Alan Baer's "love for the obscure and the nontraditional led him to the alternative news weekly," Omaha Reader writes of its eccentric owner, who died of cancer Nov. 5. The paper remembers Baer as "the philanthropist and the gentle man with a quirky sense of humor, who never lost faith in those around him and in the city he loved."
The U.S. objective in Iraq is not to strike against terrorism and a rogue regime. It's not even to secure the smooth flow of oil from the region, Roger Trilling writes in The Village Voice. Based on a report by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, the true objective in removing Saddam Hussein from power is that a more friendly government in Iraq "would drastically reduce the requirement for U.S. military forces to deal with the problems that remained." The report argues for a less visible U.S. military presence, while remaking the region in our own political image.
San Antonio Current's David Wallis goes inside Storm Mountain Training Center, the "Andover" of private sniper schools. In the rural 208-acre compound military sniper program washouts and other wannabe killers can learn the same long-range shooting techniques the Beltway snipers used. "In a country where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, where the National Rifle Association intimidates legislators into voting against common-sense gun control laws designed to keep children from accidentally shooting other children, learning to kill with long-range rifles is considered not only a useful skill for law enforcement officers but a legitimate leisure time activity," Wallis writes.
The Montreal police's organized-crime division urges local papers to reconsider running escort agency ads or face charges for solicitation, the Globe and Mail reports. In Canada, prostitution itself is not illegal, but solicitation for sex is. AAN member NOW Magazine in Toronto has been through this kind of crackdown before, the newspaper reports. In 1990, 14 counts of "communicating for the purpose of prostitution" were brought against it, but the Crown later dropped the case.
Camille Dodero interviews a flu-stricken Joan Didion in a Boston hotel room and mines the author's opus for the structural framework of the writer's life. She's struck by the dissonance between Didion's literary stature and her "miniature" real person. "Barely five feet tall, she doesn’t even fill a chair ... she looks like she could slip between the seat cushions at any moment," Dodero writes. And the legendary writer giggles, girlishly.
Chicago's new weekday tabloids RedEye and Red Streak are pulling the same display advertisers as AAN members Chicago Reader and Chicago Newcity, Jeremy Mullman reports in Crain's Chicago Business. "This will have some short-term impact on the Reader," newspaper consultant Scott Stawski tells Mullman. "I believe it'll put Newcity out."
