Apartment Choice

The Mobile City Council has approved the sale of the Water Street building known as City Hall North , clearing its way for redevelopment as an apartment complex , and a consultant on the project said that groundbreaking could come next spring. District 2 Councilman Levon Manzie announced his "100 percent support" for the project and pledged to assist developers any way he could. "I can't think of a better way to describe 350 St. Joseph Street than to say it's not now needed for public or municipal purposes," Manzie said as the council voted. "It has been a blight on that corner of DeTonti Square for a long time. And that entrance is one of the gateways to our beautiful city." "I know those employees who worked at old City Hall North are not sad to see it go," commented Council President Gina Gregory . "It will be a tremendous improvement." Occupying a roughly triangular lot where St. Joseph Street hits Water Street , the bu...

On Aug. 9, 2007, Lansing police discovered the beaten body of 46-year-old Debra Renfors in her apartment in the 1000 block of North Washington Street . Renfors was the third woman to be bludgeoned to death in the city in two weeks, and a grim reality was beginning to set in. Det. Sgt. Joey Dionise confronted Captain Ray Hall , giving voice to a fear that had been bubbling for days. “Captain,” Dionise said, ”We have a serial killer. Years later, Hall still remembers the “sinking feeling” that accompanied that moment. Ten years ago this month, Lansing was in the grip of a killer who preyed on single women, using whatever was convenient to murder them, and, in some instances, sexually assaulting them. Before police caught him, he had killed five women in just over four weeks. A sixth woman would survive. Matthew Emmanuel Macon , then 27, was eventually convicted of two of the murders, and the assault of the surviving victim. When detectives got Macon in an interview room, it would take ...

For the third year, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center and Mark Twain House & Museum will partner with Capital Community College to offer a class on the work of Hartford's most famous authors . The Hartford Heritage Project course, "English 220, Studies in American Literature: Stowe & Twain," will begin Aug. 30 and run through Dec. 18, with alternating sessions online and at the historic Twain House , 351 Farmington Ave., Hartford, on Wednesdays from 2 to 4:42 p.m. It can be taken for college credit or audited for personal enrichment with optional papers and assignments. Either way, the cost is $599. Registration must be completed by Aug. 30 (and no later than Sept. 5, the last day to add a class). capitalcc.edu/hhp/courses. Audit information: Amy Lemire at 860-906-5185 or alemire@capitalcc.edu. Sunday Poetry Series The Clinton Art Gallery , 20 E. Main St., Clinton, will continue its free monthly poetry readings on Sunday, Aug. 20, from 2 to 4 p.m., with readi...

When American doctor Stephen Yoon thinks of North Korea, he does not think of ballistic missile tests or the threat of nuclear war. He remembers instead a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who suffered from spastic quadriplegia that made her unable to stand or sit. Five years ago, she went to Yoon's developmental-disability program at Pyongyang Medical University Hospital , where she received treatments from Yoon and his team of local doctors. After almost a year of exercise therapy and some surgeries, she walked out of the hospital on her own. The event was heralded in North Korean state media as a national victory, but it received no notice in the U.S., where few people even know about the roughly 200 Americans like Yoon who work and live under the rule of Kim Jong Un. Carefully monitored by the regime, they have come and gone for years, doing educational, medical or infrastructural work, and sometimes raising families in a nation that has been officially at war with the ...