Sacramento rolls out the red carpet for a "global food security" summit, as protesters from around the country are laying plans of their own. Ron Curran looks at the first-ever international Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology, which is expected to back global trade in irradiated and genetically modified food. It's also the first World Trade Organization-related meeting in North America since 1999’s confrontational Seattle Ministerial Conference, where police used tear gas and rubber bullets on protesters, and ultimately a curfew shut down the city.
Dallas Observer won two first place awards in the 2003 Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards, and The Village Voice and Phoenix New Times each took one. East Bay Express won second place in the General Excellence category for papers with circulations 50,001 to 100,000, and New Times papers were finalists in nine other categories.
"It’s the stank of corporate America; everything within those walls designed and engineered for greatest selling power. Even me." The Local Planet Weekly's new staff writer, Melissa Amos, bids a more-bitter-than-sweet farewell to the department store jobs that sustained her through college. After five years, she knows that even the fine crystal has a smell all its own.
Yoga, once defined by asceticism, has become big, cushy business in America. Can it survive what some fear is the selling of its soul? Metro Silicon Valley's Russell Wild estimates yoga in America is a $27 billion a year industry, somewhere between the size of Dow Chemical and Microsoft. "What's next for the yoga biz, now that we've already seen the marketing of yogatards, yoga shoes, yogi pillows (stuffed with buckwheat hulls), the $1,200 'tantric bedroom set' (for adults only) and a battery-operated, inflatable 'Chi machine'?"
"You need this," claims the debut editorial as Southland Publishing launches two new alternative papers in the Los Angeles area after buying the assets of New Times L.A. "In recent years local readers have experienced their own pain when two local weeklies -- the Los Angeles Reader and the New Times L.A. -- were prematurely shuttered for no reason other than financial expediency," the editorial states. "They mattered, and then they were gone." For their part, the mantra of LA CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT is "to explore, to challenge, and to celebrate the substance and irreverence of our vast city."
The "electronic marketplace" syndication service will offer columns by Village Voice alums Andrew Sarris and Joe Conason, and others from the New York Observer, as well as news analysis from British-based New Internationalist after signing deals with the two publications.
