In 2011, Texas booted Planned Parenthood from the state’s Women’s Health Program, starving the family-planning provider from federal Medicaid funds. Almost half of Planned Parenthood’s Texas clinics closed, depriving many in the state of critical medical care. Two years later, the federal government cut off funding to the program, because…
For one minute, let’s not call it the murder problem. The word, murder, makes people understandably crazy. Let’s go easy on the murder and just call it the general social messed-up-edness problem or GSMP instead. Better? We now have two recent independent reports on GSMP, one assembled by the administration…
Dallas Area Rapid Transit promised Tuesday to alter plans for its new rail line after two North Dallas council members objected to an updated design that would elevate portions of the track. Planners had proposed raising the entire track 5 feet, saving at least $10 million and limiting construction impacts…
There’s something about public memorials Dallas can’t get quite right. Sure, Robert E. Lee has been kicked out of Turtle Creek Park, but the traitorous general’s fellow travelers are still standing, albeit shielded from public view, on Pioneer Plaza near City Hall. Efforts to take down both memorials to treason…
Farmers across the country are struggling to make ends meet. In Texas, the stress weighs on farmers who sometimes struggle to figure out how to scrape together the next bill payment.
They should just come out and say it. Everything would be so much easier if Texas Republicans would just admit what they, their constituents and their fellow travelers know to be true: They don’t care whether President Donald Trump did what he’s alleged to have done in the articles of…
Customers of Dallas vape shops looking for Mango Juul cartridges are finding empty shelves and heavy markups. Instead, they’re turning to Puff Bars, a nearly identical product that skirts the new rules by fusing the liquid-filled cartridge to the pen-sized stem. Users consume the liquid — which can last from…
Dallas’ housing authority will begin accepting new applications for its housing voucher program at 9 a.m. Tuesday. It’s the first time DHA has accepted new applicants to the program in years. The program provides a voucher that caps rent at 30% of a family’s income. It’s available to families with low…
The state of marijuana regulation in Texas, as it stands at the beginning of 2020, is a puzzle. For those of the right race and socioeconomic status, weed is effectively legal. In the state’s big cities especially, pot isn’t seen as a scourge — police departments are citing and releasing…
Last week, a day before candidate filing opened for the upcoming school board election, East Dallas/Love Field Dallas board member Miguel Solis announced he will not seek reelection. His public statement maintained a certain aura of mystery. He didn’t announce new plans. It was sort of like, “And now my…
Ten Dallas organizations held a joint press conference decrying Abbott’s rejection of Refugee resettlement.
For the fourth consecutive year, thousands of people marched through downtown Dallas on Sunday afternoon, calling for greater political and social power for women. This year, the Women’s March highlighted the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and celebrated a century’s worth of progress in women’s rights. For the fourth…
Newly released documents paint a disturbing picture of the incident that lead to the arrest of a Dallas County Sheriff’s Department deputy Thursday evening. Deputy Austin Palmer is charged with assault causing bodily injury and official oppression, both Class A misdemeanors, after he allegedly tased and threatened a handcuffed man…
Stripped of specific context, Thursday’s events in Washington were remarkable. Ninety-nine U.S. senators — Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe was absent, dealing with a loved one’s medical emergency — swore an oath promising to impartially weigh whether President Donald Trump’s conduct merits his being removed from office. It’s historic, only the third…
Dallas plans to offer Zume, a Silicon Valley tech startup, more than $5 million in tax incentives to open a manufacturing hub. The company, once valued at more than $2 billion, has come on hard times after failing to deliver on its early promise of robotic pizza delivery. The city…
People across North Texas, and in Dallas specifically, have progressively gotten squeezed by the region’s rental market, according to a report from RENTCafe, a rental market analysis website. Despite robust apartment construction, rental costs have skyrocketed, far outpacing household income gains. At the beginning of the decade, in 2010, the average…
We struggle, strive, scrape our shins and freeze our toes to see what’s on top of the cliff of urban poverty. Once up there, we all see the same thing. And we all shrug and say, “I am not seeing this.” What we don’t want to see is race. More…
Lawyers for the city of Dallas and Yvette Gbalazeh have agreed to settle the activist’s 2018 lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the city’s panhandling ordinances. Gbalazeh said she will receive $20,000 and a meeting with the city’s police chief. She said the settlement sends a message: “There’s going to be consequences…
It doesn’t take a particularly good memory to remember when Dallas had a problem with loose dogs. A crisis is probably a more accurate way to describe it. A 2016 study found that there were literally thousands of loose dogs roaming the streets of southern Dallas contributing to a spike…
When the Observer first reported on the burgeoning “sanctuary cities” for the unborn movement last summer, the whole thing seemed like a sideshow. Waskom, a town smack-dab in the middle of Gohmertland in East Texas, banned abortion clinics within its city limits. The town based its decision on the fact that,…
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday morning blocking the executive order that allowed Gov. Greg Abbott to reject all new refugees to Texas. In a 31-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte blocked the order, stating that the plaintiffs…
In early 2018, the city released a plan to build thousands of new units of affordable housing. When the plan was introduced, then-Mayor Mike Rawlings said, “This is a very important day to show that government works in America, and we can take complex issues and get 15 of us…
