More than a thousand top U.S. military and government leaders and their guests are scheduled to gather this weekend in Washington, D.C., for a secretive tribal rite called the 103rd Annual Wallow of the Military Order of the Carabao, Ian Urbina writes in The Village Voice. The Wallow commemorates one of America's imperialistic triumphs -- "the bloody conquest of the nascent Philippine Republic a century ago in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War." Celebrating an ethos that concludes "peace is hell," the Carabaos may be looking forward this year to a new burst of American empire-building.
That's what The Village Voice's Cynthia Cotts asks when she looks at the consent decree signed by Village Voice Media and New Times that settled an antitrust investigation of their agreement to close competing papers in Los Angeles and Cleveland. She suggests the settlement, which requires the companies to resell assets to groups attempting to start new weeklies, "might represent a violation of the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and/or the prohibition on selective prosecution."
Ron Williams and Monte Paulsen, former publishers of Metro Times and Casco Bay Weekly, respectively, have gone New Age with their new venture, Dragonfly. The company they operate part time owns small magazines in Chicago, Los Angeles and Vancouver. "When many of us started alternative weeklies, we spent three or four nights a week out listening to music and drinking beer," Paulsen tells AAN News. "I loved this part of my life. I’m very rarely out that late anymore. I probably spend more of those hours in meditation, yoga."
The Rio Grande is becoming a river of effluent, yet the city of Albuquerque wants to pump more water from the already drought-stricken river, endangering fish and worrying farmers. The consequences could make the region's aquifer unusable in 35 years and cause the city to sink into the hole left behind. Weekly Alibi's Jeremy Vesbach looks at the problem and some possible solutions.
After only a year on the job, Jim Nesbitt steps down as editor of Riverfront Times, the St. Louis Business Journal reports. The business journal also reports other changes in staffing at the New Times paper in St. Louis, including canceling the column "Short Cuts" and making Associate Editor Randall Roberts a staff writer.
In public health circles, it's called the Mexican paradox: despite high poverty rates and a lack of prenatal care, Latina women -- especially Mexican women -- have healthier babies than Caucasian or African-American women, Independent Weekly's Barbara Solow writes. However, that advantage goes away the longer they live here. So far, the cause is believed to be a combination of community and family support, healthy diets, high rates of breastfeeding and low rates of smoking and drinking during pregnancy. Public health experts are perplexed and studying this phenomenon to see what it says about American culture.
In the conclusion to the unprecedented antitrust probe of the two alt-weekly chains, neither company admitted guilt but agreed to aid the opening of new weekly papers in Los Angeles and Cleveland. The New York Times' David Carr calls the case "a validation of the growing role of the alternative press in an era when many dailies now own monopolies in their respective markets." New Times officials expressed outrage at the government's actions in the case. "The way that it has been told, this was two fat cats getting together so they could get even fatter, but the fact of the matter is, we would not be here if we had not done this deal," says New Times' CEO Jim Larkin, who reveals that $20 million of losses in Cleveland and Los Angeles had put the company in technical default with its lending agreements.
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley calls a column by LA Weekly's Harold Meyerson and a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal written by New Times' Michael Lacey "self-interested positions staked out by those who are directly affected by this investigation." Cooley claims he reads LA Weekly "because it is a valuable news organ" and says New Times LA was "occasionally very funny, on occasion very insightful, on occasion very cruel." He argues that "It's wrong ... to attribute political motives to government agencies that are just doing their jobs. ... we're at the investigative stage. At the end of the exercise, there may be a determination that what's been uncovered falls short of establishing a violation of the law."
Gambit Weekly columnist Ronnie Virgets suffered a stroke on Nov. 24 and entered the Veterans Administration Hospital on Perdido Street in New Orleans for treatment and recovery. One month later he began to write again "I remember reading somewhere that 'perdido' translates from the Spanish as 'lost,'" he says. "Everything here is the tug-o-war between feel-good cheerleader motivation ("you're making great progress with that leg -- why, two weeks ago, you couldn't flex that foot even once") and the reality of just how humiliatingly helpless you have become."
