Mara Shalhoup in Creative Loafing Atlanta looks at how one of the country's most lauded housing agencies rebuilt the homes of the poor to better serve the middle class. She talks to former tenants of public housing who are now shut out of the "mixed" development. "It was all right for me to raise my kids over there in Carver Homes when it was a hellhole," one former resident says. "Now that they've remodeled and did everything, we ain't good enough to come back." That's OK to the Atlanta Housing Authority. "Anybody who finds it difficult to get in," AHA spokesman Rick White tells Shalhoup., "we probably don't want to have as a tenant anyway."
Last year, 231 traveling jewelry salesmen were robbed in the U.S. of goods worth upward of $30 million. Just since the start of 2000, 17 San Francisco salespeople have been relieved of more than $6 million, often during what truly are daring daylight robberies. Most of the Bay Area crimes, law enforcement authorities say, have been committed by organized bands of jewelry robbers based in Los Angeles and composed primarily of illegal aliens from Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. The FBI has dubbed the gangs "South American Theft Groups," or SATGs. But just because the feds have created an acronym, SF Weekly's Peter Byrne discovered, doesn't mean they know how to deal with the problem.
Richard Hart will jump from the Raleigh News & Observer to become editor of Independent Weekly, Publisher Sioux Watson says. He replaces David Madison, who was named editor in October 2001. Madison has decided to return to Montana to rejoin his wife, Katie.
"San Francisco supervisors bowed to the City Attorney's Office once again and approved another really bad contract," Tim Redmond writes in this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian, introducing a story by Tali Woodward. The 20-year contract is with media giant Clear Channel Communications, which owns 1,200 radio stations across the country and assorted other media and advertising properties. It allows the company to erect modular news racks, called pedmounts, and sell advertising on the backs and sides. The deal gives the company "control over the distribution of newspapers in the city for the next 20 years," Woodward writes. "Even some of the supervisors who voted for the deal expressed reservations and said they were acting under legal pressure."
Jeff Truesdell, who had been with Orlando Weekly since its birth in 1990, was abruptly fired this week after a spat with Publisher Mike Johnson. Truesdell says he and Johnson had a tense relationship, but says the publisher never interfered with the editorial side of the paper. Johnson says he respects Truesdell but won't talk about the argument that led to the termination.
Thirty years ago, the nuns at St. Agnes Home for Unwed Mothers in Connecticut "brainwashed" pregnant teens shipped there to purge the shame of their premarital mistake by giving up their babies for adoption. The nuns insisted that God would approve. That's the claim of the women who contacted the Hartford Advocate to tell their stories. They also charge that the adoption of their babies was a money-maker for St. Agnes.
