Author: jnweaver

The thing you notice is that they can?t seem to stop smiling. Maybe it?s that way with most newlyweds. But it must be more true when it happens later in life, out of nowhere, when it?s least expected.

A suspected drunken driver who was spotted driving recklessly and hitting parked cars near Gorham Street is also accused of resisting arrest just after bar time on Saturday morning. Madison police officers said the driver, Spencer Eckstein, 20, of Madison, began racing down Langdon Street as he was being pulled over. They said he jumped out of the vehicle and started to run away, but a second officer who was nearby on a separate call caught up to Eckstein as he was trying to get into a home on North Lake Street. Eckstein resisted arrest and a Taser was used to subdue him, police said.

One day in the summer of 1987 a young man walked in the office of The Daily Cardinal on the UW-Madison campus. I was there, alone, preparing for my new job as campus editor. On his shoulder he carried an overstuffed military-style canvas bag about as long as he was tall. He introduced himself, explained that he had just transferred to the university, and asked me if I could assign him a story. He had yet to even find an apartment. The man was Anthony Shadid. He died of an apparent asthma attack Thursday while on assignment in Syria for The New York Times. He was 43.

Anthony Shadid, one of the most incisive and honored foreign correspondents of his generation, died Thursday in Syria, where he was covering the armed insurrection against the government for his newspaper, the New York Times. Shadid, 43, won two Pulitzer Prizes for his lyrical and poignant dispatches from Iraq, which he covered extensively for The Washington Post before and after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Shadid, a fluent Arabic speaker, roamed broadly across the Arab world, reporting with precision, nuance and depth from the West Bank, Lebanon, Libya and other troubled and peaceful realms in the region.

The great unfinished story of the last half century in Madison is whatever happened to Leo Burt. Burt, of course, is the last fugitive from the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing on the UW-Madison campus ? the last fugitive, really, from that whole era. In 2006 I chatted about Burt with Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground co-founder who spent 11 years on the run himself. Ayers was stunned to learn Burt was still at large. “That?s amazing,” he said. At the time, Burt had been a fugitive 36 years.

Anthony Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and UW-Madison graduate, died Thursday in Syria of an apparent asthma attack. He was 43. Shadid was in Syria on a reporting assignment. The New York Times reported Times photographer Tyler Hicks was with him and carried his body to Turkey. A 1990 UW-Madison graduate, Shadid won two Pulitzer Prizes for the Washington Post, in 2004 for international reporting and in 2010 for his coverage of Iraq. He was with The New York Times since 2009.