For years, the residents of an inner-city boarding house in the slums of West Palm Beach have sold drugs, beat on each other and generally struggled to get by. But then the city announced plans to demolish their home to make way for multi-million dollar apartments. New Times Broward/Palm Beach staff writer Eric Alan Barton reports how this threat brought the residents together in their own strange, strange way.
After 27 years at Mass General, social worker Hope Cranska was abruptly laid off. The hospital calls it a simple case of downsizing, but evidence points to another explanation: age discrimination. Cranska's lawsuit against the hospital still hasn't been resolved although a jury awarded her $631,000 in damages in 1999, Kristen Lombardi writes in the Boston Phoenix. Cranska's case epitomizes "the potential injustices faced by outspoken older employees in bottom-line American corporate culture," Lombardi writes.
Media giant Gannett Co. is launching its first salvo in a war to win the elusive 25-to-34 year old reader away from alternative newsweeklies. In Lansing, Mich., and Boise, Idaho, Gannett dailies are set to begin publishing "alternative" weeklies this fall. Established alts in those markets are bracing for the ruthless competition described by Richard McCord in his book "Chain Gang." Berl Schwartz, publisher of City Pulse in Lansing, scoffs at the notion the Gannett weekly will be an edgy alternative publication. "What is it an alternative to?" he asks. "Itself?"
A simple piece of plastic, the Government Travel Card (GTC), has plunged thousands of ordinary servicemen and servicewomen into debt so deep that the Pentagon is busy garnishing the wages of its own soldiers, Geoffrey Gray reports in The Village Voice. And the lone military commander known to raise hell about the scheme—an Air Force colonel based in the Midwest—tells the Voice that blowing the whistle on the GTC ruined her career.
