Recent Articles

Recent Articles By Jeannette Batz

  • Hard Case
    Marie Clark's group-therapy sessions are a sex offender's worst nightmare. Her down-and-dirty approach gives some of her colleagues the willies too.
  • Wait Elephant
    Flora prepares to pack her trunk once more -- but where's she headed?
  • Class War
    Marty Rochester wages war against the dumbing-down of public education -- even in the best of schools
  • A Matter of Honor
    Vets call on the military's top brass not to fight
  • Who's Afraid of Anthony Shahid?
    He's a hero to some, a pain to others. Either way, he makes people very nervous.

Recent Articles By Melinda Roth

Recent Articles By Richard Byrne

Recent Articles By D.J. Wilson

  • Slayer
    Could the mayor's uncanny habit of making enemies wreck the charter-reform effort?
  • The Worst of D.C.
    Shock jock's found a new way to annoy people
  • Demolition Man
    To save St. Louis public schools, Bill Roberti and his band of hired guns plan to blow things up. Who'll pick up the pieces when they're gone?
  • Don't Go There
    Metropolis' North St. Louis pub crawl could be just the beginning and the season's over for Coach Brady
  • Foul Ball
    Baseball coach Jim Brady has been fighting his bosses in the UMSL athletic department for seven years. And he thought colon cancer was a pain in the ass.

Recent Articles By Thomas Crone

Recent Articles By Safir Ahmed

  • Selling Out
    To save Maplewood, some residents have to go
  • Cleaning House
    The reasons we're resented aren't as simple as President Bush would have you believe
  • The Big Fix
    Public schools are broke all over, so why are only St. Louis and Kansas City getting charter schools?
  • A Black Eye Affair
    A minority firm takes a hit for no good reason
  • Black and Blue
    The conflicting versions of the shooting by police of a teenager widen the rift between cops and African-Americans

Recent Articles By C.D. Stelzer

  • Maybe in Memphis
    Jim Green, ex-con and government snitch, says he and his buddies from the Bootheel took part in the plot to kill Martin Luther King Jr. Trouble is, Green's been lying all his life -- so why should anybody believe him now?
  • Norm the Dinosaur
    Despite nearly a half-century of loyal service, Sinclair says goodbye to one of its finest
  • The Anarchists' Cookbook
    They make bread, not bombs, at the Black Bear Bakery
  • Stalking Back
    Trying to collect a half-million-dollar debt from Floyd Warmann, the hunter becomes the hunted
  • Cementing a Deal
    A giant quarry and the world's largest cement kiln are being welcomed by Ste. Genevieve County. But the operation may leave St. Louis gasping for air.

National Features

  • The Pitch
    Time Bomb in a Bottle

    "The idea that you're using sex hormones to make plastic is just totally insane."

    By Nadia Pflaum
  • Houston Press
    Foreclosure Pets

    When homeowners are pushed out, animals get left behind.

    By Paul Knight
  • Broward-Palm Beach New Times
    On Your Honor

    A judge's alleged relationships with defense lawyers and prosecutors raise eyebrows.

    By Bob Norman
  • Village Voice
    A Soldier's Story

    Remembering the day a black mob lynched a white man.

    By Tony Ortega

THROWING AWAY THE KEY: In a year punctured by the acts of inexplicably violent children, 15-year-old Vince Greer was an easy target for local prosecutors. Any child who could shoot his sweet, loving mother to death and wound his father -- senselessly, but with obvious deliberation -- should be locked in the darkest penitentiary for life, they reasoned. The system's mental-health professionals bolstered this by repeatedly diagnosing "conduct disorder" and fretting over Greer's use of marijuana. Then the state's own appointed psychiatrist said Greer was suffering from schizophrenia, a major mental illness that is believed to be biologically caused and can indeed drown out rational moral thought. But Greer's still incarcerated with seriously criminal adults, waiting to be tried for Murder One. It's just not popular these days to treat a criminal differently if he's sick. (JB)

ONE NATION, INCLUDING ISLAM: Two hundred years of religious freedom, and Americans still run the words together when they utter phrases like "Muslim terrorists." Muslims living in St. Louis are, by and large, decent, charitable, successful and God-fearing (their Allah being not an exotic separate entity but the same Creator referred to so smugly on the country's coinage). Their personal blurring of church and state can make dyed-in-the-wool patriots nervous, but overall the Koran's much better than the Bible at making room for other faith traditions. And the Muslims who've become U.S. citizens know the importance of American freedom and pluralism a lot better than most WASPs. (JB)

HAVE GUN, WILL CAMPAIGN: In November, John Ross, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House seat from the 2nd District, lost the election to Republican incumbent James M. Talent, but his candidacy may have helped promote two of Ross' other passions: guns and literature. The Clayton-based stockbroker garnered 57,665 votes to Talent's 142,313. Ross' unorthodox political views caused the Democratic Party to shun him. A licensed gun dealer, Ross is also the author of the novel Unintended Consequences, a fictional account of how jackbooted thugs from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wreak havoc on constitutional rights. The book, popular among members of the gun culture, is being sold through Internet sites, including one created by a member of the Missouri Sport Shooting Association, the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association. Some proceeds from the book's sales through Amazon.com, the online bookseller, are being added to the coffers of a campaign to legalize carrying concealed weapons in Missouri. Look for the measure to come to a ballot box near you. (CDS)

CRITICAL MASS: When Washington University began excavating near the corner of Wydown Avenue and Big Bend Boulevard last year, former St. Louis building commissioner Martin Walsh became concerned. The university has since completed the construction of new dormitories at the location. Walsh, an alumnus, recalled that he had been warned in the 1950s to stay clear of that area of the campus because it contained radioactive waste. The caveat came from his chemistry professor, the late Joseph Kennedy -- a co-discoverer of plutonium. A Wash. U. spokesman said the radioactive waste had all been located and removed years ago. But university documents indicate that low-level radioactive waste was buried at the site for more than a decade. University records further show that in 1958, when the first residence halls were built in the vicinity of the nuclear dump, the administration could not pinpoint the location of all the waste. (CDS)

ON THE RIGHT TRACK: It's a senator! No, it's a presidential candidate! Wait, it's our own U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft, a politician who spent 1998 launching an early bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. Ashcroft spent February fighting a doomed battle to prevent Dr. David Satcher from becoming U.S. surgeon general -- a stand that even some of his Republican Senate colleagues believed was harebrained. In the spring, Ashcroft released a new classic in the field of spiritual autobiography, Lessons from a Father to His Son, and he spent much of the year setting up political-action committees to raise campaign cash. Ashcroft even joined the wave of national candidates taking advantage of a campaign-funding loophole in Virginia to raise large sums of cash that evade Federal Election Commission scrutiny. Ashcroft didn't ignore President Bill Clinton, either. He was one of the first talking heads to appear on CNN and MSNBC as Clinton was testifying to a grand jury in August, and one fundraising letter that Ashcroft sent out before the disastrous GOP election campaign in 1998 could be summed up as "Bring me the head of Bill Clinton!" Keep on running, John! Mel Carnahan is right behind you! (RB)

LUMP OF COLE: It hasn't exactly been a banner 1998 for St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Cole Campbell, has it? The year was punctuated by plagiarism and libel disputes at the paper. The libel dispute was the one Campbell created for himself last spring when he attempted to strong-arm the St. Louis Journalism Review and its editor, Ed Bishop, by sending a letter to the paper before SJR published a profile of editorial-page editor Christine Bertelson. The letter told Bishop that publishing "any statements alleging that her appointment was made for personal reasons" would be libelous on its face -- "to her and to me." Bishop published the profile -- and Campbell's letter -- anyway. The plagiarism hubbub came in October, when the RFT found that an editorial by P-D editorial writer Mubarak Dahir cribbed from an article in the New York Times. Several national experts called it plagiarism, but Campbell didn't, preferring to write an editorial note stating that the piece's "failure to attribute its key source violates the spirit of our standard." (RB)

MARKETING MARK: Seventy home runs? OK. Seventy million references to Mark McGwire? Well, it wasn't actually 70 million references to McGwire in local media -- but with McGwire pushing hurricanes, plane crashes and national and international news off the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch every day, it seemed like it. The October issue of the St. Louis Journalism Review found 1,812 P-D articles with McGwire mentions through Sept. 14 (compared with a mere 961 mentioning Monica Lewinsky), and the final article count probably topped 3,000. The highlights of Post-Dispatch coverage included a profile on local people named "Mark McGwire" or some variant of the slugger's name, and a front page on Monday, Sept. 28, that had nothing but McGwire news. It was a boon for circulation, however, with the paper selling out of a number of special editions and reaping a publicity jackpot. The question now is how the Post-Dispatch will handle the Pope's upcoming visit. We're betting on McGwire treatment. (RB)

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