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.
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.
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.
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.
The first issue of Pulse, "a new weekly magazine supplement targeting younger, active, single servicemembers," is scheduled to launch March 5. Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-authorized bastion of daily military news, says Pulse won't "be talking down" to its audience, unlike other dailies' youth pubs. "The staff working on this is under 30. The editor is under 30. We're going to try to tap our totally unique market to make this a magazine they want to read," Editor Danielle L. Kiracofe says.
Depending on whom you ask, stem-cell research is either a medical godsend or further proof that God is dead. This seminal research pits scientists against anti-choice zealots, old-school Republicans against new-school moralists, states against the Bush administration -- even reason against hysteria. As one observer tells LA Weekly's Steven Kotler, the "stem-cell debate is about everything but what it's about."
