"I'm exhausted. I'm not feeling well. I'm overwhelmed," the L.A. Weekly columnist writes. She says she will return next Tuesday. Her blog has become the go-to source for news on the writers' strike, and she's reportedly been working nearly around the clock since it started. "I need a week away from the emails and the comments and the phone calls and the rumors. Most of all, I just need to rest since I've been going, going, going, since the strike started."
Some adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement hit the streets in front of the paper's Hollywood office on Friday, handing out flyers, waving upside-down American flags and denouncing longtime columnist Marc Cooper. The activists took umbrage with this turn of phrase included in a recent Cooper column on Cynthia McKinney: "She was one of the first high-profile adherents of the official whack-job '9/11 Truth' movement, directly implicating the U.S. government in the staging of the attack on the Twin Towers." The Weekly has a slideshow of the protests.
In her weekly "Murder Ink" column, Anna Ditkoff factually recounts Baltimore's homicides as they are made public by the police department and gives updates as they go through the legal system. This week, the Single Carrot Theatre compiled all the 2007 columns (282 murders) and did a straight reading of all of them, in order to give a comprehensive view of Baltimore's murder rate. City Paper managing editor Erin Sullivan tells AAN News that the reading was nearly three hours long, there were so many murders to cover.
The ACLU of Michigan filed a federal lawsuit in Detroit today on behalf of Metro Times, three political parties, and a political consulting firm, to overturn a law that enables only the Democratic and Republican parties to obtain lists of people who will vote on Tuesday's presidential primary, the Detroit Free Press reports. The law, passed last August, doesn't require voters to register by party, so the ACLU is arguing that the party in which residents will cast votes is valuable to political parties, candidates, journalists and citizen groups.
While he has been the de facto editor since the fall, Jeff Lawrence says in a letter to readers that he's now officially editor. "Once again, we need to reinvent and recast our editorial voice, from the ground up," he says. In other Dig news, Laura Dargus has been named the paper's new managing editor after being the interim managing editor for a few months. Lastly, Cara Bayles will begin her tenure as news and features editor in a few weeks.
