Lewis & Clark College President Michael Mooney resigns this week after revelations that he loaned $10.5 million in college funds to a former wildcatter looking for a way to reprocess waste oil. Willamette Week's Nigel Jaquiss wraps up a three-part series on the scandal with a visit to Environmental Oil Processing Technology's dormant refinery 22 miles west of Boise, Idaho, an unlikely spot to have marked the end of the respected college president's 14-year reign.
Partners in Housing, an Indianapolis non-profit developer specializing in housing for the homeless and other special needs tenants, will begin major rehabilitation work on several 70-year-old buildings this fall. Using the innovative concept of "supportive housing," the 106 units will be linked with an array of social services to provide counseling, job training and placement, access to mental and physical health care and other forms of assistance to help the low-income tenants stay housed and healthy. NUVO's Summer Wood talks to the developer, potential tenants, and community leaders about the plan and its pros and cons.
Judicial Watch, which buried Bill and Hillary Clinton in legal papers, has subpoenaed OC Weekly writer Gustavo Arellano for all the photographs he shot of a fight that broke out at an anti-immigrant rally in Anaheim, Calif., in December 2001. Judicial Watch represents the anti-immigrant group California Coalition for Immigration Reform, which claims the city of Anaheim didn't protect CCIR members when a melee broke out with counter-protesters. OC Weekly publishes the photographs in question, and it seems they may actually hurt CCIR's case.
An appeals court panel rules that a March 2000 story about Dallas restauranteur Dale Wamstad's troubled family life was not libelous. Wamstad's advertising for his chain of restaurants promotes his "family man" image, which the Dallas Observer helped puncture with a story about his ex-wife's claims of abuse. The court found that Wamstad's advertising and court battles had made him a "public figure," and therefore a legitimate target for media attention.
Crisis pregnancy centers are beginning to use the language and technology of modern medicine to help soften their appeal to clients -- but not their anti-abortion aims. Independent Weekly's Barbara Solow looks at how Christian crisis pregnancy centers use ultrasound images of a first trimester fetus to turn women away abortion. "Are pregnancy centers, as their leaders portray them, valuable community service organizations providing women with support and information they can't get elsewhere?" Solow asks. "Or are they, as abortion-rights activists describe them, 'fake clinics' that lure women in with free medical services, then use one-sided information to dissuade them from having abortions?"
The Local Planet Weekly's Founding Editor and Co-Publisher, Connye Miller, died June 15 of complications related to the rare disease porphyria. Matt Spaur, her husband and co-publisher, remembers her in 475 words of poetry, pain and love.
Coral Eugene Watts has confessed to 13 murders, and authorities in four states believe the true number of victims may total more than 50. They were all women, and they were strangled, stabbed, hanged, or drowned, all part of Watts' plan not just to take their lives, but to "kill their spirit." Today, at 49, Watts marks time in the Texas prison system, patiently waiting for May 9, 2006 -- the day of his scheduled release. Because, as Glenna Whitley of the Dallas Observer reports, Watts has made a career of staying one step ahead of authorities -- and of combining unspeakable wickedness with phenomenal luck.
