Last month, the District sought redress for yet another federal diss, demanding the right to place two statues in the Capitol's Statuary Hall, alongside those from the 50 states. Congress hasn't agreed just yet, but the District is going ahead with carving the statues anyway (to be placed in the Wilson Building “as suggestions to [...]

The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) has made a number of head-slappingly ludicrous decisions in the past—perhaps most famous among them the pronouncement that the sale of 95 percent of a building is not actually a sale. But for sheer Kafka flavor, a recent ruling in a tenant-purchase issue may have set a [...]

When the Washington Post gets it in its head to tell readers about a threatening new drug trend, there's a general formula a reporter goes after. A good example is Amit R. Paley's piece on the region's (not-so)brewing meth epidemic. Paley has all the necessary elements: hysterical cops, worried public-health officials talking about the drug's [...]

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we run down what's going on in local Internet discussion groups.
ustreetnews
“DCRA's Communications Team” sent a list of 15 jobs to the Cardozo Shaw Neighborhood Association's e-list, calling it the “VACANCY HOT LIST.” The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, known for years as the city's most inept agency, said it was [...]

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we run down what's going on in local Internet discussion groups.
Brookland
Sarah on 17th and Jackson Streets NE in Brookland expresses shock that a motion-detecting light failed to scare a plant thief from her porch. “3 hanging baskets of flowers were stolen off my front porch despite the motion sensored light. My [...]

This poem, “What bugs me is the security guards,” was written by an eighth-grader at Garnet-Patterson Middle School, at 10th and U St. NW, where I teach a weekly writing class through DC WritersCorps.

Got a great example of student writing? Send it to us.

Recently, the City Paper offices were on the receiving end of a kind Canadian gesture. Our neighbor's embassy had conducted a nationwide study to determine the economic benefits of trade with Canada, state-by-state and the results are laid out on a glossy, color-coded “Trade and Security Partnership Map.” Alabama ships up its auto parts, Florida [...]

Scare quotes: Not just for the Washington Times anymore.
In 1994, a coalition of union and religious leaders successfully campaigned for a law in Baltimore mandating that employers with city contracts pay workers what they called a living wage. A movement was born, now among the most successful over the past decade; today, 130 cities and [...]

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In November 2003, the District's Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program released an interim, and scathing, assessment of the city's nursing facilities. It followed an equally scathing report released by congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton's office in 2002. (In 2001, we did a story of our own on the lax oversight of [...]

On the same day that we published a story on bicyclists who have had a hail of projectiles lobbed their way as they ride up and down 11th Street NW near Florida Avenue, Martin Nikoloski was knocked off his bike on 11th Street, just south of Florida, and stomped by a group of what he [...]

If Trader Joe’s broke ground on as many stores as the rumor mill says it has in the pipeline, the quirky organic food joint could rival Starbucks for most openings. Here’s one more for the pile: a PN Hoffman manager says the California-based grocer met today with the its representatives to discuss opening a store [...]

Yesterday, City Desk banged away at the Washington Post‘s Metro section for repeating an already discredited claim that meth has “infiltrated” the Washington region. The repetition came on the heels of “The Next Crack Cocaine?”—a story about a supposedly growing meth epidemic. We also knocked the paper for a story headlined “Police Find Meth Chemical [...]

On Sunday, March 19, the Washington Post ran a hysterical story on a growing meth epidemic in the Washington region on the front page of their Metro section. Slate's Jack Shafer dismantled the story in a piece called “How Not To Report About Meth.” We put it back together using accurate data and on-the-record interviews [...]

This afternoon, the D.C. Apartment and Office Building Association (AOBA), held a press briefing at its downtown offices on rent-control legislation currently making its way through the D.C. Council. Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham has been AOBA’s main adversary on the legislation—which would do such tenant-unfriendly things as abolish rent ceilings and penalties for landlords [...]

Last Friday, the University of the District of Columbia’s law school held its annual fundraising auction. The items up for bids ranged from the pedestrian—four Capitals tickets, breakfast for two at the Tabard Inn—to the not-so-pedestrian—lunch with Councilmember Phil Mendelson, a tour of Ward 8 led by Philip Pannell, and a citywide gay-bar crawl, also [...]