Browse News & Feature Stories

The trial balloon

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 8/26/2009

Types: News, Law & Jurisprudence

The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. — Winston Churchill United States Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday the appointment of a special prosecutor, who will decide whether the Justice Department should investigate sev...[MORE]

Take This Country and Shove It

By Gilbert Garcia

Published: 4/29/2009

Types: News

Few states can claim an official tourist slogan as (inadvertently?) truthful as “Texas: It’s like a whole other country.” With that in mind, Governor Rick Perry’s caught-up-in-the-moment suggestion at an April 15 Tea Party protest in Austin that Texas might secede from the United States has draw...[MORE]

It’s the economic model, stupid: FROM THE EDITOR

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 3/4/2009

Types: News

“Most owners of newspapers are businessmen, not newspapermen. The news is something which fills the spaces left over by the advertisers.” – I.F. Stone Like many of my colleagues in this self-congratulatory and under-compensated field, I don’t intend to go down ...[MORE]

Rich plaza, poor park

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 2/18/2009

Types: News

Although I was impressed by the City Manager’s swift response to last week’s Express-News story that the Cortez family of Mi Tierra fame had expressed interest in buying El Mercado through a land swap — it’s “dead” she announced not 24 hours later — I have to wonder: What would it take to get Our La...[MORE]

Prospect park

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 1/7/2009

Types: News

Healy-Murphy Park, little more than an acre of asphalt and dirt squeezed between Highway 37 and the Salvation Army’s Dave Coy residential facility on the city’s near East Side, is no urban paradise. It looks shabby and neglected, and much of the time it’s occupied by our city’s less-fortunate reside...[MORE]

2012: Game on

By Greg M. Schwartz

Published: 12/17/2008

Types: News

Earth’s 26,000-year passage around the galaxy into alignment with the Milky Way’s galactic equator — a journey known as the precession of the equinoxes — is now just four years from completion. So says the legendary, galactic calendar of the ancient Maya. But many still wonder what 2012 really signi...[MORE]

The buck stops over there somewhere

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 12/3/2008

Types: News

It’s a strange truism of history that popular democratic leaders often leave a troubling legacy — but they don’t do it without help. Tammany Hall and the senior Richard Daley’s empires had their virtues, at least in the beginning, and certainly their adherents. In Shakespeare’s retelling of Caesar’s...[MORE]

Clear Channel likes skies bright, citizens in the dark

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 11/26/2008

Types: News

Clear Channel Outdoor is nothing if not punctual. Here it is just about a year since our City Council approved the 12-month digital-billboard pilot program, which allowed them to flip the switch on a dozen hi-def signs across the city, and they’re back at City Hall, pushing a variety of agendas. Las...[MORE]

How much change can we really expect?

By Greg M. Schwartz

Published: 11/12/2008

Types: News

Barack Obama’s historic election to the presidency represents what a majority of Americans hope is a pivotal moment enabling the country to escape the national nightmare of the past eight years, and move into a new era of egalitarian and progressive change.  But how much change can we real...[MORE]

Term limits: baby steps on the ballot

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 10/29/2008

Types: News

My husband and I were driving out I-10 Sunday afternoon, and as we passed one of the billboards promoting Mayor Hardberger’s campaign to loosen our restrictive local term limits (currently set at just two, two-year terms apiece for council and hizzoner), he commented on its clever double entendre: “...[MORE]

The second time as farce: The MashUp

By Gwynne Dyer

Published: 10/1/2008

Types: News

This is not the Crash of 1929 revisited, and we are not heading into a second Great Depression. No developed country this time round is going to face the 25-percent unemployment rate that the United States experienced in the 1930s. “Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as the...[MORE]

Wronger to righter: Locavore food mogul expounds

By Greg Harman

Published: 9/24/2008

Types: News

Mason Arnold’s chemical-engineering degree took him into the kindly world of “environmental services,” where, faced with a closer look at industry’s often-unpleasant impact on the Texas landscape, he made an earth- and life-changing U-turn. The 30-year-old has since launched two eco-friendly compani...[MORE]

Sweet home Alabama

By Gilbert Garcia

Published: 9/17/2008

Types: News

Prior to the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, a persuasive case could be made that the most horrific act of terrorism ever committed on U.S. soil was the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four young African-American girls. The bitter racial climate in Alabama at the time mad...[MORE]

You are what you think

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 9/10/2008

Types: News

The Mind Science Foundation, founded 50 years ago by San Antonio oilman, philanthropist, and adventurer Tom Slick, is one of those San Antonio giants hiding in plain sight. In science, a hypothesis isn’t much good without the means to test it, and MSF has been the lonely financial vanguard of the sc...[MORE]

Postcard from Alaska

By Krestia DeGeorge

Published: 9/3/2008

Types: News

The defining moment of Sarah Palin’s political career — at least up until Friday, August 29 — took place while she didn’t even hold elected office and occupied a place largely outside the public eye. In 2004, two years after leaving the office of mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (a town of fewer than 1...[MORE]

Sign off

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 8/27/2008

Types: News

The Queque reported incorrectly last week that, save for the absent Philip Cortez, Council unanimously approved the digital-billboard pilot program last December – the program that’s about to plant 15 bright, message-swapping signs along 1604, 281, I-10, and the Pan-Am Freeway. [See “Hang ’em high,”...[MORE]

‘Mr. Chertoff: Tear down this wall.’

By Greg Harman

Published: 8/20/2008

Types: News

Walls are rising in the Rio Grande Valley. Contractors are sharpening their shovels downstream of El Paso. Texas is finally seeing what many dismissed as an unlikely event: The start of construction on hundreds of miles of hulking walls, fences, and barriers running along the Rio Grande. In o...[MORE]

po•et•ry

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 7/30/2008

Types: News

Last week, in the Queque and online in Curblog, the Current reported on two recent instances, one at the San Pedro Playhouse and one at community literary organization Gemini Ink, in which City arts funding was given as a reason to shut down an audience Q&A and reject a writing workshop because ...[MORE]

Obama and McCain on Hutto: who’s on the fence?

By PATTY DELGADO

Published: 7/23/2008

Types: News

As the race to the White House enters its most crucial lap, one labor activist is looking to the candidates to explain why there are children behind bars in Texas. While Jaime Martinez, founder of the César Chávez March for Justice was in Washington D.C. last week for the LULAC elections, he t...[MORE]

Chief concerns and PERFormance wisdom

By Greg Harman

Published: 7/16/2008

Types: News

Listen to the whole interview: It’s been seven months in the waiting, this outside evaluation of the San Antonio Police Department’s use-of-force policies and practices. After months of behind-the-scenes editing and discussion within SAPD, the City Attorney and City Manager’s of...[MORE]

Planning for an abuse-free PD

By Greg Harman

Published: 7/9/2008

Types: News

There’s a funny little stratagem employed ever so often in the cat-and-mouse game played out day by day between the press and the press-acuted. Suppose I have the latest on a federal plan to pump up the gas tax to pay for daily Botox injections for the most stately members of Congress — specif...[MORE]

Big Brother’s cool sibling

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 7/2/2008

Types: News

Texas Representative Charlie Gonzalez stuck to his promise to oppose the FISA reform legislation that the House passed last week if it contained a retroactive immunity provision to protect the telecoms (including SA ex-squeeze AT&T) suspected of aiding the Bush Administration in its illegal post...[MORE]

Saving land, rediscovering community

By Greg Harman

Published: 6/25/2008

Types: News

The Bexar Land Trust has saved tens of thousands of acres of agricultural and park land to help protect San Antonio’s water supply, the Edwards Aquifer. This year, the Trust increased its drive to green the urban core of San Antonio with a potentially self-replicating program of community gardens in...[MORE]

Olympic torcher

By Greg Harman

Published: 6/18/2008

Types: News

Today, protests were expected to erupt across Tibet as the Olympic torch passed through the Central Asian region. A last-minute cancellation, however, now has the Tibetan leg of the relay on hold. Political activists had been preparing for major actions intended to draw attention to China’s ongoing ...[MORE]

School of hard knocks

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 6/11/2008

Types: News

On Sunday, June 8, the San Antonio Express-News published a story that seemed to vindicate former City Auditor Pete Gonzales’s contention that he was pushed out of his job because his drive to inspect local playgrounds would embarrass high-up City staffers. At a key April meeting attended by a f...[MORE]

Out with the old

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 6/4/2008

Types: News

Monday’s demolition of the old Jorrie Furniture Building at 131 San Pedro took the city’s historic-preservation watchdogs by surprise. Defeat on this scale, as in the case of the recently flattened downtown Walgreens, usually follows a protracted fight, marked by dramatic appeals to San Antonio’s se...[MORE]

Spring court season: Witch trials out, evidence in

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 5/28/2008

Types: News

“The sad parallels between the Texas polygamy raid and Guantánamo” is the subtitle on a Slate column reviewing our post-9/11 impatience with the niceties of American jurisprudence. This is actually the least alarming of the historical precedents invoked since April 3, when law enforcement (including...[MORE]

No vaya con dios

By Jennifer Herrera

Published: 5/21/2008

Types: News

Local performer Anna De Luna doesn’t believe in God. But she has no choice but to pray the rosary whenever her mother does because if she doesn’t, she’ll get a scolding. De Luna tackles this and other kinds of issues in her upcoming one-woman show ¿Chicana Atheist? Having performed the piece since a...[MORE]

Sticking it to the man (or the DA, anyway)

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 5/14/2008

Types: News

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s May 5 ruling that 2007 state legislation authorizing a pilot needle-exchange program in Bexar County doesn’t protect participants from being arrested for distributing drug paraphernalia kicked the DA’s case against local activists Bill Day, Mary Casey, and M...[MORE]

Finally old enough for the Oval Office, Swift throws a lasso in the ring

By Greg Harman

Published: 5/7/2008

Types: News

Three candidates get all the air time. Ralph’s defected for an Independent run. “Green” has become the Holy Grail of marketing kitsch. And San Antonio’s newest perennial candidate (and former Current staffer), Kat Swift, is using her Minervan powers to shake down the last few uncommitted primary ...[MORE]