Q: When is a dead bird in the hand worth considerably more than two in the bush? A: When that bird is a protected species–and possession and public display of any portion of its corpse is punishable by a six-figure fine. Or so Valley sculptor Paul Stout discovered the hard…
Boy, Is Fife’s Face Red Governor J. Fife Symington III occasionally loosens his tie and invites the Capitol press corps up to his office for an informal audience. A Fifester-side chat, if you will. The Flash wasn’t invited to the May 26 confab, but was told it went like this:…
For thousands of Arizonans, the court case known as Arnold v. Sarn was a godsend. The landmark lawsuit grew from a sensitive subject that few people voluntarily broach: how society cares for its seriously mentally ill. Superior Court Judge Bernard Dougherty forced the issue with a ruling in 1985. Maricopa…
Faced with an investigation by the Attorney General’s Office, pressure from the federal Health Care Finance Administration and inquiries from state legislators, Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System officials announced last week that all contractors in the program’s Information Services Division will be let go. Employees present at the meeting…
Land owners inside the downtown stadium site say their properties can’t be condemned because the facility is being built to benefit private interests. They say the state constitution requires that property condemned under eminent domain must be for a public use, and that the stadium project doesn’t meet that standard…
Cheryl Burgess, a member of the Wickenburg Town Council, said she had documents and information about the explosion in Oklahoma City. A self-described Arizona patriot, Burgess is a faithful trooper in the militia culture that President Bill Clinton has blamed for the bombing of the federal building. Today, Cheryl Burgess…
June Is Caveat Emptor Month Last week, John Hays, director of the Arizona Weights and Measures department, issued a memo informing his employees that the department had run out of money for the fiscal year, which ends June 30. Weights and Measures sleuths are supposed to check the veracity of…
“It’s a new day,” Phoenix Police Department 911 operator Tracy Lorenzano tells millions of people listening to National Public Radio’s popular, magazine-style news show, All Things Considered. In a five-minute piece that aired last month, Lorenzano is giving a day-in-the-life account of an emergency police dispatcher’s work in the Valley…
Jerry Millison was overcome with anguish on the afternoon of May 12. “He wondered for a second just how screwed up he had to be before someone would help him,” a friend of Millison’s recalls. Millison, 41, had a history of mental illness, substance abuse and three suicide attempts. The…
By now, everyone knows that Governor J. Fife Symington III has legislative approval to remodel his offices, which inhabit the top two floors of the state’s Executive Tower. The $1.7 million project has drawn criticism from the usual suspects–particularly the media–who are complaining that the rehab is far too lavish,…
So Let’s Do Lunch, Mr. Nixon Raena Honan’s a self-described conservative Christian Republican who counts among her most-treasured possessions a photograph of herself flanked by U.S. Senator Jon Kyl and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. So why can’t she get an audience with Mr. Rightward Republican himself, Governor J. Fife Symington…
Seen from the street, the Valley’s most fabled restaurant doesn’t look like much, just a boxy, Pepto Bismol-colored building badly in need of a paint job. The only decoration is the sad-looking awning over the front door, an entrance that doesn’t get used much, anyway. On the roof is the…
The middle-aged clerk at the sundry shop touches her brown, feathered hair, gazing appreciatively at the bodies pushing into the main exhibit hall at Phoenix Civic Plaza for the National Rifle Association convention. “Lotta men in town, inn’t there?” Well, yeah. Lotta guys wearing tee shirts with slogans like “Political…
Language and the abstract thinking that makes it happen are foremost among the characteristics that make humans human. But linguists, anthropologists and psychologists cannot agree on the moment in man’s evolution when that characteristic appeared, or why. Last week, in an article published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences,…
At first glance, Lionel Dela Rosa’s lawsuit against Scottsdale Memorial Health Systems seems like just another ho-hum discrimination case filed by a grumpy former employee. But it isn’t. It is really about whether a Vietnam veteran’s sometimes disturbing behavior justifies workplace harassment by co-workers. Dela Rosa, a 60-year-old Hispanic Vietnam…
Last fall, when the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System awarded contracts to companies that would provide health-care services to the state’s poor, there were winners and losers–just as there are in any bidding process. It was the way AHCCCS picked the winners and losers, however, that raised eyebrows. The…
Flashes, 5-25 Proof: Fife’s Off His Gourd Someone sent in this photo, and even though we don’t know what the occasion was, The Flash believes it’s worth 1,000 words. We do know the picture shows our esteemed governor, J. Fife Symington III, with a bunch of vegetables. There are some…
Jawad Hashim raises his chin slightly, looking directly into the video camera recording his statement. Droves of lawyers hover. They all want to know just what Hashim did with several tens of millions of Arab dollars that disappeared more than a decade ago. It’s not the first time Hashim–a 57-year-old…
Eight years ago, nearly 1,000 west-side residents crowded into the Maryvale High School auditorium to accuse doctors from the Arizona Department of Health Services of ignoring what they saw as an alarming leukemia rate among Maryvale’s children. The 1987 meeting was held on a muggy July night. It was a…
Bryan Gilliam knows that crime doesn’t pay; the 20-year-old is serving a five-year sentence for car theft. Now he may be learning that truthfulness doesn’t pay, either. While incarcerated at Fort Grant, a minimum-security prison near Safford, Gilliam took training to become a legal assistant. That, combined with the fact…
Thanks to the recent surge in the economy, plain ol’ white paper is turning to gold. And the unprecedented demand for it seems to have taken the state bureaucracy by surprise, costing Arizona more than half a million dollars. When the economy began to turn a little more than a…
High above downtown Phoenix, Ulysses Sanchez sits in a borrowed office in an executive tower with a window that looks out on another executive tower. He’s nestled in a chair that’s not really his behind a desk with someone else’s name on it, surrounded by the believers. Like Sanchez, these…
