It’s the kind of problem Mayor Allen Joines likes to have. He said the drive to revise the ordinance comes out of a recognition that sidewalk dining is a full-on reality and a desire to relieve residents whose sleep is disturbed by the clanking of bottles getting dumped into recycling bins outside restaurants and bars in the middle of the night.

Though the auditorium will continue to be used until events can no longer be booked or until it is unsafe or unsanitary, Coliseum Director Matt Brown and others agree it’s time to build a new performing arts center from scratch. Yet the two primary questions remain: How much will it cost, and where should it be located?.

Lovett’s next-door neighbor, Cynthia Davis, was watching the television drama “CSI” as the intruders completed their work undetected by nearby residents, making off with a flat-screen TV, a computer monitor, a digital camera, a cell phone, jewelry, a checkbook, old coins and a topaz 1975 Ragsdale High School class ring.

The list of keynote speakers at UNCG’s annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration is long and impressive, with names like Ralph Abernathy, Michael Eric Dyson, Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable, as well as the more recent ones like Franklin McCain, Angela Davis, Julian Bond and Al Sharpton. This year was no exception, as Elaine Brown, former chair and defense minister of the Black Panther Party, took the stage at Aycock Auditorium on Jan. 17.

The Ministers Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity have increased pressure on Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill to disavow a Nov. 14 letter sent by the NC Con- ference of District Attorneys to NC Sen. Phil Berger urging state legislators to support Senate Bill 9, which critics say amounts to a repeal of the Racial Justice Act.

Welcome to the county,” said Mayor Robbie Perkins as he reached for the door of the Old County Courthouse after walking across Governmental Plaza from the Melvin Municipal Building with Councilwoman Nancy Vaughan and interim Water Resources Director Kenney McDowell.

At the outset of Monday’s meeting of the Public Safety Committee, Mayor Pro Tem Vivian Burke announced to the audience — and specifically to the members of Occupy Winston-Salem in attendance —that the issue of potential changes to the city’s open-air meetings ordinance would not be resolved that night.

Before the leaves changed and the temperature dropped, before most people began thinking about their Halloween costumes and before midterms, the Greensboro Fire Department began burning down houses owned by UNCG to make way for the school’s expansion into the Glenwood neighborhood.

After a 90-minute discussion of the first portion of Besse’s proposal, which would limit the time for open-air public meetings from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., the Occupy members took a vote. A number of members crossed their arms to form an “X” indicating a block, which is essentially a veto, and ended all further discussion of the proposal.

As one of its final decisions, Greensboro’s outgoing city council extended the city’s municipal solid waste management contract with Republic Services until June 30. The current council will take up the issue during its Feb. 28 budget meeting, city spokesman Donnie Turlington said, but some preparations and discussions are already underway.

The Dec. 22 motion by BHC Interim Funding II LP came on the heels of a jury verdict two days earlier finding Harrison guilty of failing to pay payroll taxes in the amount of almost $16 million over a five-year period, and of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct federal revenue laws.

Most of the trends with available data seem to point up, which is often bad news. New numbers at the beginning of the year showed an increased poverty rate, and reports throughout the year indicated that both Greensboro and Winston-Salem are towards the top of the list in terms of percentage of residents experiencing hunger or food insecurity.

If we are to take Emerson’s words to heart, 2011 represents a fascinating chapter in the biographies of scores of newsmakers in the Piedmont Triad.

Thom Tillis, the NC Speaker of the House, said the new Republican majority in the NC General Assembly had to make some tough decisions during the 2011 legislative sessions, but he felt certain “most of those decisions were the right ones.

Stanly County’s attempt to bring 450 jobs and an estimated $300 million in investment fell apart last week after Clean Tech Silicon and Bar LLC scrapped plans to build a manufacturing facility on the old Badin Works aluminum smelting site owned by Alcoa.

Greensboro`s new city council practically operated on consensus in its first business meeting Dec. 13, with most decisions passing 9-0. The new composition of council contributed to the change, but so did planning ahead.

The verdict took several minutes to read as the clerk outlined guilty verdicts on 59 counts of willful failure to pay federal payroll taxes for 14 different companies over 12 quarterly periods, one count of corrupt endeavor to obstruct and impede internal revenue laws, and three counts of willful failure to pay individual income taxes.

During a Dec. 10 town hall meeting at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, the ACLU of North Carolina unveiled maps of Winston-Salem reflecting 244 driver’s license checkpoints by the Winston-Salem Police Department over an 11-month period. The ACLU is concerned that checkpoints are concentrated primarily in minority neighborhoods.

Andrew Young and his wife Betsy Renfrew have been working with immigrants and refugees in Greensboro, particularly the Montagnard community, connecting with an array of people and organizations to build relationships and collaborate to address some of the issues immigrants and refugees face.

Dozens of FBI agents and officers with the Greensboro Police Department and Guilford County Sheriff’s Office swarmed over a house at the corner of Florida and Lexington avenues in Glenwood on Dec. 6 to arrest Jorge Cornell, AKA King Jay, and Charles Moore, both members of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation, on racketeering charges.