Thursday, October 09, 2003

That's Mister Ed to you, pal. The Globe Spotlight Team today has one of those long packages on an obscure topic that you wouldn't think you'd much care about: financial abuses at private foundations.

This one, though, is pretty sprightly, mainly because the paper has found some rather colorful characters with their hands in the till.

My favorite is Edward Lake, whose story is told in a sidebar by Francie Latour. A retired $20,000-a-year government clerk, Lake, through a chance encounter some six decades ago, lucked into serving on the Florik Charitable Trust, paying himself -- at most recent count -- $230,000 a year to look at the mail.

Latour's kicker:

"A lot of people thought I couldn't do this, see? I don't appear to be slick enough," Lake said. "But I fooled them. I fooled them all. When they say Mr. Lake, that means Mr. Lake. Nobody calls me Ed."

Urine trouble. Both the Globe and the Herald give front-page treatment to yesterday's regional drug summit at Faneuil Hall.

The Herald's Thomas Caywood runs hard with the most disturbing angle: White House drug czar John Walter's outrageous proposal for random school drug testing.

As the ACLU's Nancy Murray says, "It's just putting the emphasis in the wrong place. We don't need our schools to be more like prisons."

New in this week's Phoenix. The Wilson affair is potentially an enormous scandal that could endanger lives and national security. Will the media keep the heat on -- or just pass it off as a typical Washington kerfuffle?

California voters show the LA Times that they don't care about Governor-elect (imagine that!) Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping and humiliation of women.

And the Phoenix editorial calls on WEEI Radio to declare that Dennis & Callahan has completed its long-running engagement.

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