Given the opportunity last week to go head-to-head with Governor Fife Symington, Attorney General Grant Woods flinched. Not only did Woods pull his legal punches, refusing to seek criminal charges in his investigation of Project SLIM, the attorney general’s actions also raise serious questions about why Symington is being distanced…
Like organic tomatoes, natural peanut butter and tofu hot dogs, controversy has always been a hot commodity around Tempe’s Gentle Strength Co-op. Let someone suggest anything more substantive than “Have a nice day,” and you can be sure some disgruntled faction inside the member-owned cooperative will squawk that the organization…
The Rule Dave Alt faced the prisoner at Madison Street Jail. “You made a mistake, dude, a big, big mistake,” Alt told Jimmy Lee Luman in the fall of 1993. “You won’t beat her. Not in your dreams. You might beat the system. But she’s gonna haunt you until the…
Ignacio Alvaraz does not know much about the “cross-cultural two-nation vacations” being touted by the newly formed Center for Arizona-Sonora Regional Tourism Development. Then again, Alvaraz, a Yaqui Indian elder, didn’t travel to the United States from his native Mexico to sightsee. He came to inform fellow Yaquis in Arizona…
It’s Dumpster-diving paradise. And the best thing is you don’t have to dive into a smelly garbage can. Thanks to lax security by the state Department of Transportation, hundreds of condemned homes in the pathway of the Squaw Peak Parkway north of Shea Boulevard sit empty, vulnerable to anyone with…
A committee of criminal justice and mental health experts met regularly last year as the debate over Ardrey McFarland’s legal fate raged. The sessions did not always go smoothly. “There are so many angles on this,” says Superior Court Judge Robert Myers, who chaired the committee for a time. “We…
At Least It Wasn’t Larry Everyone knows GOP supermouth Newt Gingrich and his half-sister, Candace, are politically incompatible. An occasional mention of cyberspace aside, the House speaker generally supports his party’s ultraconservative wing. Candace, of course, is active in gay-rights issues and groups. Despite those differences, the Gingrich siblings had…
Steve Krafft, a reporter with Channel 10, asked last Friday if I’d print the Unabomber’s lengthy manuscript. This is the sort of question that’s supposed to stump journalists. There will be convention panels on this weighty matter all year long. Earlier in the week, the Unabomber had threatened to blow…
It didn’t take long for the investigation of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building to wind its way back to the nation’s 48th state. Within days, federal agents were swooping through Kingman, Mesa and even tiny Oatman, Arizona, in search of evidence and co-conspirators and anything else connected…
At least 13 times in the last 18 months, Department of Health Services investigators have found one or another of Steve Broe’s American Child Care Centers to have more children per adult caregiver than the law allows. And last fall, Craig Barton’s Camelback Desert School in north Scottsdale, which offers…
Another attempt to develop property in the historic Roosevelt neighborhood has been rejected. The proposed project was a new, expanded campus for Magnet Traditional School, the brightest star in the Phoenix Elementary School District, a school whose students score better on national tests than their district counterparts, and better than…
While workers begin the $1.7 million renovation of Governor Fife Symington’s office, the state’s historical landmark next door is going to hell in a handbasket. The Old Capitol Building, built in 1900, is in need of some care. There are holes in the domed ceiling where the plaster has fallen…
Not too long ago, an employee at the Arizona State Compensation Fund was questioned under oath during legal proceedings against the fund. Some of the questioning dealt with the work atmosphere inside State Fund headquarters. At one point, the questioning turned to The Firm, a film about a seemingly respectable…
Camille Kimball has a brand-new dog named Clara. She got it about a week ago to keep her company and to watch the central Phoenix home she bought a few months back. It is her first pet. She wants to teach it some tricks, and worries about whether she’ll be…
Lorne Shantz looks like a cop, even out of uniform. He’s so fresh-scrubbed he could have walked a beat in Mayberry, but instead he got a job as a patrol officer for the Arizona Department of Public Safety. In his 14 years with DPS, his worst offense was waiting a…
To get an idea of just how very on-the-verge CNN sportscaster Daryn Kagan has become, consider this: She is more current, more suitable for framing, than Armando. Armando is Armando Alvarez, who from his home in Miami has phoned Calling All Sports, the CNN late-night sports talk show hosted by…
Vernon Foster, of the American Indian Movement of Arizona, stood before a drum and looked straight at five weary Croatian human-rights activists. “We are all warriors,” he said. Foster, wearing a beret with a feather, jeans, cowboy boots, a leather vest and a belt with a bright red AIM buckle,…
MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN NEEDS GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT Convict groupie Donna Hamm was arrested for obstruction June 12 outside Tucson during a staged media event. Hamm had bellowed into a bullhorn for an hour in a clumsy attempt to incite a chain gang of 20 men from the Arizona State Prison complex. Not…
Yellow Journalism E.J. Montini’s writing style can be trying. You know what we mean. Or perhaps you don’t. In any case, Montini and Steve Benson are the only Arizona Republic commentators whose names should appear in the same sentence with the words courage and imagination. (Memo to management: While you’re…
A dove settles on Loreen Bustardi’s head. Happens all the time, says Bustardi, not to worry. The bird figures Bustardi is its mate. Sometimes, it lays eggs in her hair. Bustardi usually doesn’t know about the eggs until she changes position. The eggs aren’t fertile, so it’s not a loss…
They played one song at Phil Girardin’s memorial service last week. “Everybody hurts,” the R.E.M. vocalist droned over and over in the small chapel at a Peoria funeral home. Girardin committed suicide by drug overdose June 8, one week after New Times told his story in a special report (“Mental…
After six months of nausea and pain, and a battery of tests, Sherrian Beagle was finally on her way to the hospital to have her gallbladder removed. Then she learned that her insurance company, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Arizona, had decided she didn’t need the surgery and wouldn’t…
