Growing up in Iraq, Azzam Alwash remembers its wetlands flourishing with life. Then Saddam happened and a centuries-old water culture vanished. Now, Azzam and his wife, Suzie, are returning to his homeland. LA Weekly's Joshuah Bearman talks to them about their plans to help restore marshes once rich with ducks and pelicans and human settlers living in reed homes.
Tom Picou (pictured), president, chairman, and CEO of the company that owns the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, warns Chicago Reader's Michael Miner to be objective about reports of plagiarism at the paper or "I will not hesitate to come after you." Several former employees say Picou himself was Larry Reeves, the mysterious unpaid freelance writer who lifted stories from AAN papers coast to coast, including the Reader. Picou calls the reports about the Defender's plagiarism "bullshit" and says he never even read Reeves' stories. "I just laid them out. And that was my job."
The first alternative newspaper in history to be spawned by an antitrust settlement hit the streets last week exploding with entrepreneurial energy and vitriol directed at its main competitor, Cleveland Scene. Debuting with a summer-special issue weighing in at 112 pages, the new Cleveland Free Times unleashed a fusillade of name-calling and planted the flag of "local" ownership even though all but a sliver of the paper is owned by Times Publishing of Erie, Pa.
Two years ago, Erika Van Meir thought social therapy could change the world. Today, she calls it a cult. Creative Loafing's Steve Fennessy talks with Van Meir about her experiences with the movement founded by Fred Newman, a Marxist and one-time Lyndon LaRouche ally, who terms modern psychology "a fraud." Others in the field, while tolerant of off-beat therapy approaches, call Newman's brand "complete gobbledygook."
Steven Emerson, who promotes himself as an investigative reporter with special knowledge of radical Islamic terrorists, has abandoned his four-year-old libel suit against the Weekly Planet and former Editor John Sugg. In a 1998 article, Sugg, now a senior editor at Creative Loafing (Atlanta), questioned Emerson's assertions about terrorist plots against him. Emerson sued, saying the articles defamed him. "Emerson never had a case," Planet Publisher Ben Eason says.
The "wacko, ultra-paranoid neurotics" at Spokane's newer, smaller alt-weekly admit that "they whine more than anyone in town." But that doesn't stop the folks at Local Planet Weekly from issuing a warning: "(W)hen you fuck with our ideas, we're going to go psycho on your ass." And psycho they went when they picked up last week's issue of Pacific Northwest Inlander and found that the cover story, "The State of Radio," employed the same title that LPW had previously used for an award-winning series.
New Times Broward-Palm Beach columnist Bob Norman ignited the Internet last week when he revealed what is already common knowledge among "political and media types": That Palm Beach County Republican Congressman Mark Foley (see photo) is gay. The column was immediately posted on at least 20 Web sites, and the story was then picked up by gay newspapers and received a mention in Hotline, a popular inside-the-beltway political fixation. Now even mainstream local papers like the Sun-Sentinel appear to be closing in.
Noel Black heads to cowboy church, one of the fastest-growing religious phenomena in the world. "God showed me cowboys hung up on bulls with fire beneath them," Glenn Smith, who founded a cowboy ministry after this vision, tells Black. "He said they were dying and going to hell. [He told me the] next morning I was to sell all my worldly possessions and he would provide for me to minister to cowboys. So I did."
