Uranium study: Aglow with questions.

Courtroom murder, political plotting The March 29, 1913, Richmond Times-Dispatch called the executions of a father and son the final curtain on “one of the most remarkable dramas of modern times.“ The chain of events that ended in Richmond had begun more than a year earlier in Carroll County...

If it’s not a conspiracy, it sure looks like one. The Big Three of the state Democratic Party—Tim Kaine, Jim Webb and Mark Warner—are signaling separately they’re doing the same thing: nothing, when it comes to the 2009 nomination for governor.

Imagine Richmond as a Top 40 city with 500,000 residents, 307 square miles and downtown Short Pump swelling the municipal coffers. It could have happened. Forty-seven years ago yesterday, residents in Richmond and Henrico County voted on a proposed merger. Richmond voters endorsed the plan by a more...

Perhaps it’s too much to hope Dwight Clinton Jones will toss away the security blanket Mayor L. Douglas Wilder draped around himself. Wilder has been the mid-city mayor with the big-city security detail—around-the-clock coverage from an eight-member Executive Protection Unit whose police...

Would you shed your clothes for the camera to ensure that others remain clothed, fed and housed? The “Nekkid Men from the Center of the Universe” has exposed a rift in priorities and values in the town of Ashland.

Today would have been Ernest H. “Judge” Williams Jr.‘s 94th birthday. The famed lobbyist, who died in 2003, had a keen appreciation for a bottom-line tenet of his craft: There’s a difference between being friends and being friendly. It’s something to keep in mind as Richmond’s...

Ever since his election, folks have wondered how the Rev. Dwight Clinton Jones of First Baptist Church of South Richmond will balance his role with that of Mayor Dwight Clinton Jones.

Next to the job Barack Obama will start in January, the presidency of Virginia Union University may be the toughest gig around. Imagine inheriting the helm of a historically black college with relatively threadbare facilities in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. Did we mention...

Who’ll inherit the governor’s mansion? Political columnist Jeff Schapiro handicaps the three Democrats and one Republican who want to be Virginia’s next governor.

The case of the stray sword Three years after the death of Williams Carter Wickham, thousands came to Monroe Park for the unveiling of a statue dedicated to his memory. The Richmond Times estimated that 5,000 turned out for the Oct. 29, 1891, ceremony, at which speakers recalled the Richmond native’s...

Since this is the time of year to count our blessings, we should give thanks for what clearly is a safer city. There’s a Richmond listed among the 10 most dangerous cities in the country, but it isn’t ours. Richmond, Calif., was the ninth most-dangerous city in 2007.

As Ashland celebrates its 150th anniversary, which portrait best reflects this quaint little town with the immodest slogan? The portrait of NBC travel writer and editor Peter Greenberg, who ridicules the town that touts itself as “The Center of the Universe”?

On Nov. 13, what remains of the House of Delegates Republican majority met—safe from the prying eyes of the press and always-open pocketbooks of lobbyists—at the Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen for a post-election, pre-General Assembly skull session.

An elementary school in a small Texas fishing village, battered by Hurricane Ike two months ago, is getting help from a Texas native who now lives in Henrico County. When Cindy McNamara learned of the children’s needs from her niece, a second-grade schoolteacher in the village of San Leon, she...

Green is the new black. Fifty is the new 30. And Henrico County, in an unwelcome trend, appears to be the new Chesterfield. Once upon a time, Chesterfield County made an accommodating whipping boy for local media. We chronicled the county’s growing pains and its at-times absurd isolationism, typified...

Fire threatened Richmond landmark The clock in the tower at Main Street Station read 12:48 when the first train pulled in the afternoon of Nov. 27, 1901. “A throng of people had gathered to greet the incoming train, and they evinced the pride and pleasure that the citizens of Richmond feel in the...

Primer for a governor. Democrat Terry McAuliffe is interested in being governor of Virginia. Columnist Jeff Schapiro is willing to teach him what a governor actually does for a living.

Beginning in the early 1990s, area delegations flew to the Twin Cities, Cincinnati, Portland, Ore., and Jacksonville, Fla., as part of an effort to make the Richmond region greater than the sum of its parts.

Forty-one years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional and ended race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Can you imagine if voters were later allowed to overturn Loving v. Virginia? On the same day Barack Obama’s historic...

He won with 2.36 million votes, a record for a statewide candidate. His total was nearly twice that of his opponent. He swept all 11 congressional districts and carried 128 of 134 counties and cities. And yet Mark Warner is merely Virginia’s new junior U.S. senator. A guy accustomed to being No....

Their first responsibility is the care of those who give the last full measure of devotion. About 60 soldiers—members of an Army unit that recovers and prepares the bodies of fighting men and women killed in combat—yesterday departed this sprawling base between Petersburg and Hopewell for...

If the tangled vote tally holds up, Dwight Clinton Jones appears poised to become the Richmond rarity: a mayor from south of the James River. Jones won largely on his political strength on the city’s South Side, where he took the 6th, 8th and 9th districts handily. No one’s ready to say the...

Adecade ago, the prospect of a white mayor in Richmond caused a major controversy. At the time, the Richmond City Council chose a mayor from within its ranks, amid back-room dealing. Tim Kaine was the clear frontrunner. Councilman Sa’ad El-Amin openly opposed the idea of a white mayor. If others...

When he was elected governor in 2005, Tim Kaine vowed to complete the unfinished work of Mark Warner (read: transportation) and to nudge Virginia forward in areas it often neglects (read: pre-kindergarten). On a fix for transportation, Kaine flopped not once, not twice, but three times. On expanded pre-kindergarten...

Baseball in Richmond has gone south, literally and figuratively. The lame-duck mayor and his outgoing administration are working a deal whose timing is challenging at best. The U.S. economy is tanking and our city will feel trickle-down pain. Credit lines have dried up. And even during flush times, this...

How well the developers of the proposed Shockoe Center can integrate the national pastime with the nation’s greatest shame will determine whether their pitch is a success. Highwoods Properties’ proposal is intriguing: a $363 million development in Shockoe Bottom, including a $60 million baseball...

Now that Mayor L. Douglas Wilder has opted for “none of the above,“ where does that leave Robert J. Grey Jr.? Wilder, in a commentary in Sunday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, wrote that none of the five mayoral contenders has proven worthy of his support. “If you listen to the candidates,...

He failed to secure a spot with Barack Obama on a Democratic Party sample ballot. But mayoral candidate Dwight Clinton Jones garnered reams of free publicity. The party ultimately overturned the Richmond Democratic Committee’s controversial endorsement of Jones, who had received the nod during...

Political columnist Jeff Schapiro says Obama and McCain are barnstorming purple Virginia to grab votes with not-so-straight talk about God, guns, gays and gas.