Phoenix Az

This is a city in ascendency, and it knows it. There's a sense of great things to come at every turn. Like the San Fernando Valley in the 1950s, and Orange County 20 years ago. Phoenix's airport seems three times larger than it needs to be. The Phoenix Art Museum is doubling its space. Everything's a size too large, with room to grow. The question was, could a couple of non-golfers (non-tennis players too) find other things to do in this go-go, airline-hub city?

About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, milled among protesters outside the convention center where President Obama was speaking Monday -- the latest incident in which protesters have openly displayed firearms near the president. Gun-rights advocates say they're exercising their constitutional right to bear arms and protest. Those who advocate gun control say it could be a disaster waiting to happen. Phoenix police said the gun-toters, including the man carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, didn't need permits.

When you check into a luxury resort, you don't expect to find a notice in your room cautioning you about rattlesnake encounters. As a guest with my wife, Sandy, at the new Four Seasons Resort in the desert just north of Phoenix, I watched where I stepped. In this part of the country, the good life comes with a drawback or two. I never did see a snake--although lots of rabbits hopped just beyond my feet as I strolled to the pool each morning.

A jury spared a man convicted in a series of random nighttime shootings from the death penalty on Wednesday, sentencing him to life in prison. Samuel Dieteman, who pleaded guilty to two of six murders in the metropolitan Phoenix Serial Shooter case of 2005 and 2006, appeared stoic as the jury's decision was announced. "I'm truly sorry for the pain that I've caused to many, many people," Dieteman, 33, said after his sentence was read. He thanked the court for treating him like a human being.

Phoenix HERE in Arizona's premiere resort playground, consider the dizzying number of hotel rooms -- 55,000, about as many as in all the Hawaiian islands combined -- and you may wonder how it could possibly stand more palm trees, pools and cabana boys. I wondered too. And wondered even more after the recent openings of the JW Marriott Desert Ridge, Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain, Westin Kierland and Sheraton Wild Horse Pass.

The Superstition Mountains were evaporating into the great sigh of dusk when we struck it rich. "Dad!" Robert said, pointing to sparks in the heap of boulders upon which we perched. "Gold!" Eighteen months earlier, at dinner, I told my three children about an exciting assignment I'd been offered. The catch? Extensive travel. Only Robert, then 5 and the youngest, didn't grudgingly vote to let me go.

The stark landscape looms large here: miles of open land pockmarked by desert scrub; jumbled rocks heaped upon one another to create wild mountains; cantankerous cactuses ready to hurl daggers if you come too close. Landscapes don't come much more ruggedly Western than this. So it's not surprising to find restaurants that feature an Old West menu.

A serial rapist was sentenced Friday to 50 years in prison and began to sob when he heard some of his 13 victims testify about how the attacks had traumatized them. David B. Wilson Jr., 33, pleaded guilty in a plea agreement last month to 13 felony counts of sexually assaulting or attempting to assault young women in the Phoenix area between July 2004 and July 2005. "I have nightmares every night of your smell, your touch," one woman who fought off Wilson told the court.

Groups of city firefighters and police officers will begin taking Spanish classes this summer under a pilot program that has raised the hackles of those who supported a 1988 constitutional amendment making English Arizona's official language. Councilwoman Mary Rose Wilcox, who proposed the program last fall, believes that, because an estimated 50,000 members of the growing Latino population in Phoenix speak little or no English, police and firefighters must learn Spanish.

In another procession of unwanted coastal imports, the latest to infest this state comes from, of course, California. Only this time Arizona isn't inheriting its haughty neighbor's noxious air, snarled traffic or even suburban sprawl. Now it's rats. The big-eared, ropy-tailed pests hitched a ride in trucks from Central California's citrus groves and have taken up residence in the roofs of one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, known for its forest of fruit trees.

The stark landscape looms large here: miles of open land pockmarked by desert scrub; jumbled rocks heaped upon one another to create wild mountains; cantankerous cactuses ready to hurl daggers if you come too close. Landscapes don't come much more ruggedly Western than this. So it's not surprising to find restaurants that feature an Old West menu.

PHOENIX -- So you're having a tough time finding lodging for Super Bowl XLII? Get thee to a nunnery. Or you could have, at least, until the last of the 10 rooms at the Our Lady of Guadalupe monastery was booked this week. "I'm most excited to meet them," said Sister Linda Campbell, one of three Benedictine nuns who have converted their two-acre spiritual retreat into comfortable accommodations for football fans coming to town for the game.

PHOENIX -- Fifteen months from the targeted opening of a spring-training facility the Dodgers will share with the Chicago White Sox, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt sank a shovel into a pile of dirt on the edge of a barren lot at the complex's official groundbreaking Monday. "Realistic" and "better than 50-50" was how McCourt characterized the possibility of the Dodgers' spending their 2009 spring training on the Phoenix property owned by the neighboring city of Glendale.

A man pleaded guilty in Phoenix to killing a Japanese tourist whose body was found below a waterfall at an Indian reservation that includes part of the Grand Canyon. Randy Redtail Wescogame, 19, said he encountered the woman while she was hiking alone and offered to guide her to falls in the area.

People here expect it to be hot, but they sure wouldn't mind a cool spell. You know, maybe 105 or so. Phoenix reached a shoe-melting, spirit-crushing milestone Wednesday: 29 days of temperatures 110 degrees or higher in a single year. The previous record of 28 days was set in 1970 and matched in 2002, according to the National Weather Service. The streak is enough to vaporize any humor left in the phrase "It's a dry heat." The average number of days 110 or higher in a given year is 10.

A mother of two who disappeared last week was found in Phoenix on Tuesday where she was found illegally swimming in an irrigation canal. Melissa Jo Lindstrom-Harnit, 35, was reported missing July 24 after a hired caregiver arrived at her Riverside home to find her 8-year-old autistic son and 1-year-old daughter unattended, said Riverside police spokesman Steven Frasher. The daughter was bleeding from numerous cuts.

Call me an L.A. snob, but Phoenix has always struck me as a land of "a's." Establishments that sound natural with that article in front -- a Quiznos, a Safeway, a Mobil station -- grace every corner, amid sand-colored low-rise condos and the occasional empty lot. It's all very functional, perfectly livable but hardly cutting-edge. So I was skeptical when my cousins Hank and Tom described a flourishing alternative art scene around downtown Phoenix.

An immigration service crackdown focusing on airports and immigrant drop houses in Phoenix and Las Vegas has led to the arrest of 15 suspected smugglers and the capture of more than 1,450 illegal immigrants, officials said Friday.

The Rev. Ted Haggard moved Wednesday from his longtime home in Colorado Springs, Colo., to Phoenix, where the disgraced minister will join the same church that helped fallen televangelist Jim Bakker. Haggard, 50, resigned as president of the National Assn. of Evangelicals last year after a former male prostitute alleged a three-year cash-for-sex relationship. The man also said he saw Haggard use methamphetamine.

A serial rapist was sentenced Friday to 50 years in prison and began to sob when he heard some of his 13 victims testify about how the attacks had traumatized them. David B. Wilson Jr., 33, pleaded guilty in a plea agreement last month to 13 felony counts of sexually assaulting or attempting to assault young women in the Phoenix area between July 2004 and July 2005. "I have nightmares every night of your smell, your touch," one woman who fought off Wilson told the court.