Split (1)

train · 2.6M rows

text stringlengths 11 77k
At the City Council meeting that had “Save the Dells” on its agenda. Councilmen Steve Blair gave a summary of all the things the city did to purchase open spaces.
While the Arizona Legislature is considering ethical guidelines for lawmakers prior to their election, it would do well to also consider adding guidelines for the behavior of already elected officials who exceed the boundaries of acceptable and ethical behavior by their punitive actions.
Editorial: Why wait to implement ban on texting while driving?
Surrounded by victims’ families, Gov. Doug Ducey on Monday, April 22, 2019, signed a bipartisan, legislative effort to ban texting while driving, which will take effect on Jan. 1, 2021.
I’m amazed by a variety of things in life: the love of a devoted wife (even though it took three attempts to experience it); the lifelong loyalty of a dog; the warmth and power of the sun, which is over 93 million miles away (an orbit average); and, the frigid Phoenix Suns’ inability to reach the NBA finals in the past...
The most important right that every American possesses is the right to vote. Citizens decide who wins elections at every level of government. We assume in every election that our votes are correctly counted.
Politicians love to embrace the Constitution, hold it high, and swear to defend it to the death. Until it becomes inconvenient.
Today, dear readers, I want to invite you into my personal space.
An editorial cartoon published in the Courier, April 24, 2019.
I’m a coach for the Prescott High School mountain bike team. We keep brainstorming on how we can encourage more girls to join the team.
Accelerated depletion of groundwater in the Prescott Active Management Area (PrAMA) — as well as above the headwaters of the upper Verde River — began in the mid-1990s.
The first time I saw it, I could barely breathe. It was so beautiful against the cerulean sky. Our Lady of Paris.
The American Friends of the British National Party was set up in the late 90s to raise funds for the organisation among far right sympathisers in the US.
It was modelled on Sinn Fein's fundraising network, although it was never as successful. Organisers say it raised around $40,000 in three years – but more money may have been sent from US sympathisers direct to the BNP.
Nick Griffin said the money raised made a "significant contribution to the BNP's general election campaign". Its meetings attracted various activists from the US and the UK including two former members of the Klu Klux Klan, Don Black and David Duke.
Several senior BNP members visited the US to attend meetings. The organisation folded in 2001 when the Department of Justice requested that it register as a foreign agent and its founder, Mark Cotterill, returned to the UK.
The phone call that changed my family’s life irrevocably came out of the blue, as these earth-shattering events so often do, one autumn evening as we ate our supper.
The four of us — my partner Olly, our two young sons and I — had just settled down at the table. It had been an unexceptional day, yet the prosaic domestic scene is imprinted indelibly on my memory. I can still summon up the picture of that moment: the boys’ knees, mud-splattered from a game of football in the garden; ...
And then the telephone rang.
I recall next — with a clarity undimmed by the passing of 25 years — the succession of emotions that flashed through my mind: first annoyance that our meal had been interrupted. Then, as I heard the tone and warmth of Olly’s greeting, recognition: the call was obviously from his mother in Holland.
And then there was a long pause which I recognised as a prelude to unexpected or untoward news.
I held my breath and listened intently. Next came an unmistakable frisson of worry and disbelief in Olly’s voice as he said, ‘I can’t believe it. Are you sure?’ And in that moment I knew instinctively that the news his mother had imparted was momentous.
Olly was pale with shock when he returned to the table; his voice barely audible over our sons’ chatter as he relayed the content of his mother’s call. ‘She says a woman has been in touch with her claiming to have a daughter by me. She wants to meet me,’ he said, and in that instant my cosy domestic world seemed to spi...
I was stunned, confused and angry as a thousand questions coursed through my mind. How could Olly have a daughter when we had been together — contentedly, monogamously I believed — for the past 19 years?
Of course, we’d had our bad times — there had even been a short spell when we had lived on separate floors in our house — but I had not imagined he was capable of infidelity. In fact I felt the passing years had brought us closer.
Our sons, Zek, 13, and Cato, nine, were happily oblivious, engaged in some absorbing game, but I feared the worst. I started to believe that this daughter — this interloper who threatened to disrupt our settled and contented lives — might have been conceived during one of Olly’s trips back to see his mother in their na...
What had happened was less worrying than the scenario my wild imaginings had conjured up. Olly explained kindly that he’d had several brief relationships as a young man before he met me. This girl, he said, must have been born as a result of one of them.
The selfish part of me wanted to beg him to do just that. Who knew what havoc this young woman might wreak on all our lives?
But even then, in the midst of my angst, that seemed a very cruel path to take. I’ve always believed it is important for children to know their parents, so, with some trepidation, I urged Olly to make the phone call; to meet the girl — called Cindy — and find out if she really was his child.
And so, two months later, Olly travelled to the small Dutch town of Hilversum near Amsterdam, where he was born, to meet the woman who professed to be his daughter.
I stayed at home in London with our boys: it didn’t feel right for me to intrude on that first private, emotional meeting. It was something Olly needed to do on his own.
Even so, I was consumed by nerves; unsure how this strange and unnerving new chapter in our lives would pan out. If Olly met Cindy’s mother again, might their old passion be reignited? The thought plagued me.
Yet I took consolation from my conviction that, although I was unsure about his undying loyalty towards me, I did not believe he would ever choose to leave his sons.
The days of his absence passed in a tumult of nervous anticipation. Was the story true? Could Cindy be his daughter?
Then he arrived home, eager to impart his news. The young woman he met was, in fact, 21. I was reassured that her age proved unequivocally that Olly’s relationship with her mother had pre-dated our own.
He told me she had fine features: huge grey-blue eyes, a cascade of russet curls and a striking resemblance to his own mother when she was younger.
I was intrigued to hear, too, how tongue-tied and shy she had been, and how Cindy had arrived to meet her father with a list of questions she had prepared.
Cindy had been born in January 1966, when Olly was in his early 20s, after he’d had a brief relationship with her mother, who is still alive. She later married and had another child, but Olly had never been told about the first pregnancy.
It turned out that Cindy’s mother had only recently told her who her father was and Cindy had persuaded her to track down Olly’s mother.
Cindy wanted to know all about Olly’s parents and brother, about the kind of people they were, how they lived and, importantly, whether they had any inherited illnesses.
She was engaged to be married and wanted to have children, she explained, so a family medical history was particularly important to her.
At this stage, I admit, my relief that Olly hadn’t had an affair was mixed with anxiety: even though I knew now that Olly had not been unfaithful to me, an uncharitable mistrust of this beautiful new interloper started to creep up on me. Did I want Olly’s fully-grown daughter, with whom I had no biological link, to bec...
Cindy’s desire to understand her origins was reasonable enough, I told myself, but I felt uneasy. Friends did not help when they asked, incredulously, why I wasn’t more upset and jealous. Some even suggested I should throw Olly out.
Had I missed something? Should I insist Cindy have no role in my partner’s life? I reflected on this at length, but the truth was that she was the result of a liaison which had taken place before I even met Olly: why should I feel antipathy towards her?
Over the months that followed, Olly travelled to Holland several times to visit Cindy. He would return, ebullient, clutching photographs he had taken and some that Cindy had given him from her past.
I tried to be pleased by the delight he clearly took in having ‘found’ her; I even endeavoured to understand when, in wistful moments, he regretted the fact that he hadn’t known Cindy earlier; that she had not been able to spend time with us as a child. I remember feeling then a niggling fear that she might become too ...
Then suddenly, the following year — 1989 — there were new concerns to confront. Cindy and her fiance, Gerard, said they were planning to visit us in England. What if I didn’t like her? What if I found her conniving? What if she started making demands on Olly and wanted money from him at a time when, as a freelance writ...
Might she want a stake in our children’s inheritance? Was she working on persuading Olly to change his will?
Of course, I wasn’t proud of my thoughts — in fact I reproached myself for being suspicious and cynical — but I also recognised that all these scenarios were, after all, perfectly feasible.
Then Cindy arrived; bright, beautiful and unassuming, she seemed shyly grateful to be admitted into our lives, and within minutes my shameful suspicions dispersed.
Olly’s long-lost daughter was guileless, charming, open and as eager to be friends with me and our boys, as much as she was with her father.
During their visit, Cindy and Gerard made a discreet but concerted effort to fit in; our family, in turn, embraced her. She confided in me later that she, too, had endured her own private terror that she would feel out of place in our home; that I would dislike or reject her.
And even though our boys seemed uncertain and coy at first when their new half-sister came into their lives, they quickly took their cue from Olly and me, and their shyness and reserve soon dissipated.
So as Cindy and I grew closer, a firm and genuine mutual affection took root, and I was moved one day when, during a long walk, she told me the heart-rending tale of her childhood.
Her mother, Ellie, was just 19 when she fell pregnant by Olly, and she remembered little about him. Ellie’s strict Roman Catholic parents had shunned their daughter when she told them she had become pregnant, and forced her to leave their home.
She had subsequently struggled as a single mother and had gone to America to find work, intending to send for Cindy, whom she had left temporarily at home with her grandparents.
But it was six years before Ellie was able to return to Holland, by which time Cindy felt abandoned and bereft. Indeed, when she was eventually reunited with her mother there was a new stepfather on the scene, a new sibling, and an unsettling degree of family tension. Cindy confided in me that hers had been an unhappy ...
I found myself reflecting on how crucial Olly’s love and consistency had been for our boys, and felt huge compassion for this young woman as she admitted how scared she had been about contacting Olly.
When Cindy confessed, ‘I didn’t dare imagine I would find a father who would take me on’, I felt a wave of fellow-feeling towards my new step-daughter, coupled with relief that I had urged Olly to contact her, and delight at the close bond they had formed.
Suspicious? At first Angela was wary of Olly's lovechild but her suspicions soon disappeared after she met her and immediately began to warm to her.
But the human psyche is both fickle and complex, and even though I warmed to Cindy, my feelings were thrown into tumult once more when she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, Jamie, in 1991.
I’d naturally always assumed my sons’ children would be our first grandchildren; that Olly and I would share in the delight of our next generation together. Yet here was his flesh and blood, his ‘new’ daughter, getting there first.
Olly reacted excitedly, insisting he must go over to Holland immediately to take a gift and deliver congratulations. I felt shamed by my uncharitable feelings, and mercifully they dispersed as, during successive trips to Holland, I grew closer to her.
When her second child, Mikey, was born in 1993, I shared Olly’s joy, and as I grew to know Cindy better and better and saw how hard she was striving to create a reliable and happy home for her own family, my respect and admiration for her burgeoned.
I also appreciated how sweetly welcoming she was to me, each time we visited, and took delight in the genuine happiness our sons felt, too, at this new extension to our family.
Over the years, indeed, I have relished watching the bond our sons have formed with Jamie and Mikey. Despite this, I had privately wondered whether Cindy, now 45, felt resentment towards me for having a family with the man she so wanted in her own life — particularly since we lived in England and she rarely had time to...
I put this thought to her quite recently, confident that the bond between us is sufficiently robust that she would talk to me about things that troubled her.
She went on: ‘I don’t have negative feelings towards you. You didn’t take Olly from my mother, and you have invited me to stay and taken an interest in me.
I was profoundly touched when Cindy told me she would have liked me to be part of her life when she was younger, too.
I think back sometimes to the phone call that brought Cindy into our lives, and I am not proud of my initial suspicions.
I am grateful, however, that I didn’t let them corrode me, or impede Olly’s reunion with his lovely daughter and the joyful part she now plays in all our lives.
My elder son and his wife now have a baby daughter, Isana, our beloved granddaughter, and I look forward to the role Cindy will now play in her life.
We visit Cindy two or three times a year; we’ve spent holidays together. I am 69 now, Olly 68, and I have found in his daughter a true friend. She seems to value my experience as much as I set store by her perspective on life.
I felt exactly the same way — which is a happy ending to a tale which, however convoluted and sad, has enriched my life beyond measure.
Angela Neustatter is the author of A Home For The Heart, published by Gibson Square at £10.99.
If Texas' long-maligned Child Protective Services is ever going to turn the corner, it's got to be able to hang on to people like Nakiba Pruitt.
I first brought Pruitt to your attention more than a year ago, after riding along with her to get a glimpse of her daily grind. It's not a job most of us could do, not even for a day.
Luckily, Pruitt is still on board despite upheaval that put a bulls'-eye on the agency where she has worked for nearly a decade.
And by "on board" I mean tucked away in a drab maze of offices at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services hub, which once was a sprawling Winn-Dixie grocery store in the Kessler Hills Shopping Center in southwest Dallas.
This beat-down retail strip — home to an express bus company, a check-cashing store, a hair and nail salon, a Dollar Store and a Mexican restaurant — is the base for hundreds of caseworkers investigating allegations of child neglect and abuse in Dallas County.
The caseworkers, who spend most of their time out in the field, usually work from home. That's what Pruitt did — until about four months ago, when she was promoted to a supervisor slot and put in charge of eight caseworkers.
It came with a small pay bump, money the mother of three can definitely use as she wraps up her master's degree in social work.
Her bosses had asked her several times to join the management team, but Pruitt enjoyed being out in the field rescuing kids and helping families repair their lives. She didn't sign up to do this for a big job title or a fat paycheck. The second one isn't coming for anybody at CPS, no matter what.
"It's for the children and for the community," Pruitt said. "Keeping that in mind is helpful — just knowing why you're doing this work."
Still, low pay coupled with an unbearable caseload created a revolving door for CPS caseworkers, which, in turn, led to a backlog of child welfare cases and caused gaping holes throughout the system.
In December 2015, shortly after I rode along with Pruitt, U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack ruled that the state's long-term foster care program is "broken" and in desperate need of an overhaul.
Three months later, CPS came under fire when a 4-year-old Grand Prairie girl was beaten to death after the agency failed to properly investigate complaints of abuse. Two CPS workers were fired and a third resigned after Leiliana Wright's death on March 13, 2016, revealed a chain of errors, incompetence and systemic pro...
By April, even Gov. Greg Abbott had seen enough. Saying "the status quo at CPS is unacceptable," Abbott brought in retired Texas Rangers chief Henry "Hank" Whitman to overhaul the agency.
"Our children are too important to suffer through the challenges they've faced," Abbott said at the time. "I've insisted on overhauling a broken system, and I applaud the leadership changes that will provide a new direction and focus that puts protecting children first."
Meanwhile, while the governor was safe in his bubble in Austin, front-line workers like Pruitt were catching the brunt of the public's outrage. In Pruitt's case, The Dallas Morning News didn't help matters by publishing photos of my ride-along visit with her in subsequent articles about the agency's many problems. The ...
"It was definitely rough and a little disconcerting seeing all of the negative headlines," Pruitt said. "Of the few cases shown in the media, there are thousands of other cases we're working on with different outcomes."
What impressed me about Pruitt was the connection she built with the families we visited. She was sensitive, respectful and, unlike less diligent or dedicated caseworkers, she showed up when she said she would, the families told me.
Pruitt also was extremely organized and meticulous, lugging her laptop with her wherever she went to track the cases on her plate.
"You have to be organized to do her job as well as she did," said Marissa Gonzales, a spokeswoman for the agency. "That's why she'll be a good supervisor, too."
No matter how things appear on the outside, the way Pruitt sees it, things are finally looking up at CPS.
"The agency is definitely moving in a positive direction," she said. "We are working better as a team and with our families and other stakeholders in the community."
There's evidence to back her up. When we last visited, in December 2015, the CPS office in Dallas County had 254 investigative caseworkers, but the agency was facing a 57 percent turnover rate.
A year later, thanks to Whitman and others pressing to hire more workers, Dallas County had 305 investigators, and the turnover rate had dropped to 39 percent.
"We hope to see that continue to decrease with the new staff and pay raises that are taking effect," Gonzales said.
The local office also is beginning to put a dent in the caseload that each investigator handles. The average caseload was 24 in December 2015 but rose to 31 in May of last year. By December, it was down to 21.

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.