Edna Nadel stood in the middle of a grass-covered campsite surrounded by a dense forest near Elk Mountain, deep in the Santa Fe National Forest. Her 62-year-old husband, Mel, carrying only a bow and a pistol, disappeared a year ago from this place while on an elk-hunting trip.

The family of Mitchell Hanrahan has been through this before.

A professional boxer, the governor of Pojoaque Pueblo, the manager of the city of Santa Fe and the Santa Fe county clerk all played a role in what developed into a bar brawl at Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino in June, according to the police report.

New Mexico's Palace of the Governors, the oldest public building in the U.S., needs help. Its windows and their frames and sills are in various stages of deterioration.

March 30, 1998: Mitchell Hanrahan, 44, is shot and killed in his apartment off South Meadows Road in Santa Fe. There are no signs of forced entry or burglary in the home. Hanrahan was an eight-year employee of the state Environment Department's Solid Waste Bureau.

Two significant events occurred this week. Both concerned the Middle East. First, President Barack Obama declared the Iraq war was over, at least for the U.S. It isn't, of course, because we still have 50,000 troops in the country, though they are not supposed to engage in combat unless in self-defense. Those 50,000 are expected to be gone by the end of next year, leaving Iraq to its tortured self. In the meantime, that deeply divided nation is still wracked with violence, and that almost inevitably will mean further U.S. and Iraqi casualties. We may hope the war is over; Iraqis, I suspect, think otherwise.

Back in the days before Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, Labor Day weekend marked the start of many political campaigns' most intense work — door knocking.

SFPS enrollment numbers steady