We'd like to take a moment to introduce the newest addition to New Times' stable of scribes -- please join us in welcoming Matthew Hendley back to the Valley.

Loyal Valley Fever-ers may remember Hendley -- he did an internship with us last year and brought us some classic yarns about stupid politicians and naked drug addicts (including the tale of Eugene Gimzelberg, a Gilbert man who spent 36 hours in a sewer while naked and tripping on hallucinogenic mushrooms and PCP). He did such a good job with us during his internship that he was hired to work at the Broward/Palm Beach New Times, one of our sister papers in Florida.

As you can see in the above rant by conservative talk show host Mark Levin, Hendley has spent the past eight months pissing off all the right people, including far-right-wing Congressman Allen West and Florida Governor Rick Scott.

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Before (left) and after.

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Remember Victoria Jackson? She's a former Saturday Night Live cast member (she was the show's token ditz in the mid-1980s).

She also happens to be the focus of this week's New Times cover story because of her new career as a far-right-wing, Bible-thumping political pundit.

Read the story, written by Gus Garcia-Roberts, a scribe for our sister paper Miami New Times, here.

Jackson's taken issue with much of the story because we're part of  "the liberal media and it's predictable slant."

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This is what Google's homepage looked like on Wednesday as it "protested" Congress' attempt to censor the Internet.

​Remember when on Wednesday the Internet search engine Google protested Congress' attempt to "censor the web" via-the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by participating in a purely symbolic "black out" with several other big-time websites?

About that...

We've come to find out that on the same day Google was (ahem) fighting for free speech, the search engine removed a blog from the Internet, apparently because it was scared of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.   

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Bill Heywood

​Valley radio legend Bill Heywood and his wife, Susan, were found dead yesterday afternoon at a Scottsdale hotel in what police suspect to be a double-suicide.

About 1 p.m. yesterday, housekeeping staff at the Homewood Suites hotel -- near the intersection of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard -- found the Heywoods' bodies in the room they'd checked into the night before. Each, it appears, died from a gunshot wound to the head.

In addition to the bodies, the cleaning staff also found what reportedly was a suicide note, as well as two guns in close proximity to the bodies.

Police also found evidence at the Heywoods' Phoenix home that the couple had planned to kill themselves.

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Bruce Branscom and Jose Alfredo Rivera were arrested on New Year's Day in separate cases on suspicion of molesting little girls.

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The arrest of men on suspicion of sexual misconduct with their own family members makes for a journalistic conundrum: Name the suspect, and you've all but identified the victim.

Local media was presented with this challenge yesterday -- twice. Court records show that two men -- Jose Alfredo Rivera of Glendale and Bruce Branscom of Mesa -- were arrested on New Year's Day in separate cases after being accused of sexual activity with 12- and 13-year-old girls.

In our blog post yesterday, you'll see that we decided to name the men without stating their relationship to the victims. Not sure if that's the best way, but when a guy is accused of committing a horrific crime like that, we tend to believe that he doesn't deserve anonymity.

The Arizona Republic, on the other hand, decided for inexplicable reasons to name one suspect -- and describe his relationship with the victim -- but not the other.

The story by reporter Angela Piazza about Rivera states clearly that the victim is his stepdaughter. (Thus defeating New Times' attempt to cloak the relationship between the two, as New Times accidentally defeated the Republic's attempt to hide the suspect's identity.)

The Republic states that, "the suspect's name is being withheld by The Arizona Republic to protect the victim's identity."

But now the truth is out, for better or worse -- as it is in the Branscom case.

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KPHO

KPHO: "Telling it like it is" -- even when it comes to animals that don't actually exist.

​Say what you will about the local TV news-hounds at KPHO, but the station is again leading the way in chupacabra-related journalism -- for the third time in less than a year, KPHO is reporting a sighting of the mythical animal, which doesn't actually exist.

If you're unfamiliar with the fictitious beast, click here.

Under the headline "Could it Be? Another Chupacabra Sighting?" KPHO reporter Steve Stout tells the tale of a Tucson meteorologist who claims he saw a chupacabra.

According to Stout, "some think it's the chupacabra, the creature of urban legend."

"Rumors of the mythical creature have been bouncing around the Southwest for half-century. [Chupacabras are] said to attack goats and livestock," Stout explains in the article.

Again, just to be clear, chupacabras aren't real -- but that hasn't stopped KPHO from reporting on them every time someone sees a sick coyote.

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"Mr. Conservative" J.D. Hayworth seen here explaining how to get "free government money."

​It's been more than a year since Senator John McCain mopped the floor with former congressman/phoney conservative/free government-money huckster J.D. Hayworth in Arizona's GOP Senate primary, and the former congressman's finally gotten around to getting himself a full-time job.

A right-wing San Francisco radio station announced yesterday that it's hired Hayworth to host his own three-hour-long show in a time slot that, until now, belonged to Rush Limbaugh.

In the announcement, the radio station touts Hayworth's supposed conservatism, citing his helping write the Bush tax cuts while serving on the House Ways and Means Committee in 2001 and 2003.

What KSFO's news and program director Paul Hosley fails to mention is that while J.D. talks the talk when it comes to being a fiscally responsible Conservative against wasteful spending, he used to be a pitchman for a company that showed people how to get "free government money" through many of the same government programs Hayworth considers wasteful (when he's running for office, anyway).

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​An Arizona State University student who jumped off the Arizona Republic building in downtown Phoenix last night in an apparent suicide attempt was an intern at the newspaper, sources tell New Times.

The student lept from the roof of the Republic's parking garage at Second and Taylor streets near the Sheraton hotel and ASU's Phoenix campus -- but he survived the nine-story fall.

He was taken to a hospital in extremely serious condition.

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Joe Arpaio: supermarket tabloids "do the best journalistic stories."

​First Lady Michelle Obama apparently is in a "panic" over Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's probe into whether her husband, President Barack Obama, is a U.S. citizen -- if you believe the supermarket tabloid The Globe's "inside" White House sources, that is.

Arpaio, who applauds supermarket tabloids as having "the best journalistic stories," is running with The Globe's absurd claim, "tweeting" the following on his Twitter page this afternoon:

"In this week's Globe, inside sources in the White House stated the FLOTUS is in a panic over my investigation into Obama's legal status."

In other Globe news, Frank Sinatra "seduced two first ladies," Sarah Palin's getting divorced, and the paper apparently has solved the 30-year-old mystery of what really happened to actress Natalie Wood.

The article to which the sheriff is referring is titled "Cops Probe Identity of Obama's Real Dad."

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​The days of sounding off about the day's news under the anonymity of the Interwebs have come to an end at Arizona's paper of record.

Arizona Republic editor and vice president for news Randy Lovely announced yesterday that readers would no longer be able to comment on stories on the paper's website anonymously. As of yesterday, if you want to comment on an article on the AZcentral website you must do so through your Facebook account.

Lovely, apparently, has grown tired of people making nasty comments without having the cojones to reveal their identities.

See Lovely's explanation for the change below.

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