Erik Wemple, a former Washington City Paper senior editor, returns to become editor, the paper announces today. Wemple replaces Howard Witt, who left the paper for the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune. Richard Byrne, interim editor and media columnist, is leaving the paper to become executive editor of TheGlobalist.com.
Miami New Times sleuths crack the case of the vanishing alternative newsweeklies. The paper wrote a critical story about Eduardo Padron, president of Miami-Dade Community College, and suddenly reports roll in about empty news racks on all the campuses. A 72-year-old journalism student finally produces a smoking gun: he says he was with a security officer who scooped up the papers. The guard sheepishly admitted Padron had ordered security to confiscate them, the student says.
New Times Broward-Palm Beach reports that not only did alleged terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta waltz past the INS in January 2001, he actually went back with fellow hijacker Marwan Al-Shehhi in tow. An INS mistake had given Atta an extra two months on his visa, and he wanted Al-Shehhi to get the same. José Touron, an INS union official, tells New Times, "He was daring -- he put his head right back in the lion's mouth." The INS refused and took the extra two months away from Atta, but New Times reporter Bob Norman argues they could have investigated the two men then and there.
Ron Curran, a veteran writer and editor for LA Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, plans to launch a new alternative syndicate in the spring. The service, to be called Pulp Syndicate, takes aim at non-profit AlterNet, but Don Hazen, AlterNet’s executive editor, isn’t too worried. "We look forward to whatever healthy competition they might provide," Hazen says.
Are American Muslims harboring terrorists or seeking peace? To answer the question raging on talk radio, Willamette Week peeks behind the curtains at Portland's Islamic Academy. WW's Chris Lydgate interviewed students, teachers and parents, reviewed textbooks and sat in on classes and prayers. "What we discovered was neither the conservatives' paranoid nightmare of fanatics sharpening scimitars nor the liberals' wishful daydream of Unitarians in headscarves. Instead, we developed a far more nuanced image. We found a deeply conservative faith determined that its children not lose their way in a me-first society--and a group of believers scrambling for sanctuary in a newly suspicious nation," Lydgate writes.
