Debut literary journal The Believer brings together the talents of novelist Heidi Julavits, Village Voice Senior Editor Ed Park and author Vendela Vida, with the backing of Dave Eggers and McSweeney's, Newsweek reports. The Believer, which has no advertising, isn't paying its editors yet, although they all want to be "critically engaged," Julavits tells Newsweek.
Last week East Bay Express exposed that the Memphis weekly, which calls itself "The Mid-South's Best Alternative Newspaper," had run a plagiarized story about a police scandal, changing Oakland to Nashville but virtually nothing else. Now Memphis Flyer reveals that the paper has been running stories stolen from New Times and Village Voice Media papers for years under the byline Larry Reeves. The mysterious Reeves can't be found, apparently has been writing for free, may be 80 years old, and no one has ever met him. Reeves' pattern is to cut-and-paste stories from AAN member papers, "localized" with a little search and replace on city names. "You can't get that mad because the whole operation is like amateur night," Cleveland Scene Editor Pete Kotz tells the Flyer. "It's so bad it's amusing."
Maryland's African-American farmers, after more than a century of institutional discrimination at home, hope a new deal with Fidel Castro will bring in the long green. Ericka Blount Danois follows a delegation led by John Boyd Jr. to Havana, where a deal selling produce to Cuba -- with no middlemen taking a cut, no competition -- could bring U.S. black farmers about $12 million a year. "We have been trying to do business with other countries for a long time, to become independent from the federal government," Boyd tells Danois. "The federal government has shown us historically that they don't want to do business with us."
Columbus Alive Inc. is launching an e-mail brand campaign to call attention to its five-month-old redesign, its new focus on arts and entertainment and its new name: Alive. Publisher Sally Crane says the ad sales have climbed about 18 percent since the campaign began and projects an additional 25 percent through the end of this year. Alive's 2002 ad sales were more than $1 million, Kathy Showalter of Business First of Columbus reports.
John Dougherty's latest investigative report on extreme Mormon sects focuses on the bizarre grip the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has maintained on the local school district, which diverts federal and state funds for the private use of its members and provides a highly dubious education to its students -- whose parents often don't believe in evolution, dinosaurs, or that America ever really put a man on the moon.
Last year, a week after Valentine's Day, Rick Rojas was visiting his father's grave when he met a woman who demanded to know who had left balloons and roses on her husband's grave. Rojas said his sister, Patricia Flores, had placed them on their father's grave. The woman insisted that her husband was buried there. "She was adamant that it was him," Rojas says. Their receipts and records showed that they had bought the same plot, Rojas says. In "Dead Wrong," Houston Press staff writer Wendy Grossman walks the lanes at Hollywood Cemetery where relatives say management sells the same plot over and over, stacks graves and buries people where they don't belong.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is being targeted for billions in cuts. Seattle Weekly's Rick Anderson looks at the case of Sgt. Joe Hooper, who won a Medal of Honor for valor in Vietnam, yet came home with a serious alcohol problem and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 40. "He was a casualty of war, and you can expect more of the same after Iraq," David Willson, a retired Green River Community College librarian, editor of Vietnam War Generation Journal, and a Vietnam vet who worked with Hooper on a collection of war literature, tells Anderson. "Look at the history — this is a country made by war on the backs of vets who have never, ever been treated as promised."
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