Jokers don’t get any wilder than the one draped on the wall of a Shockoe Bottom strip club. A banner of President Barack Obama as The Joker hangs across Main Street from the Slave Trade Reconciliation Triangle, where human figures lock in a melting embrace. Reconciliation is not what MICHAEL PAUL...

Bill Lohmann is out of the office. His column will resume Friday.

Michael Paul Williams’ column will resume Thursday.

Acommunity provides a range of opportunities—a place to live, marry and raise a family, to have fun, to be creative and to make life more meaningful for others. Despite the challenges, tensions and seemingly unbridgeable divide among political camps, community is desirable. These opportunities...

Jeff E. Schapiro is out of the office. His column will resume next weekend.

For R. Creigh Deeds, the latest setback in his campaign for governor wasn’t so much a plot twist as a rerun. Four years ago in his bid for attorney general, Deeds failed to receive an endorsement from fellow Democrat L. Douglas Wilder. He eventually lost to Republican Bob McDonnell by a mere 360...

The public housing resident received a letter in May saying she’d been picked to receive a rent-subsidy voucher. She’d been on the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s voucher waiting list since at least 2000 and was living with her mom. “I was glad to receive it so...

Appropriately, I heard radio legend Harvey Hudson before I saw him. He was whistling, cheerfully, as I walked into the lobby of the building where he lives. Then came the voice. Even if you didn’t know Hudson, as soon as he opened his mouth you’d know he was a radio guy (and TV, too). Hudson...

“I’m thinking this guy could be a big creep,“ said Pappas, who uses MySpace and Facebook. That didn’t turn out to be the case, and they dated for a year. But Pappas, like many Longwood students interviewed yesterday, is rethinking her relationship with the Internet in the aftermath...

Recently, we have seen several examples of very public and profound negative behavior. Just in the past two weeks, people in the sports, entertainment and political arenas have demonstrated some bad choices in their actions. As a teacher and a parent, I have some concerns about the implications of these...

With four months left in his term, Gov. Tim Kaine is not quite toast. His legacy will include big bursts of partisanship; bigger holes in the budget. Another tile in the Kaine mosaic: the large number of appointments he’s made to top courts—two each to the Virginia Supreme Court and Court...

It’s clear that Del. Phil Hamilton badly wanted a job at Old Dominion University. Less clear is whether he actually performed it. The Newport News Republican sent or replied to 11 e-mails discussing possible employment at the then-proposed Center for Teaching Quality and Educational Leadership....

Carter Colan has a sick child, great health insurance and almost $700,000 in medical bills. Something’s not quite right with this picture. As her 5-year-old son, Kieran Hathaway, battles a rare form of childhood cancer, they’ve had to rely, in part, on friends and neighbors who generously...

The Chinese-food deliveryman zipped out of Oak Hill Plaza on Tuesday night carrying two orders from Hunan Gourmet on Mechanicsville Turnpike. Heading east, his first stop was Bolling Court in eastern Henrico County. He sprinted to the door step of a town house, where he handed the waiting customer chicken...

TANGIER When members of the Secret Seven go out to lunch, they really go out. Well, not always. But they sure did yesterday. The weekly lunch bunch of old friends and community leaders from around Richmond typically dines at restaurants close to home, but they decided to do something a little out of...

The Quest Institute of Charlottesville has distributed more than a million books to 11,000 inmates during the 20-year history of its Books Behind Bars program. The Virginia Department of Corrections should be giving the nonprofit program’s founder a medal. Instead, it kicked Kay Allison and her...

Igrew up in the city and county of Honolulu in Hawaii. We moved there from Chicago in 1954, several years before Hawaii achieved statehood. I was a keiki (little kid) so I certainly wasn’t thinking about the structure of my local government and how it affected my day-to-day life. After college,...

It’s popping up in Northern Virginia. In suburban Richmond, too, it’s become a talking point. Bob McDonnell’s moldy graduate-school thesis and its less-than-politically correct observations on premarital sex, gays, birth control and working women are seeping into races for the Republican-run...

Hope, once again, abounds on Sixth Street. Richmond CenterStage, whose grand opening is tonight, rises above the ashes of the demolished Sixth Street Marketplace, hailed 24 years ago as downtown’s savior. “Today Richmond has the exhilaration of watching a dream turn into a reality,“...

Columnist Bill Lohmann is out of the office. His column will resume when he returns.

Columnist Jeff Schapiro says Gov. Tim Kaine’s plans for painful spending cuts will echo in the campaign to choose his succesor.

Becky Lee, chief program officer at the YWCA of Richmond, recalled her reaction upon learning that entertainer Chris Brown’s punishment for assaulting his girlfriend would be removing trash and graffiti in Richmond. “I was undone,“ she said. “The truth is, I sort of rolled my...

Deandria Spears turns 18 today, and it’s a happy birthday. She’s right where she hoped she might be at this age—starting college, surrounded by friends, looking ahead to a boundless future. Yet there’s no way she could have envisioned this day a few years ago when she was a 14-year-old...

But on the 20th anniversary of a Labor Day weekend of notorious unrest here in Virginia Beach, the oceanfront of this resort city could hardly have been more placid. Time seems to have salved the wounds of Greekfest, a festive gathering of black sorority and fraternity members that erupted into violence,...

The script usually opens with the basics: “Great to see you! How are you? Where are you? Are you married? Kids? Job?“ The answers, naturally, vary with the respondent. But they are the opening for many a class reunion conversation. This summer was a “two-fer” for me on the reunion...

Though school bells are no longer ringing for Republican Del. Phil Hamilton of Newport News, they are for other legislators who have a big say in spending your money. Tommy Norment, Fred Quayle and William Wampler, all members of Senate Finance Committee, do as Hamilton, vice-chairman of the House Appropriations...

It has been a good summer for Boaz & Ruth, sponsor of a number of programs that are rebuilding part of Highland Park while rebuilding the lives of former prisoners. On June 30, founder Martha Rollins was invited to the White House to meet President Barack Obama and talk about her vision of a national...

What? Parents are protesting an American president’s message that their children study hard and stay in school? Some school systems, cowed by grumbling parents or perhaps politically simpatico, are refusing to broadcast President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address? A pro-education message...

On the first day he walked into Henrico County’s Mills Godwin High School as a ninth-grader, Jordan Kocen met everyone he expected he would and at least one person he didn’t. “I see this guy standing in the hall, a janitor, and he asked me for my name,“ recalled Kocen, now a senior,...

“Man’s basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter.“ With that sentence in his 1989 Regent University law school thesis, Bob McDonnell laid bare...