Editor Pete Kotz eviscerates alt-weekly competitor Cleveland Free Times, saying its "relentless strife still makes for the best running sitcom in town" and laying odds Free Times will close. David Schneiderman, CEO of Free Times' parent Village Voice Media, in an e-mail to Kotz, calls the Scene's claims "untrue and outrageous." Free Times Publisher Matt Fabyan tells AAN News the article is "pathetic, desperate and sleazy." Now Free Times Editor David Eden is calling Scene Publisher Ramon Larkin, "badgering him about (Scene's) finances," Kotz reports. Payback may be in the offing.
What's it like to share a community with a top-secret paramilitary compound? Ask the people of Hertford, a small community nestled in eastern North Carolina. Located just outside the city is the fenced-in, heavily secured Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity where explosives are tested regularly. The knowledge of what exactly goes on at the base is limited, but the residents of Hertford are used to that, as Independent Weekly finds out.
Dan Kennedy, the Boston Phoenix's media critic, originally opposed publication of the video and photo of Daniel Pearl's grisly slaughter. Now that his paper has carried through with its vow to publish the images, Kennedy has changed his mind. "It's important to see the Daniel Pearl video because it's important to look into the face of the pure evil we're up against," Kennedy writes. "It's important to see it because merely reading a description of it cannot do justice to its full horror."
What do local Ohio politicians have to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict? Despite their irrelevance, Ohio officials chime in on this sensitive international issue, siding firmly with Israel. Columbus Alive's J. Caleb Mozzocco reports on the controversy that has Columbus' Muslim and Arab community seething.
"Newspapers want the benefit of being read worldwide but not the responsibility that comes with it," an attorney told a federal appeals court June 3 in Stanley Young vs. The New Haven Advocate. The libel lawsuit by a Virginia prison warden is an appeal of a federal district court ruling in Virginia that granted jurisdiction because the Connecticut newspapers that he was suing published their material on the Web. AAN joined amicus briefs in support of the publishers in both Young and Gutnick vs. Barron's, a similar case before Australia's highest court. The case may be the first federal appellate ruling on whether a newspaper can be sued anywhere its Web site is read.
