Mayor Martin Chavez on Friday sent a notice to the Second Chance rehabilitation program, ordering it out of the old West Side jail by Jan. 31. The city contends that Second Chance violated its lease agreement by housing violent offenders and making unauthorized changes to the building. C h ave z said he was particularly c onc er ne d that Second Ch a nc e, i n h is v iew, had recently moved some of its residents to "avoid ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A controversial Albuquerque rehabilitation center is struggling with finances, and the secure facility for drug and alcohol offenders could be in violation of the law that allowed it to open by housing overf low prisoners from a county jail . The Second Chance Center uses massage, natural diet, saunas, and some training manuals based on criminal justice research done by Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to detoxify and rehabilitate drug offenders. But the program is facing ...

Last week we learned that Amazon.co.uk has bowed to pressure to stop selling a book by a former senior Irish Scientologist. The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology (Merlin Publishing, Dublin) describes John Duignan's 21 years in the religion, not all of it a happy tale. According to Amazon, "Unfortunately, we have had to withdraw The Complex by John Duignan in the UK because we received a specific allegation that a passage in the book ...

The young cast of the Valley’s newest holiday pageant is all atwitter. Opening night is only a week away, and for the first time, the pre-teen actors are getting a glimpse of their costumes. The young cast of the Valley’s newest holiday pageant is all atwitter. Opening night is only a week away, and for the first time, the pre-teen actors are getting a glimpse of their costumes. But something is profoundly askew at Tempe’s Stray Cat Theatre. Where one might ...

When he was a UCLA student 15 years ago, Mario Majorski was a committed enough Scientologist that he helped file a federal lawsuit against a professor who called the church a cult. On Sunday, Majorski stormed the church's Celebrity Centre in Hollywood with a sword in each hand. He was shot dead by a security guard who police say had every reason to fear for his life and the lives of hundreds of others gathered on the property. The reasons for ...

The representative, Doug Bushwar, told police he arrived with a can of gas and found [Mario Jay Majorski] standing on the passenger side of his Toyota pickup, which had its flashers on. Behind the truck, there were "small kids' toys lined up in a row on the street," Bushwar told the officer. "He thought this looked very strange," the report said. When Bushwar approached, Majorski became upset and agitated, according to the report, yelling at Bushwar to stay where he was, ...

But a Collier Circuit judge still must hear arguments from the homeowners and property owner to set a price NAPLES — When Barbara Brown bought her mobile home in Naples Estates in 1987, she was paying $160 monthly in base rent for the land it sat on. But over the years, land rents at the senior citizen mobile home park, off Rattlesnake Hammock Road, increased while services decreased. So the homeowners sued. That was a decade ago — and the prices ...

An ex-Scientologist and an army of online pranksters attempt to bring down the controversial religion. Maybe it's his badass black outfit with blood-red letters screaming "Scientology Kills." Or possibly it's his crew cut, or his nose slammed 45 degrees left after catching one too many right hooks. Maybe it's the hardcore cell-phone earpiece or the camcorder strapped to his palm to record confrontations. Whatever it is, when Tommy Gorman stands at a man's door demanding he get his "chicken-shit ass out ...

All acknowledgement to Poynter's Jim Romenesko, whose blog [http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45] alerted me to the Reporter's Notebook Web site [http://www.reportersnotebook.net/article.php3?id_article=57], which contains a compelling collection of memories by alums of the long gone Clearwater Sun newspaper. While I'm not so sure about the contention that a newspaper 25 miles away can't provide comprehensive coverage of a community, it is illuminating and sobering to read about the Sun's glory days. A particular standout is the essay crafted by Mike Pride [http://nenews.org/stories/639.html], a well-regarded, recently-retired ...

Tom Cruise is named in a $250 million federal lawsuit that is using the RICO statute against the Church of Scientology. Ex-Scientologist Peter Letterese, a longtime critic of the church, filed suit in Southern District Court in Florida on July 15 alleging, among other things, that members of the church harassed him after he left. In court papers provided to The News by investigator Paul Barresi, Letterese claims a member of the church phoned his lawyer at home, and when the ...

Six years ago, when I was a reporter at New Times LA, ''I’d written several stories about Scientology (Los Angeles is one of its headquarters), and I was about to uncork the longest one yet—a 7,000 word piece about an embarrassing, $8 million defeat Scientology had just suffered, when the weekly paper suddenly folded. That unpublished story has been sitting in storage ever since. Fast forward to 2008, and the world of reporting on Scientology has changed radically, thanks in part ...

Wikileaks.org — a watchdog Web site that leaks corporate and government documents — hasn't officially launched, yet it has already uncovered human-rights violations in China, claimed to have swayed Kenya's Dec. 2007 elections and exposed the inner workings of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. So many were surprised when it recently turned its sights on two lawyer-heavy religious groups: the Mormons and the Scientologists. Founded in December 2006, Wikileaks boasts of an archive of 1.2 million released documents, sent ...