The Weekly Roundup

Singleton gets the Merc, Phil gets the votes, state gets the cash

Thursday, April 27
Dean Singleton has succeeded in his efforts to purchase the San Jose Mercury
News and Contra Costa Times, with financial support for a minority stake
from Hearst Communications, which publishes the Chronicle.

“Before Hearst’s involvement was announced, most observers thought the deal
would set up a showdown between MediaNews and The Chronicle, the region’s
biggest newspaper with a daily circulation of 400,000. Instead, it appears
that The Chronicle’s parent company and MediaNews will cooperate in ways
that are still to be fleshed out.”

“‘To the extent we can do things legally [with Hearst], we’re open to them,’
MediaNews President Jody Lodovic said in an interview. ‘For antitrust
reasons, you obviously can’t do a lot of things together that might make
sense. We will be very careful. We have a long, good relationship with
Hearst. We see eye-to-eye on Internet strategies and a lot of things of that
nature.'”

No need to worry, antitrust is so 1980s.

Meanwhile, Steve Westly and Phil Angelides filed ethics complaints against
each other’s campaigns yesterday, setting the scene for the state party’s
convention in Sacramento during the weekend.

Friday, April 28
This just in. Osama bin Laden has been spotted, and he’s headed to the
jungle. “Osama bin Laden” is still on the run in the jungles of Sierra Leone
after escaping with some 20 other chimpanzees from a wildlife sanctuary
where they killed a local taxi driver on Sunday.

“The chimp, named by wardens after the wanted al-Qaida leader, was among a
pack of apes which mobbed and mauled four men at the Tacugama Chimpanzee
Sanctuary in the forested hills outside the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown.
“We hope by the middle of the coming week we will get all of them back to
the sanctuary,” a Tacugama spokesman told Reuters.

Saturday, April 29
Phil Angelides, looking for a bit of momentum, got a boost from the tried
and true today as he secured the support of more than 60 percent of the
party’s delegates, and locked up his party’s nomination in the June primary.
That’s the good news. The bad news: Steve Westly is still hella rich.
In other news, Keith Richards fell out of a tree