Blogs: News Blawg

Around the country, as here at Metro Times, folks no doubt continue to share personal anecdotes about what transpired last week. An electric current of optimism surged through a vast network of people — from those who invested dollars and labor in the Barack Obama campaign to those who simply voted. And we’re still...
Read more »

A joyous crowd cheers President-elect Obama at the Renaissance Center’s ballroom. In Phoenix, Sen. John McCain had finished his concession speech. In the streets of downtown Detroit, the first notes of the celebratory car-horn symphony were being honked and tooted. Up several floors in the ballroom rented by the Democratic Party, lots of folks,...
Read more »

For you political junkies out there who can’t get enough election news and want to keep tabs of how the presidential race is going down the home stretch, I have a couple of Web sites to recommend. The first is realclearppolitics.com, a site that, among many other things, posts a daily roundup of all...
Read more »

The news came today: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved Aziz Alfassa for permanent residency in the United States, putting to rest the 20-year-old’s fears of deportation to Togo where he said he would have feared for his life.“We are grateful that they decided to give this young man a chance at a new...
Read more »

It was hard not getting a little teary-eyed watching the Barack Obama infomercial Wednesday night. Who could not be touched by the amber waves of grain, and all those seemingly sincere testimonies to the character of the man who wants to lead us, and the tales of people struggling as a result of eight...
Read more »

I just got off the phone with Daniel Cherrin, spokesman for Detroit Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. (man, it still feels odd typing the words “Detroit Mayor” without having them be followed by the name Kwame Kilpatrick). Cherrin says that the city’s Law Department is in the process of “going through the appropriate legal channels”...
Read more »

Detroit Auditor General Joe Harris delivered a message many officials didn’t want to hear. Given the collapse of the economy and the foreclosure crisis and the general gloom that seems to be hanging over us like cold October rain clouds, it was nice to see something in the news that actually made me feel...
Read more »

The Metro Times has received several e-mails and phone calls from readers who take us to task for the comic book treatment we gave Kwame Kilpatrick, aka Kwame-man. You can read some of the letters Wednesday when this week’s paper hits the stands and the letters are posted to the Web. The general theme...
Read more »

What to do? That was the question we faced last week when Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick pleaded guilty to two felonies and no contest to a third, and then resigned. It was a story guaranteed to get saturation coverage from all the area’s media. That was a given. And, by the time Metro Times hit...
Read more »

A Detroit Free Press reporter may be questioned about the confidential sources who told him about a federal investigation into misconduct by a former federal prosecutor, a federal judge ruled. David Ashenfelter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 26-year veteran of the daily newspaper, reported in 2004 about an investigation into possible ethical violations involving then-Assistant U.S....
Read more »