‘He’s gone back to Afghanistan,” says Khaled Waleh. “He left last week.” It’s a shock. I’d come looking for Zia Waleh, famous for his intimate Zia’s Afghan Café in North Park, closed now but much …

What’s it like to live in what passes for “the wilds" of San Diego County? Bill Manson finds out.

Midsummer. Japatul Valley, south of Alpine. Too hot to sleep indoors. Warren Storm-thunder snoozes in his hammock. He has slung it under trees down by a creek bottom near his isolated valley home. Then, around …

‘When I heard that Qaddafi was killed,” says Abdul, who’s from Lebanon and doesn’t want his real name used, “I had to laugh because not too long ago he was calling his people cowards, rats. …

"Look. Look! They took our money! Ten thousand dollars, from some. They came in with their shotguns raised. ‘Down on the ground!’ They cuffed me, hands behind my back, threw me on my face on …

The woman on the other end of the phone is in tears. “I was just praying to God when you called,” she says. “That He’ll help us with what happened to our daughter. We are …

Rarely has Coronado been so abuzz. In the early morning of July 13, a young naked woman hanged herself (or did she?) at the Spreckels mansion on Ocean Boulevard. Two days before, a six-year-old boy …

Suffering Suffragettes! Ashley Gardner stands inside the three-by-three-foot Women’s Hall of Fame mini-Greek temple and says three words to me as if they were Holy Scripture: “A hundred years.” She pauses. “Since 1911. That’s how …

Uh-oh. Beer Man looks up. He’s six-foot-five and garbed in his blue Superman tunic with a red cape, yellow briefs, a full mane of red hair and a beard. His expression says it all: Is …

The graffiti wraps the California Theatre in a ten-foot-tall necklace of yellow and black and silver, squished-together letters shaped like half-inflated airbags. The odd thing is whoever did it also surrounded it with a new …

Reporting from the front lines, here. Before me, across Juniper: Them. North Parkians. If you didn't know they were The Other, you'd be fooled into thinking they're just like you.

We put out the call, “Tell us your HOA horror stories,” and you came back in your millions. Okay, your dozens. Okay, nearly a dozen. The issue was courage. How could people report on the …

“Global warming?” says Steve Wampler. “Crap!” This is unexpected because Steve trained as an environmental engineer at UC Davis. But he’s serious. “There are 100,000 scientists out there who are saying it’s total crap too, …

Barrio Logan?” says Dave. “I tell you, soon there won’t be a Barrio Logan. It’ll be swallowed up by downtown.”Dave and Tennessee and I stand in the dark on National Avenue, by 16th Street, right where …

Roll 'em! Straight-to-camera, Guy Harinton yells, “Why can’t I kill one of them little fuckers?!” He’s frothing. Here, at the Embarcadero’s Coronado ferry landing, a foreign-student pedicab driver has just ridden off with a load …

Let’s say you’re a redhead. Duck, that is. Or a scaup. Or a falcon looking for rabbits. Or a coot, ruddy duck, bufflehead, or — more likely over Mission Bay these days — a seagull …

“I couldn’t believe it,” says the veteran San Diego lifeguard. “A kid shouted, ‘Hey, look!’ And I saw two of them with their parents, and I suddenly realized, oh my God. On a day like …

There are times, sometimes in the midst of otherwise polite conversation, when it comes out that I make my living writing for the Reader. The follow-up to this revelation is almost never “Oh, that’s right, …

French vermouth-Italian vermouth-Gin-Twist of lemon Mix French (dry white) vermouth and Italian (sweet red) vermouth into a cocktail glass, favoring the French. Add a shot of gin. Garnish with a twist of lemon. José Palma’s …

The Hell’s Angel takes me aside. It’s 10:00, Saturday night. A bunch of them stand around outside their headquarters by a row of angle-parked Harleys, here where Palm meets El Cajon Boulevard. ”Look, we’ve had …

San Diego River? “There is no San Diego River,” says Pete Cuthbert. “What you’re dangling your toes in is the Colorado River, the Sacramento River, the Feather River — but not the San Diego River.” …

• Captain Charles Moore, UCSD alum, steps overboard. He disappears into the inky Pacific. It’s 2007, nighttime, 500 miles west of San Diego. He swims, about three, four feet beneath the surface, through the spooky …

Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, Somalia, Guyana, and Eritrea

"It's catastrophic!" Duncan McFetridge flings his arms out. "Look, can't you see the change?" Several years ago, when I last came here to the Cleveland National Forest outside of Descanso, McFetridge's cabin nestled in a …

Our future began on Wednesday, February 5, 2003, when a UCLA doctor announced that for the first time since the late 1850s, Hispanic births accounted for more than half the births in California.The UCLA Center …

Most-Filmed Wild West Main Street Don't look yet. Turn off Woodside onto Maine and behold a li'l old Wild West street that'll knock your spurs off. It huddles beneath a perfect movie-set backdrop of towering …

The Ethiopian Army caught up with the boys at the Gilo River. "Most of us couldn't swim," says Isaac. "It was really very deep and swollen because of rains. The currents were very, very fast. …

At Times It Was Like Shared Music, at Times Like a Skin Graft or Root Canal — Stephen Dobyns I do at a coffin sale — Dorothy Stewart A Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Cake …

"William, do you take this woman, Lita..." Ah, the Reverend Jones. It's 6:30, Saturday evening, August 21, 1982. I'm standing in front of 35 friends here in the old Authors' Lounge of the Oriental Hotel, …

Katherine Jackson takes the toothbrush out of her mouth. "In an old house in Paris all covered in vines lived 12 little girls in two straight lines..." This is Jackson's way of telling me what …

Noah Gabriel plays Paul McCartney's "Blackbird" at the Sunday market in San Diego's old Chinatown (at Third and J). A year and a half ago, he was a singing star in China...well, around Shanghai, anyway. …

Where I live, no major high-volume road cuts apart the 'hood. People can cross the street without becoming dead. The amoeba-shaped Balboa Park Municipal Golf Course and grid-busting canyons have made a rabbit warren of the streets.

Has Linda Vista lost its heart? The Yum Yum Donut Shop in the Vien-Dong supermarket center has become the place where old-time Linda Vistans turn up to chew the fat. "This shopping mall that used …

Okay, okay, I know. San Ysidro. It's not a place, it's the blur just before you get to Mexico. It's humanity sluicing up and down through the World's Busiest Border. The tidal gate between the …

I see Asian gang cars some nights, in a long caravan down the Mira Mesa Boulevard. They meet at In-N-Out Burger before heading off for illegal street races on Kearny Villa Road or in Sorrento Valley.

IB? My friend Mark nailed it the other night. We had fallen into conversation outside Cow-A-Bunga, the ice cream and coffee place at the entrance to IB’s pier. It was getting dark. You could just …

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

Oh yeah. This sepia one is Dad, the 19-year-old skinny kid in the lieutenant’s uniform, with the canvas strips wrapped around his legs, huddling on the Turkish cliff in a trench, waiting for orders. Not …

Silvia Labastida is nervous. Two thousand of Tijuana's poorest children surround her, cheering the mayor of Tijuana. For three months she has helped organize this day. She holds on to a young girl in a …

Brian Bilbray has no doubts: It's time to send in the troops. All along the border. "We need to send a very clear message, almost in the tone of John Kennedy, when he said, 'We …

The brown-robed monk leads the way down into the crypt. "In 1791 the Mission of Santo Tomás de Aquino was founded by Dominican friars, south of Ensenada. Along with the mission, they brought grape vines...." …

Is the Clinton administration developing a conscience on border pollution? When Energy Secretary Bill Richardson comes to San Diego May 11 to host the energy conference of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, he will be …

Lorena González doesn't want to use the "B" word. " 'Bilingual' has too much history attached to it," she says. "And besides, from what I've heard, you're very anti-second-language out on the West Coast. Especially …

The man who decided to drug-test all the cops in Tijuana is satisfied. Marco Antonio González Arenas says the front-page color photos of police officers lining up at a table loaded with their urine samples …

When the kids get off the trolley at San Ysidro these spring evenings, you sense the bravado. With so much news about murders, cartels, allegations of government corruption, it's impossible to think about Tijuana the …

Don Manuel lives where the border fence ends, in the mountains east of Tijuana. He's heard about the murder of the police chief, about the execution of the lawyer who represented the man allegedly behind …

As you'd expect of an architect, Héctor Osuna Jaime explains what he means by drawing on his paper napkin. Two football teams. "This is them. The narco-traffickers. They know everybody on their side is on …

How much does the world care that 80 people have been murdered in Tijuana in the last two months? Not much, except when one is Tijuana's police chief, says Victor Clark Alfaro, director of Tijuana's …

The Lariat is on the verge of sliding. You can feel it. Celso Rodríguez grinds to a halt. He gingerly eases the Ford truck back down the hill. At the bottom he gets out and …

"My patient is Tijuana," says Dr. José Rubio Soto. "My hospital is city hall. These are the X-rays." He's peering at a computer screen filled with blobs. It's a map of the city. Tijuana looks …