San Diego is a wired city, not by telephone lines or fiber-optic cables, but by a small group of insiders: men and a few women who, by virtue of birth, marriage, enterprise, cunning, guile, or …

At this moment, with my title written and nothing else, the former San Diego Symphony is preparing to announce the end of its silence. A month after disclosing a final plan to bankruptcy court, the …

What the Joseph C. Glickmans believed was a simple $242,000 gift to an annuity trust has become a $32.4 million tax nightmare. Now the La Jolla couple, well known in San Diego's social and political …

'Now you can be Andrew Philip Cunanan, 'the gay spree killer,' and experience his final days! You choose where to go. You decide who to meet. It's a sarcastic adventure based on the wildly inaccurate …

The end of a once-controversial era has finally arrived for the Salk Institute's Biologicals Development Center in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania. The 20-year-old lab, which at its peak in the early 1990s employed a staff of 110 …

Hey, Matt: I burn quite a bit of incense in my apartment, and I'm wondering just what sort of toxic chemicals I am inhaling. Has incense ever been linked to lung cancer or other serious …

Matt: I've been meaning to ask this for a long time. It's bugged me. I remember seeing a car screaming past me on the freeway one day that had wire mesh screen between the front …

Mattster: I just ate a sandwich and a handful of pepperonis, and now I'm suffering from a near-crippling case of SDSU cafeteria heartburn. Years ago I was never plagued by this phenomenon. What causes heartburn, …

It's good that we went away now, because Fin's till too young to voice any objections." My dearest wife Deirdre, whose devotion to our son is a constant lesson to me, had done it again. …

Two one-time staffers of M. Larry Lawrence, the late owner of the Hotel del Coronado and Bill Clinton's ambassador to Switzerland, are claiming rich rewards for years of loyal service. According to documents filed in …

In 1972, Tony Tarantino was a street evangelist. A thin, gentle kid of 20 with bushy reddish hair, he roomed with his older sister up the street from the Spring Valley house where Laura and …

When San Diego police captain Lesli Lord killed herself on August 25, Joanne Archambault was furious. "I went home raging about who would do this to their children," says Archambault, a sergeant in SDPD's sex …

Each throw rug is neatly rolled into a sausage. The small gray rabbit dozes in a fluffy lump under a rattan plant stand, a half-lidded sleep, alert for any coyote that might leap from behind …

San Diego city schools just got a solid pat on the back from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network of New York. The group rated 42 of the country's largest public school systems on …

“The Spiro house" looks gloomy from the outside. Cathy, Judy, and Angie debate whether the home’s showing agent is required to tell potential buyers what transpired in the house. “I think she has to,” Cathy says.

Dear Matthew Alice: What officially makes a place a town? When the highway department puts up a sign? When it's on the AAA map? Or when you have a post office? In North County, De …

The Point Loma peninsula has a split personality. In the north, block upon block of houses spread over the peninsula's broad spine. Spacious military land and parkland (Cabrillo National Monument) encompass the peninsula's narrower south …

AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, they were called orphans, and they lived in a home on five acres in Balboa Park. Those who weren’t orphans were “half-orphans,”“abandoned children,” or “those for whom we temporarily …

At the halfway house near 14th and Market, inmates sit on the balustrade, smoking cigarettes and chewing the fat. When you ask When you ask them about Fred Levy, they point toward the office around …

It's a fact. Tourists will pay good money to visit Imperial Beach to go birding in the cold morning mist at the Tijuana River Estuary. They'll come from Europe to Poway to climb Mt. Woodson's …

If you're on the wrong side when San Diego's downtown establishment closes ranks, watch out. Just ask ex-city councilman Bruce Henderson. Fresh from victory in Sacramento -- where the state Fair Political Practices Commission voted …

Behind the easternmost houses and condominiums in Tierrasanta, a sparsely vegetated landscape of rounded ridges -- a part of Mission Trails Regional Park -- stands head and shoulders above the urban plain. Months of heat …

“IT’S JUST A CASE OF MIDDLE-AGED HYPOCHONDRIA.” “NO, IT ISN'T” WAS MY MIND’S BLUNT REPLY. AS I STARED AT THE NEATLY HANDWRITTEN WORDS. I FELT MY FACE GRIMACE IN RESPECTFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF FATE’S TIMING. WHICH …

On one side are two multi-millionaires; five national cable and broadcast conglomerates; a well-entrenched, monopoly daily newspaper and its army of compliant reporters; the mayor and city council and their taxpayer-paid staff; an ex-mayor tainted …

The news is good. Murder down 50 percent. Robbery down 18.2 percent, burglary 13.9 percent -- all for the first six months of 1998 (compared with the same period last year). Violent crimes are decreasing …

Otay Mesa is part of a vast sweep of scrub that stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border as far as Texas. Donovan State Prison State Prison is located there, a huge complex of buildings 25 miles …

Chargers owner Alex Spanos, who benefits mightily from the stadium-ticket guarantee financed by San Diego taxpayers, threw a 50th anniversary party for his wife Faye at their controversial new mansion near Stockton last week. Guests …

Although Beatrice still has, at age 72, all of her gloves, it was the hats she loved. "I tell you," she says Some people go buy shoes when they're depressed. I sued to buy hats."

Dear Matmail, What exactly does the body go through in the electric chair when the juice is turned on? I have heard that the eyes have to be taped to keep them in. Does the …

Got a hot date with your loved one this weekend? If so, then start the evening with a romantic "sunset walk" by the bay, complete with a full-moon-rise over the twilight-bathed city and its scintillating …

While most of the Anza-Borrego Desert swelters, the temperature hovers as much as 10š Fahrenheit cooler at the "high desert" locale of Culp Valley, 3400 feet above sea level. Culp Valley is the only designated …