The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Rust v. Sullivan, prohibits family planning clinics that receive federal Title X funds from offering any information or counseling about abortion. When the new policy goes into effect, health professionals at the affected clinics will be forbidden to give information about the advisability and…
If the old wives are right and bad news really does come in threes, then Tom Connelly is due for some good news very soon. In the past year, the former federal prosecutor has had a run of terrible luck. First, he resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix…
You are playing in your company’s annual golf outing, ostensibly a social occasion, but everyone knows the tournament’s results will be the topic of endless conference-table quacking back at headquarters. Interoffice alliances are forged on these occasions, mentors are acquired, careers are ruined. Fate has dropped you, a junior executive…
Sue Holmes eyed the newspaper ad like a hungry fish eyes a worm. “I remember exactly what it said,” she recalls. “`Free consultation with one of Arizona’s leading cosmetic surgeons! No visible scars!’ I’d been thinking about doing something like that for a long time. It sounded great.” Since the…
“Weirdo. Retard. Stupid. Slowpoke.” With gentle prodding, the third graders at Liberty Elementary School had no problem coming up with the words used to describe people with mental retardation. A few minutes later, the kids got a taste of what it’s like. Split up into small groups, they were told…
The race to replace retiring Maricopa County Supervisor Ed Pastor has taken an unexpected right turn with the emergence of three Republicans among five finalists recommended for appointment by a citizens panel. The advance of so many Republican candidates fires speculation–already smoldering–that the Board of Supervisors’ Republican majority will jump…
So much happened here. And now the grass bordering the headquarters of Charlie Keating’s American Continental Corporation at 2735 East Camelback is burned out. The trees should be trimmed. The yellow awnings are faded. Some are torn to shreds. They haven’t been replaced. The place is run-down and seedy. I…
The arrest of the militant environmentalists of Earth First! on May 30, 1989, included charges of terrorism directed at nuclear power plants in the West. The foundation for the alarming headlines that announced the bust is contained in government files. Those files detail an undercover FBI probe that began in…
Never mind a car in every garage and a chicken in every microwave. Where in these United States is the couch-potato Utopia that has a videocassette recorder in virtually each and every home? Incredibly, the answer is Flagstaff. That’s what Arbitron, the national rating service that is one of the…
Phoenix residents who still may be intoxicated by the sweet smell of victory over a proposed hazardous-waste incinerator fifty miles to the southwest may soon be inhaling emissions of a slightly different sort. Even as toasts were poured to celebrate the demise of the wildly unpopular ENSCO project, two proposed…
“YOU BOND TO THE TORTOISES YOU FIND.” On the edge of Little Shipp Wash in west-central Arizona, the Sonoran Desert is settling in for the night. But the people inside a small trailer ignore the rattling call of a frog in a nearby acacia tree, the scent of moss and…
It was bad enough that a jury found a partnership of nine East Valley doctors guilty of defrauding a California couple in a catastrophic real-estate deal in Mesa. The doctors practically went into cardiac arrest when, based on the jury’s verdict, they were found guilty of racketeering. Maricopa County Superior…
That rarest commodity, a saboteur with a sense of humor, wrote the Arizona media in the second week of November 1987. A letter claiming credit for vandalizing ski lifts at Flagstaff’s Snow Bowl arrived on editors’ desks from a group calling itself the Evan Mecham Eco Terrorist International Conspiracy, EMETIC…
These are truly dark days for sportswriters covering the Chicago Cubs. The sacking of Don Zimmer, a popular manager, is a comparatively minor source of the discontent. More and more, the total environment for the writers keeps evolving for the worse. There was a time when covering the Cubs was…
Evan Mecham was back. And even though he still sported that same crooked grin, this was a new Mecham. No longer Arizona’s governor, he’s in the process of transforming himself into a newspaper publisher. Mecham stood behind a lectern in a meeting room at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. He looked…
Every tenant leaves a mess. Sometimes it’s a dirty oven. Sometimes it’s a stain on the carpet. Sometimes it’s forty tons of hazardous waste and tanks filled with 20,000 gallons of cyanide-laced water. Every day, Don DeSanti parks his 1982 Toyota in the shadow of four imposing black tanks. He…
Why was this guy knocking on my door at nine o’clock on a Sunday night? I warily peeked out my living-room window. He looked like a jogger. I asked him what he wanted. “There’s a cat across the street,” he said, “and it’s drowning! I was jogging by and I…
“Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! No-oh-oh-oh!” Standing alone in a soundproof room, a grown man is imitating a sick car. Other adults watch through a small window, listening, coaching, judging. The five people assembled in the small recording studio and control room are making a sixty-second radio commercial for…
Old joke: After he gets pulled over for speeding, a guy tries to talk his way out of the ticket by telling the traffic cop that he’s almost home. The cop doesn’t buy it. “Don’t you realize that most accidents occur within five miles of the home?” he asks as…
It is difficult to imagine a contrast greater than the Colorado River as it roars through the Grand Canyon and that same river a hundred miles downstream as it flows tamely past Bullhead City and Laughlin. Within the Grand Canyon, the Colorado has an almost religious presence, as if it…
Jim Meredith, the former Republican majority leader of Arizona’s House of Representatives, is obviously a man without shame. If I were given the chance to pick the single AzScam defendant slick and duplicitous enough to merit stuffing into a hole in the Arizona state prison at Florence, Meredith would be…
Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley should be feeling very pleased with the way AzScam has turned out so far. For one thing, various legislators who were captured unforgettably on videotape are receiving their apparently just deserts. Sue Laybe and Chuy Higuera are spending their evenings in prison these days, and…
