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A battle is raging within the ranks of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Should the group stick to maintaining gravestones and the like -- or devote itself to fighting for the right to display Confederate symbols everywhere from schools to statehouses? "I think who wins will be a straw in the wind about how the white South is interpreting its past and setting its agenda for the future," offers UNC Professor Harry Watson, the director of the Chapel Hill-based Center for the Study of the American South.

Continue ReadingTurning Point for the Sons of Confederate Veterans
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Hundreds of women around the world have been accused of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a disorder in which parents harm their children in order to gain attention from hospitals and medical personnel. After looking at cases from the United Kingdom to New York, Tennessee and Washington states, investigative reporters writing for The Local Planet Weekly in Spokane, Wash., suggest that a common prescription drug prescribed to stop babies from spitting up may be to blame for the strange symptoms that mothers are often accused of creating. The story is the result of more than a year of research by Nonny de la Pena, whose documentary on the subject, "Mama/M.A.M.A.," will premiere in Florida and Texas in March.

Continue ReadingPrescription Drug Implicated in Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy Cases

The morning after he learned that New Times Los Angeles was closing, Rick Barrs, now editor of Phoenix New Times, awakened from an "alcoholic haze" to the suggestion from The New York Times' David Carr that the closing might violate federal antitrust laws. Barrs thought the question bizarre. "It seemed unlikely that a Department of Justice that had allowed daily newspapers to eliminate smaller competitors for generations (take the Arizona Republic swallowing up the Phoenix Gazette, and the massive Gannett company buying up the whole shebang) would bother with two alternative media gnats. Especially John Ashcroft's pro-business Justice Department," Barrs writes.

Continue ReadingAntitrust Investigation Stunned Editor
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A blue curtain now covers the reproduction of Picasso's monumental anti-war painting, Guernica, that hangs in the United Nations, the Village Voice's Alisa Solomon reports. "How disconcerting, how off-message, it would be after all, if Secretary of State Colin Powell or UN ambassador John Negroponte had to beat the war drums in front of Picasso's wrenching images of women and children writhing in cubistic dismemberment under a bombing campaign," she writes.

Continue ReadingWarmongering and Reality

A state appeals court has sided with City Pages (Twin Cities) in its attempt to force the state and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota to reveal how much they paid a high-powered law firm for its work on the state's lawsuit against the tobacco industry. "We saw the lawsuit as a golden opportunity to remind our elected officials and their powerful friends that to be healthy, a democracy must be watched over by a free, independent, and vigorous press," the paper says in an unsigned editorial.

Continue ReadingCity Pages Wins Another Round in Court