Via a tipster…
Police say that Benjamin Kevin Newman was drunk when he left The Hangout Patio Bar in Plano on Thursday night. The 22-year-old Dallas resident also must have been angry, since he allegedly steered his car into four people standing in the parking lot. “We believe, based on the evidence and…
You’re an aspiring restaurateur. You’ve signed your lease, spent tens of thousands of dollars finishing out your space and getting all the proper permits and decide that it could use some European-style sidewalk seating. Great! City Hall is 100 percent behind you and your progressive, urban ideas. So let’s get…
U.S. Marshals on Friday arrested two suspects in the M Streets hit-and-run that killed 13-year-old Ethan Vasquez and critically injured his mother last week. Dagoberto Castanon, 25, and Rogelio Avila, 24 were discovered hiding in a Fort Myers, Florida, trailer park three days after they allegedly ran a stop sign…
Easter makes Christians do crazy things. Like giving up beer or chalking enormous Jesus faces on parking lots. Right now, Easter is making 30 or so cross-bearing Christians march down Harry Hines Boulevard en route to Plano. “We started at Pandora’s strip club,” says Justin Bass, pastor of 1042 Church…
There’s a reason you find so many charter schools in decrepit strip centers and old Walmarts. Decent, school-appropriate real estate is hard to come by. When it is available, it’s expensive, and charter operators, who don’t get facilities funding from the state like public schools do, are often forced to…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown is once again denying accusations that DPD has watered down recruit training standards. The allegations were leveled recently by Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston, who said a recruit was allowed to retake and ultimately pass the police academy driving test despite multiple failures. A…
Kroger, according to the wisdom of online shoplifting forums, doesn’t have a firm “no-chase” policy, at least not one that’s routinely heeded. Leave the store without paying, and you may well have a store manager on your tail. Claude Medlock did. The 51-year-old — a seasoned veteran of taking other…
Update: Associate District Judge Sheryl McFarlin ordered UGH to temporarily reinstate the doctors’ admitting privileges pending an April 30 hearing. Last month, an appeals court upheld a key provision of Texas’ new anti-abortion law requiring doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. A women’s health…
Dallas police think they have a lead in the death of 13-year-old Ethan Vasquez. At a press conference this morning, Deputy Chief Gil Garza Dagoberto identified 24-year-old Dagoberto Castanon, a convicted car thief, as a “person of interest” in the Tuesday morning M Streets car crash that killed Vasquez. Vasquez…
Remember how in the 2008 comedy Step Brothers Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly try to launch an entertainment empire with an absurdly misogynistic rap video? And how it ends in disaster when they wreck the boat they were filming on? That’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened when…
For the past three-plus years, Dallas County District Judge Carlos Cortez has been fighting to keep potentially damaging allegations about his personal life secret. On Wednesday, Cortez lost the fight. A Texas appeals court decided that, even though none of the allegations against him resulted in a formal determination of…
Two thousand years ago, give or take, the Romans nailed Jesus to a cross and left him to die. Since then, he has become the centerpiece of one of the world’s dominant religions, revered by billions, inspiring wars and reconciliations and serving as a muse for innumerable works, both quotidian…
A lot of words were spoken at today’s joint meeting of the Dallas City Council and Dallas ISD board of trustees. Most were on point, for or against the call to draft a home-rule charter. Some were illuminating. Almost all were delivered with passion. It was, all in all, a…
You know the debate over public schools in Dallas has gone squirrely when retired teacher and education activist advocate Bill Betzen stands before the City Council and offers implicit approval of Mike Miles’ tenure as DISD superintendent. Betzen, speaking in advance of a council discussion on the home-rule proposal for…
