O.K., it’s official: With the presidential nominating contests finally, mercifully kaput, and the party’s respective candidates solemnly girding themselves for November’s political battle, our quaint little Commonwealth is fast emerging as the key battlefield of 2008’s wide-ranging electoral war.
At the end of May, incoming UVA law school students got word that the student-loan ground was shifting beneath their very feet. An e-mail from Cynthia Burns, the director of financial aid for the law school, informed incoming first-years that the University had ended its relationship with Bank of America.
“Maybe I’ll wear my shades,” says Paul Cantor. The UVA English professor flips a set of clip-on sunglasses down over his regular frames and leans back in a black metal chair on the Downtown Mall. “I lead a double life.” While Cantor teaches on elitist seeming subjects like Homer and Shakespeare in a university setting, […]
I have walked the Downtown Mall several times a day for the past year in my job at C-VILLE, but I have seldom noticed the disrepair of its 32-year-old bricks.
The name of the game is “Second Chances.” The contestant? Nearby Scottsville, one of a slew of cities across Virginia trying to revamp its downtown area in the hope of attracting more tourists.
After receiving only one bid, from the developer they expected, City Council will hold a public hearing on the sale of two lots near the corner of Cherry Avenue and Ridge Street, which, if sold, could usher in dense development on what is some of the only vacant land near Downtown. The two discontiguous lots, […]
Todd Lucas is a difficult man to doubt. He is earnest and he is forceful and he is a person possessed of an electric personality channeled through a gleaming sledgehammer of a smile. So if Detective Todd Lucas of the Charlottesville Police Department says that there are gangs operating in a fair city such as […]
Of the 3,000 in attendance only six were escorted from the premises. Seventy-two others, who left of their own free will, were newly minted United States citizens. Despite the promise of angry protests disrupting the address of President George W. Bush at the 46th annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony at Monticello, the event went off smoothly.
At midnight July 1, Salvia Divinorum, the mind altering Mexican plant whose use by teenagers has been sweeping the nation (or so says some media), officially became illegal, giving some Virginians out there a cool, new, felony-level, drug-using past. Last March, Governor Tim Kaine signed into law HB21, the Virginia bill criminalizing the drug. Since […]
Jayson Whitehead v. the United States Department of the Army is now official. More than a year and a half after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the appraisal of Wendell Wood’s land that was sold to the Army in 2006, I have now had to sue in federal court. In late […]