Seattle
P-I, R.I.P.: After 146 years in business, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last print edition this week, becoming the largest U.S. newspaper to shift to an online-only format. The paper’s demise leaves The Seattle Times as the city’s only newspaper. Robert Oglesby, publisher of the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer, said the paper had struggled for years before succumbing to the sinking economy. Known for its pugnacious editorial tone, the paper “had fewer sacred cows and more gore-able oxen than any paper in the Northwest,” said columnist Joel Connelly. The online venture will employ only 20 of the paper’s 165 staff, with most of the site’s content supplied by unpaid bloggers.
Chowchilla, Calif.
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Former radical freed: A 1970s radical was paroled this week after serving seven years for robbing a bank and placing bombs under Los Angeles police cars in 1975. Sara Jane Olson, 62, was released from a state prison in Chowchilla after serving half her sentence. In the 1970s, Olson belonged to the Symbionese Liberation Army, a group espousing violent revolution. In 1975, she took part in a Sacramento bank robbery, during which Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four, was shot dead. Olson then changed her name and fled to Minnesota, living there until her arrest, in 1999. Said Opsahl’s son Jon: “She did her time, as minimal as that may have been. I don’t want to see or think about her again.”
Scottsbluff, Neb.
Grand theft auto: Three executives of a struggling Nebraska car dealership were arrested this week after allegedly stealing 81 cars off their own lot and trying to sell them in Utah and other Mountain States. Allen Patch, 52, owner of Legacy Car Sales, and controller Rachel Fait, 37, were arrested in Utah, where 16 Legacy cars were sold at auction. Rick Covello, 53, the dealership’s general manager, turned himself in to Nebraska authorities. The cars were allegedly taken from the Legacy lot in the middle of the night and shipped by transporter truck to Utah. The suspects paid the trucking company with $18,000 in fraudulent checks, police said.
Houston
Prostitution bust: Police have broken up an online prostitution ring with as many as 1,500 clients, among whom authorities said were prominent politicians, entertainers, and athletes. None were immediately identified. Authorities last week arrested Deborah Turbiville, 33, and her husband, Charles Turbiville, 31, following a yearlong investigation. Police called Deborah Turbiville, who allegedly ran the ring, “the Heidi Fleiss of Houston,” a reference to the notorious Hollywood madam. Clients of the service reportedly underwent extensive background checks before being allowed to meet prostitutes. “You had to be brought into what she called her family,” said Houston Police Sgt. Mark Kilty. “These weren’t johns off the street. These were suit-and-tie businessmen.”
New York City
Actress seriously hurt: Tony Award–winning actress Natasha Richardson apparently suffered a severe head injury this week while taking a ski lesson at a Quebec resort, and was rushed to a New York hospital. Several news accounts quoted hospital sources saying that Richardson, 45, was “brain dead,” and that relatives had gathered at her bedside. Witnesses said Richardson was skiing on a beginner’s slope at the Mont Tremblant resort when she fell. First-aid personnel found no signs of injury but advised her to seek medical attention. An hour later, she developed a headache and was rushed to a Montreal hospital and, from there, to New York. Richardson, who has starred in such films as Nell and The Parent Trap, is the wife of actor Liam Neeson and the daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave and the late director Tony Richardson.
Washington, D.C.
Torture, they said: Inmates at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo were routinely tortured at secret prisons around the world by the Central Intelligence Agency, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a newly disclosed 2007 report. The New York Review of Books reported that 14 so-called high-value detainees gave Red Cross officials similar accounts of being beaten, waterboarded, doused with cold water, and deprived of sleep—which the Red Cross said amounted to torture. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged planner of the 9/11 terror attacks, told Red Cross investigators that he was shackled with his arms above his head for days at a time, and waterboarded five times. President Bush said that the CIA’s “alternative interrogation techniques” did not amount to torture, but President Obama has banned the practices described in the Red Cross report.
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