Grab your die — watch your rights die! This week's Detroit Metro Times features "Homeland Insecurity: The Board Game" by Curt Guyette. Inspired by reports of Patriot Act II legislation that was secretly being forged by the Justice Department, the game takes a playful look at the Bush Administration's assault on civil liberties and the Constitution. A source page documents the administration's attack on our Constitutional rights. (Requires Flash)
Eric Benjamin, a 20-year alternative newsweekly veteran, becomes associate publisher of Gambit Weekly. The Boston native played a significant role in the growth of the alternative newsweekly industry as board president and founding board member of Alternative Weekly Network, which represents more than 120 alternative newsweeklies nationwide. He comes to Gambit directly from New Mass Media, where he was national sales director.
In today's Catholic Church, you can stick a diocese with $16 million in debt and sexually exploit one of your employees -- and still manage to get a gig soaking up sun in Arizona. As SF Weekly staff writer Ron Russell reports, G. Patrick Ziemann, the former bishop of Santa Rosa, Calif., once forced a young priest to wear a beeper so he could summon him for oral sex. Now, thanks to friends in high places within the church, Ziemann's a regular on the Tucson party circuit -- and isn't ruling out one day heading another diocese
A "disturbing trend of alt-weeklies' [is their] inaccessibility in inner cities -- particularly in black inner city areas," Former Cleveland Free Times writer Daniel Gray-Kontar, now editor of Urban Dialect, writes in an e-mail to AAN News. "It's been a point of contention for myself and other black writers for many moons as we question exactly who we are really writing for." This week Urban Dialect publishes an essay by contributor Mark Reynolds about the distribution pattern of alt-weeklies as well as "the phenomenon of being an alternative weekly 'Designated Black Writer.'"
Rare indeed is the pro jock whose activism extends beyond the United Way -- rarer still that professional athletes venture into politically charged territory. Well, so much for the status quo. Last month at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo hosted a press conference to kick off Battin' 1000, a campaign that aims to raise at least $1 million to construct a pro-life education center for the American Life League near the anti-abortion organization's Stafford, Va., headquarters. Battin' 1000's chairman, former Oakland A's third baseman Sal Bando, says the cause has been endorsed by 90 current and former players, managers and owners, Mike Seely writes in Riverfront Times.
