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…
Flashes, 5-18 Look Who’s Not Talking Last week, U.S. Senator John McCain was yapping about Janet Reno and Waco to that bastion of Gotham liberalism, The New Yorker. Which must have reporters at the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette scratching their heads. The Snowy Haired Senator won’t talk to their…
Moe Allen was a character. He was the kind of man whose girlfriends were invariably described as “floozies” and who drank a fifth of Seagram’s every day. He flew his own airplane. He fished for–what else?–bass. He’d spent a few years in prison for bad checks. Sometimes your bad habits…
Thirty-seven years ago, state and federal agriculture officials launched a massive attack on the pink bollworm, spraying the powerful insecticide DDT on 65,000 acres of Maricopa County cotton. From May 15 to July 19, 1958, about 500,000 pounds of DDT were applied in the county. It was just the first…
The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System has placed one employee on indefinite leave, apparently in response to revelations that the program had footed the health-care bill for people who had been dead for years. The suspended employee, Farrell Janssen, a 59-year-old computer programmer, says he was placed on administrative…
No Wonder He’s So Chipper Last Sunday, the Arizona Republic published “The Republic 100,” part of an annual special section identifying Arizona’s largest firms and blathering about the state’s fabulous business climate. Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., rated No. 40 on the list, boasting 2,486 employees. What the section didn’t tell you…
The heavy spraying of DDT and its impact on dairy herds is well-known to Arizona farmers, but not to the public. And a new law passed by the legislature may make it more difficult for the media to raise questions about the safety of the food supply. The so-called “veggie…
Some people believe that all manufacture, sale and use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) will be banned as of January 1, 1996–and that the world will instantly be without refrigeration. That’s not true. Here’s what is: Only the production of CFCs, also known by the trade name Freon and mainly used in…
Just how uptight were Americans about s-e-x in 1954? That year, squeaky clean Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” got blacklisted by ABC radio and television for containing “offensive lyrics.” Offensive? She was just singing in Italian, for crying out loud! Even Johnnie Ray, everybody’s favorite Hit Parade crybaby, had a record…
Scott Bundgaard used to believe that chlorofluorocarbons–most commonly known by the trade name Freon–were depleting the Earth’s ozone layer and increasing dangerous ultraviolet radiation. He’d nag his sister for using aerosol hair spray. Then he was elected to the legislature, where he and his colleagues on the House Environment Committee…
After eight months of anguish on the part of Kimberly Nilson’s family and friends, and diligent work on the part of the Tempe Police Department, her remains were found on April 12 in a clearing beneath the paloverde that was probably her last resting place. She had been missing since…
Before she became a jailhouse lawyer, Christina Jay Acker preyed on old ladies. In 1990, Acker was sentenced to 36 years in prison for kidnaping and robbing a 78-year-old Phoenix woman. That same year, a Colorado judge sentenced Acker to life in prison for beating a 72-year-old Colorado woman to…
If you’re looking for where pay-per-view proceeds are going in the National Basketball Association, look to the West. Six of the 16 teams in this year’s NBA playoffs show their games on pay-per-view–the cable-TV option that allows local fans to see selected home games throughout the season by the game…
Attention, chompers! At a handful of McDonald’s locations around the Valley, drive-through customers like yourselves can do something they can’t do at any of the other Golden Arches in town. Mainly, you’ll have the rare opportunity to get personal with a teen burger drone. Or that appears to be one…
Last week, the Arizona Press Club presented its first-ever Brick Wall Award to Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, because he tends to ignore the state’s Public Records Act. Governor Fife Symington finished a close second in the competition, which was judged by a committee of print reporters and editors. The…
