Creative Loafing's Scott Henry unwraps the latest twist on the mail-order bride: American men looking for love in Russia. Eastern European women, raised in a male-dominated culture, appeal to many American men who want the old days back, when wives kept the house and raised the children. European Connections' "romance tours" bring together desperate (and often beautiful) Russian women and needy American men. Henry talks to one such couple whose unlikely match has survived.
Editor Pete Kotz says the two ad department employees had been out drinking and were just "trash-talking over the phone." Cleveland Free Times Editor David Eden claims they threatened to murder a Free Times employee and rape his wife. Whatever it was, it's now in the courts. Adam Simon and Brian LeBlanc face charges of aggravated menacing, telecommunications harassment and making threats over the telephone, The Plain Dealer reports.
AAN members scrambled to keep operations running after the massive Aug. 14 blackout that plunged 50 million people into darkness across the U.S. and Canada. "This was a disastrous scenario,” Grant Crosbie, ad director for NOW Magazine in Toronto tells AAN News. But most papers had flexible printers and were fortunate that the power failure occurred on a Thursday, after that week's issue had already hit the streets.
Despite decades of multibillion-dollar efforts to flatten poppy fields, apprehend smugglers and disband drug rings, the world’s favorite opiate just keeps coming over the borders, purer and cheaper than ever. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, heroin has gained nearly half a million users in the past 10 years. Luckily, even while California’s drug and alcohol treatment programs are due to lose $11.5 million this year, medical practitioners, both establishment and alternative, are deepening their understanding of addiction — and broadening drug users’ options for getting clean. In this issue, LA Weekly writers look at everything from an African root bark and other new therapies to the economy of rehab in a issue dedicated to kicking and keeping clean.
The Association for Women in Communications grants Martin Kuz of Cleveland Scene a Clarion Award for his story, "The Wal-Mart Menace" in the Newspaper Hard News Story category. Geri Dreiling of Riverfront Times also picks up a Clarion Award in the Newspaper Feature Story category for "Nasty Boys."
