Under the Gun Cheap shot: A police officer has the right under some circumstances to kill (“A Life That Almost Happened,” Amanda Scioscia, July 26). With this awesome power comes great responsibility. This does not mean that each and every time a police officer shoots someone that he was correct…
In the end, it all came down to the girl. A 13-year-old girl with long, curly hair who captivated and charmed the heart of an older boy who should have known better. But love has a way of making danger appear distant, of bridging the gap between age and family,…
In a stretch of the lower Colorado River below Lake Mead, wildlife biologists are worried that fish are losing their gender. Chemical-laced wastewater, they fear, is giving fish what amounts to a sex change.The phenomenon, called gender-bending, has already shown up in fish nearby, in the Las Vegas area, where…
After stubbornly refusing for more than a year to sign off on efforts to obtain a $10 million grant that could end the euthanasia of dogs and cats in Maricopa County, Arizona Humane Society Director Ken White has buckled under pressure from Valley animal welfare groups and media scrutiny and…
Native American runners will set off Saturday on a grueling 200-mile course from the Hopi mesas to downtown Phoenix to protest more than three decades of groundwater pumping by the world’s largest private coal company.Marathon runners from Hopi, Acoma, Zuni and Navajo tribes will participate in the run that will…
Culture Schlock Nix the niche marketing: A few years back, a Southwest Supermarket tried moving into the vacated ABCO at 67th Avenue and Peoria. I don’t think it stayed open for even a full year. Of course, I’m sure there was the usual culture clash when a Latino-oriented supermarket opens…
After slugging it out in L.A.’s shithole-dive bar-club scene, the best-looking band in leather since Girlschool finally delivers its first full-length album with one foot in the gutter and the other planted firmly in the crotches of MTV’s endless battalion of carefully pierced ‘n’ primped Hot Topic rockers. The quartet’s…
For a month or so this spring, the most confusing sign in Phoenix was the one on the broad beige façade of Southwest Supermarkets’ new Phoenix store, at Seventh Street and McDowell Road. Its green and orange corporate cursive reads “SW Desert Market.” But on a warm afternoon late in…
The Arizona Supreme Court on July 16 upheld the death-penalty conviction of James “Butch” Harrod in the 1988 execution of Phoenix heiress Jeanne Tovrea. While the high court’s unanimous ruling pushes the 48-year-old Harrod one step closer to execution, it does nothing to get to the bottom of one of…
It was a small victory for Chez Nous when the City of Phoenix took up sides with all the people who want to save the swanky cocktail lounge at Seventh Avenue and Indian School Road.Apparently, even the city can’t stop the interests that want to turn the site of Chez…
Dr. Michael Berens has already halted his controversial brain tumor research using beagle puppies, but he’s not out of the doghouse yet. Animal rights activists have sued Berens in federal court in California, accusing him of repeatedly submitting inaccurate information to the National Institutes of Health to obtain his research…
Whale WailingA whale-hugger responds: Had you asked us, we could have saved you reams of the valuable newsprint you were forced to expend on John Dougherty’s inch-deep, mile-wide hagiography of the Makah whale hunt (“Resurrection,” July 12) with the following simple summary: After Japanese commercial whaling reps told the Makah…
John Unger couldn’t believe his first assignment as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. It was April 1999. A few days earlier, he had spotted an Apache Junction newspaper ad touting delivery jobs at the local Pizza Hut, with pay starting at $12 an hour. He had just spent the…
The dead Hispanic male lay face up in the grass, one bullet in his brain. He was a young man, barely 20, wearing a blue-and-white-checkered shirt and the new white jeans his sister had recently purchased for him. Phoenix Police Sergeant Lowell Spalla was not absolutely certain that the bullet…
David Hans Schmidt cackles gleefully every time he sees the 13-inch surgical scar down the belly of Jefferson Davis McGee. It’s just such a great visual: Here’s this 21st-century American with what looks like a Civil War triage scar. Combine that with McGee’s perpetually bewildered “what just happened to me?”…
More than 30 community leaders, including academics, clergy, public defenders and a former state senator, are calling on Governor Jane Dee Hull to create an independent task force to review conditions at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections in response to a New Times special report.The “Slammed” series (“The Kids…
Juvie, Juvie, JuvieCorrect deficiencies, build on success: As Chairman of the Arizona Juvenile Justice Commission, it was with great interest that I read Amy Silverman’s article on the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections (“The Kids are NOT Alright,” July 5). Ms. Silverman’s article raises a number of serious and significant…
Lately it seems that any discussion of country music must necessarily concern itself with image, marketing, unit sales, and play-list rotation, while ignoring the two most important aspects of the conversation: the country part and the music part. Nashville has become so preoccupied with its enormous pop success that it…
Eben Paxton’s job was getting routine. Year after year his crew of bird banders with the U.S. Geological Survey were hiking to the same breeding spots mapped out on the dry bottom of Roosevelt Lake logging them on their yearly survey. It was downright boring. Fortunately, the 1998 summer nesting…
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question –…
Two-year-old Mason Alan couldn’t have known about the fierce custody battle raging between his original adoptive parents and another caretaker struggling to keep the youngster at her side. Nor would he have cared. The brown-eyed, brown-haired imp just wanted what all babies want: loving arms to hold him, food in…
Kids on the SkidsThe paper’s not alright: The agency that Amy Silverman described on July 5 (“The Kids Are NOT Alright”) doesn’t look anything like the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.The ugly images that Ms. Silverman conjures up are not accurate. She describes trash-filled rooms smeared with body fluids. Yet…
