Browse News & Feature Stories

The QueQue

By the Current news team

Published: 2/3/2010

Types: News

Trying the victim Sixteen-year-old “Angela” was a “case study” in the challenge domestic human-trafficking victims represent to law enforcement. Forced into prostitution at age 11, she wasn’t discovered by local police until several years later, when she was placed in the juvenile system after...[MORE]

The QueQue

By the Current new team

Published: 1/27/2010

Types: News

Friendly fire As the QueQue reported last October, at least one San Antonian was chilling a bottle of bubbly in anticipation of the Roberts Court’s Citizens United coup. “Anytime that Susan Reed is unhappy, I’m happy,” an ebullient T.J. Connolly told the QueQue Thursday. District Attorne...[MORE]

Special Haiti-edition QueQue

By the Current news team

Published: 1/20/2010

Types: News

JE ME RAPPÈLE, I’HAÏTI I first landed in Port-au-Prince in December 1971. A student at La Universidad InterAmericana de Puerto Rico, I was slowly winging my way back to Texas for the Christmas holidays. (In those days one could actually book a “student ticket” with stopovers fro...[MORE]

New Probation chief cleans house, police put PERF in the contract

By the Current news team

Published: 1/13/2010

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

Fresh cups For some employees within Bexar County Adult Probation, the New Year couldn’t come fast enough. As January approached, former Probation Chief Bill Fitzgerald, ridiculed by the more uncouth elements of the San Antonio media family (read: us) as a paranoid, out-of-touch, union-busting,...[MORE]

A(nother) Year of Infamy

By the Current news team

Published: 12/30/2009

Types: News

In the QueQue’s book, 2009 will go down as the year the right thing often happened for the wrong reasons — not unlike a Coen brothers’ script. Space is at a premium in this special holiday edition (enjoy our look at the Naughty Aughts, beginning page 11), so without further ado, 10 of the year’s mos...[MORE]

New Airport Police commander, old $$ woes for the Dems

By the Current news team

Published: 12/22/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Top gun Kenton Rainey, the newly appointed commander of the San Antonio Airport Police, has spent the last four months on paid leave from his previous post: Police Chief of Fairfield, California, a Bay Area suburb hard-hit by the housing crisis and subsequent economic fallout. And although some...[MORE]

The DA's hot-check fund, more sad jail tales

By the Current news team

Published: 12/16/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Slush fund Bexar County DA Susan Reed has been in office for a decade now, and she’s seeking another four-year term next November. While the public might be most concerned with criminal-conviction and crime rates, nothing riles up fellow politicians like a pot of few-strings-attached money, an...[MORE]

Curve busters: the SBOE, and hunger

By by the Current news team

Published: 12/9/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Hunger busters Texans take pride in asserting they live in the most opulent of states, but recent figures released by the USDA suggest we live in illusion. In fact, we’re the second hungriest state in the nation, just behind Mississippi. According to the USDA’s annual report released last...[MORE]

A remade man, a paper player

By the Current news team

Published: 11/25/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Restorative justice Is District Attorney candidate Nico LaHood crazy? At least two interested parties have suggested that the young Democrat, who kicked off his campaign with a Spur-studded fundraiser November 16 at the Tropicano, is nuts to run against 10-year incumbent Susan Reed. [See the Q...[MORE]

The QueQue: Taking on the standing roster: Reed and Adkisson

By the Current News Team

Published: 11/18/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Three-point shot The bench was deep at Monday night’s fundraiser for District Attorney candidate Nicholas “Nico” LaHood, and we’re not talking about the Spurs all-star lineup that showed. District Court Judge Ron Rangel, whom we spied talking to County Judge Ernest Acevedo Jr., reminded the Qu...[MORE]

The price of a nuclear divorce and the elephant in the room

By the Current news team

Published: 11/11/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Nobody puts Baby in a corner For two weeks now, the local press has been rife with speculation that the City might kill CPS Energy’s nuclear-expansion deal with NRG Energy. That agreement, to evenly split an 80-percent stake in two additional reactors at the South Texas Project in Bay City and...[MORE]

SeaWorld's body count and the DA's blood draw

By the Current news team

Published: 11/4/2009

Types: News

Sink or swim For the annals of unfortunate headlines: A beluga whale died during a “visit” to SeaWorld San Antonio this weekend. It makes the residency sound voluntary, first of all. Worse, we couldn’t get the image of whale-sized turnstile tragedy out of our heads. A better visitation s...[MORE]

PERF reforms stalled, Big Tex polluter stonewalls

By theCurrent news team

Published: 10/28/2009

Types: News

PERF recidivism A new contract with the police union is cooking and local human-rights activists are steaming over the City’s failure to reform SAPD’s Internal Affairs. A couple of years ago, shootings of unarmed citizens were in the headlines, use of force by San Antonio police had just...[MORE]

Food Stamp shortage, imminent eminent domain reform

By the Current news team

Published: 10/21/2009

Types: News

Stamp collection Our current scrambling over the food-stamp program didn’t come out of nowhere. Yet here in the state with some of the highest hunger rates and “food insecure” households in the nation, officials continue to blame the national recession for their backlogged and error-riddled syst...[MORE]

Closing out the Toxic Triangle, conserving gay history

By The San Antonio Current News Team

Published: 10/14/2009

Types: News

Nuke’m high Halftime score: 5-0. It wasn’t the usual opposition the QueQue has become familiar with during the past year, the “no-rate-hikes-for-nuclear” chanters, but the voice seated behind us at the special meeting of CPS Energy’s Board of Trustees (held Tuesday in a bunker at the Al...[MORE]

Connolly fights back, WAO cleans house

By the San Antonio Current news team

Published: 10/7/2009

Types: News

Def squad Suddenly last week, everyone cared about about the death penalty. All it took was one pretty-damn-sure innocent man (RIP Cameron Todd Willingham, executed February 17, 2004, charged with intentionally starting a fire that killed his three young children) and a poorly timed move by ...[MORE]

Bust: Grand Hyatt, 287(g), 210sa

By San Antonio Current News Team

Published: 9/30/2009

Types: News

Union-busting: outsourced A union vote was scheduled for housekeepers, bellboys, and other “domestics” employed at the San Antonio Grand Hyatt this past July, but organizers canceled it at the last minute, claiming that the hotel chain’s dissuasion tactics had been successful enough to queer th...[MORE]

Big Tex bailout, columnist dropout

Published: 9/16/2009

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

Rock collection No good deed goes unpunished, and so the bill for the cleanup at the Big Tex site just south of downtown came due last spring — but it has yet to be paid, leaving the scenic plot in development limbo. Last December, the Environmental Protection Agency removed 1,200 cubic yards ...[MORE]

An unsolved murder, a dissident censored

By the San Antonio Current News Team

Published: 9/9/2009

Types: News

Searching for Dana Clair Edwards’s killer It’s been eight long months since Dana Clair Edwards’s parents lost their daughter, a vivacious and popular woman who collected top academic honors in high school and college before earning an MBA and entering medical school. Dana was the first Bexar Co...[MORE]

The QueQue

By the San Antonio Current News Team

Published: 9/2/2009

Types: News

The road to wellville Lydia Lopez, the San Antonio State Hospital nursing assistant who was severely beaten in June by a patient, is recuperating nicely and feeling upbeat, thanks to weeks of intensive therapy, a neck brace to hold her broken verteb...[MORE]

Vi Vi's remains, Alameda's $ pains

By the San Antonio Current News Team

Published: 8/26/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Summer shift Your local City-owned utility is dying — just as we suggested it should two years ago. Evidence: 14 megawatts of liberating solar power, to be constructed here in town by the end of next year, powering 1,800 homes. The deal, announced Monday, follows on the heels of a 27-me...[MORE]