Everybody knows that Phoenix is, quite simply, the best place in the world to live. Whether you’re looking for great weather, a unique cultural spectrum, expressive architecture or just plain friendly folks, this year-round fun capital has it all! And while naysaying summer guests may moan that the Valley of…
When I was a reporter not long ago, I often found myself in the same crowd of journalists as one particular television newsman. This reporter stood out from the journalistic pack. No matter what the event–trial or news conference, government meeting or murder scene–he seemed always to be behind schedule…
Lying in her bed last April, frail and small, Yvonne Camenos knew she had only weeks to live. Yet she was not embittered. She seemed content in the knowledge that she had fought for as long as she could. So as her mind replayed her struggle against ovarian cancer, she…
Sometimes, Debbie McQueen wonders if people could possibly understand what she’s gone through. The isolation. The struggles. The heartache of being the mother of chemically sensitive boys. There was the time a family vacation soured when Jason McQueen had a seizure at Sea World. Another incident involved Michael, Jason’s brother,…
It could have been a pep rally. But rather than “Go Team,” the placards said things like “Big Classes, Little Learning” and “Your Kids Deserve Better.” And instead of being carried by the cheerleading squad, they were brandished by teachers, More than 200 teachers picketed outside the Phoenix Union High…
A judge has thwarted the latest effort to derail construction of a major league baseball stadium in downtown Phoenix. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey S. Cates on Monday dismissed two lawsuits that tried to give county voters a voice in whether they should be taxed to build the stadium…
Another Arizona Export The giant sucking sound from out Yuma way is federal funds being flushed on behalf of the 125 powerful farmers who make up the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage District. Federal largess has reached such absurd proportions that agencies now are fining each other. The U.S. Environmental Protection…
There were 15 of them standing together in the sun. In the dust and dirt, penned up yet blas about the situation, nowhere to go. The flies were taking advantage of this, landing on their noses and clustering about their eyes. But those eyes–gleaming black eight balls of calm and…
For all of her 53 years, Donna Goodale has threaded horses and mules through nearly impassable thickets of scrub oak and manzanita behind the tiny hamlet of Top of the World, Arizona, 75 miles east of Phoenix on U.S. Route 60. Goodale is a solid-framed woman with curly blond hair…
A nasty fight may be brewing over the redrawing of county supervisor districts–and which of the current supervisors will take the political fallout from the major-league baseball stadium vote. In February 1994, supervisors voted 3-1 to impose a countywide quarter-cent sales tax to fund construction of the major-league baseball stadium…
You’re tuned to the most substantial, most intelligent, hippest television broadcasting available today. You’re one of the lucky three million people in the nation who gets the Independent Film Channel, which airs domestic and foreign nonstudio cinema, uncut and commercial-free. You’re watching the works of Fellini, Truffaut, Kubrick, art-house staples,…
They’ve swilled Coca-Cola with aspirin. Smoked banana peels. Licked toads. Over the years, thrill seekers have tried just about everything in their misguided guest for forbidden–if completely legal–kicks. And now–in an effort to experience “euphoric stimulation,” “increased sexual sensations” and a “fantastically light headed, tingly happy-happy buzz”–many thrill-starved hedonists are…
Grunting, straining and sweating like a couple of pro wrestlers, a young couple on the dance floor valiantly struggles to master a difficult back-flip maneuver. But the tricky move eventually reaches an impasse when the woman is stranded upside down on her partner’s hunched-over form, leaving the pair looking like…
Like Abigail Van Buren, Joyce Brothers and Xaviera Hollander, Dr. Crime Lab wants to help. He wants to utilize his expertise, his know-how in the world of wrongdoing and advise you, the law-abiding citizen, the potential victim. The only difference between Abby or Dr. Joyce and Dr. Crime Lab is…
CIGNA: Class, Action The tightwads at CIGNA Healthcare face further legal troubles stemming from their practice of hiding discounts for hospital services from CIGNA customers. Last March, the firm signed a state Department of Insurance consent decree admitting no wrongdoing but agreeing to pay $127,000 in restitution to several hundred…
It starts with the big floating chickens rolling in from Tucson, legions of fat, fluffy formations that have the weather wonks salivating over their radars. Weather soldiers from around the Valley call the storm hot line for instructions: Be here at four, it says; there is activity to the south…
The Troon North golf course on the far north edge of Scottsdale is a sight to behold. An emerald grass carpet, smooth, even and weedless, snakes its way along saguaros, next to mesquite bushes and paloverde trees. The grass rises and falls, from tee to green, enveloping manmade lakes, skirting…
Environmentalists fighting to restore a stretch of the lower Gila River to its historic biological splendor have found an unlikely ally in the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In a surprising policy shift, FEMA on August 18 notified a politically powerful irrigation district near Yuma that it will not fund a…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio likes to boast about all the attention he receives from the national media, mostly for the spartan life of jail inmates. Now his jails are the focus of a different kind of national spotlight–an investigation by the United States Department of Justice. New Times has…
One steamy morning in the summer of 1958–no one knows the exact date–a young man named Art Kane took on a daunting task. Weeks earlier, the editor of Esquire magazine had invited Kane to contribute a photograph to an upcoming issue devoted to jazz. Remarkably, Kane never had taken a…
Finally, an Accounting The Arizona Attorney General’s Office has slapped another major accounting firm with a large fine. Arthur Andersen & Co. joins fellow Big Six accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand on AG Grant Woods’ list of wayward accountants. Arthur Andersen has agreed to pay the Arizona State Board of…
How to describe such men as these? Men of vast and deliberate muscle. Men of spartan, militaristic coifs, men of rigidly cascading hair anointed with mousses of the highest caliber of holding capability. Men of rugged, insouciant, determined countenance. Men with devastating powers of erotic enchantment, capable of deploying a…
