Leaders of the Vermont Senate are looking into charges by Seven Days columnist Peter Freyne that the Legislature pulled funding from Vermont Public Television in order to get him off the air, the Rutland Herald reports. Freyne's "Inside Track" column blisters legislators with great regularity. He has also been a regular guest and moderator on VPT's "This Week in Vermont" for some 20 years.
After a mini-firestorm of protest over the judging in Willamette Week's inaugural writing contest, Arts and Culture Editor Caryn B. Brooks explains it all. A mea culpa for not having told the three judges that their picks were merely advisory, not binding. And she says putting "Floozy" third rather than first was because the author hadn't been particularly inventive in plot and characterization launched from the required first line, "At 4 a.m. she found herself under the Broadway Bridge."
During Hitler's reign, Germany became IBM's premier foreign customer. What role did the company play in automating the Nazi death machine? "IBM and the Nazis jointly designed, and IBM exclusively produced, technological solutions that enabled Hitler to accelerate and in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered enemies," Edwin Black reports in The Village Voice. "Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination."
A new fortnightly arts and entertainment paper, the Wave, is ready to cross swords with the already warring San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly, Dan Fost of the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Both Bay Guardian Editor/Publisher Bruce Brugmann and SF Weekly Editor John Mecklin are dubious about the Wave's chances, Fost says. Also, Featurewell syndicate signs Mother Jones.
