Alex Richards

Reporter/ General Assignment

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Story Archive

Locking up criminals locks in rising costs: Tough sentencing laws keep inmates streaming to crowded facilities; Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008; Nevadans hold two values close: They are tough on crime, and tight-fisted with public money.
They can no longer be both.
A study by the Las Vegas Sun has found that those two values are today in stark opposition.
Services help determine whether probation succeeds: Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008; The contrast between the probation rates for felons in Nevada and Massachusetts is as stark as the states’ climatic and geographic differences.
Two say treatment would have been better option than cell walls: Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008; With her youthful face and mellow disposition, 22-year-old Corrie Pallone doesn’t come across like someone who should be in prison.
County ahead of population curve: Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008; Curious about what the nation’s population will look like in 2050? Just look at Clark County.
Growth-related jobs nose-dive: Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008; Job losses began to mount in many Nevada business sectors two years ago. Residential construction led the way, with a loss of 10,000 for specialty contractors and 2,300 for homebuilders.
Rising use of painkillers taking deadly toll: Prescription drug deaths overtake those from street drugs; Monday, July 7, 2008; The New Addiction: Part 2: The skyrocketing use and abuse of prescription narcotics in Las Vegas is accompanied by a similarly startling increase in the number of fatal overdoses, a Sun analysis has found.
Tracking Nevadans’ Appetite for Painkillers: Sunday, July 6, 2008; The Sun discovered the startling increase in the number of narcotic painkillers consumed in Nevada after analyzing several thousand pages of Drug Enforcement Administration reports on the production and distribution of controlled substances to pharmacies and health care practitioners in the United States.
The painful truth about Nevada: Many Nevadans crave painkillers, and some doctors oblige; Sunday, July 6, 2008; The New Addiction: Part 1: Nevadans consume about twice the national average of several prescription painkillers, making us among the most narcotic-addled populations in the United States, a Sun analysis has found.
Bridge over troubled water: New Lake Las Vegas owner unfazed by foreclosures, lawsuit, lagging sales; Saturday, May 24, 2008; It’s a carefree life for the folks out at Lake Las Vegas — except for the developer who couldn’t pay the mortgage, the four-diamond hotel that just filed for bankruptcy court protection, and home foreclosure rates roughly the same as in the rest of the valley.
Clinton spent big for rooms on Strip; Obama workers stayed with backers: Saturday, Feb. 23, 2008; The presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton racked up big bills at some of the Strip’s finest hotels, according to recent campaign finance disclosure reports.
Delays of the land: Problems elsewhere often result in delays to and from McCarran; Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008; If you’re headed to McCarran International Airport tonight to pick up someone flying in from Philadelphia aboard US Airways Flight 788, slow down — there’s probably no hurry. The scheduled arrival time is 10:58 p.m., but over the past year, the flight from Philly, on average, was more than an hour late 62 percent of the time. Overall last year, more than one in every five flights — 22.15 percent — arriving at McCarran was late, with the average delay being 49 minutes, a Sun analysis found.
Nevada really is a lot different from Democrats’ first two states: Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008; The significance of Nevada’s presidential caucus, hailed as the “first in the West,” goes beyond the state’s place on a map.
Differences between the sites of the first two Democratic contests and No. 3 Nevada abound -- a distinction largely responsible for the Silver State having been the focus of American presidential politics for the past 10 days.
Speculators bear brunt of foreclosures: Big majority of homes lost aren't owner-occupied; Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007; If location, location and location are the most important factors in real estate, timing is not far behind.
Nevadans live hard, risk lives: Sunday, July 1, 2007; Nevadans and Clark County residents die younger and at higher rates of suicide, substance abuse and certain chronic illnesses compared with the rates nationally and in other large counties.