InkBlots

The vice chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians has issued a statement to clarify the facts surrounding an altercation last month with a male student at a community college after going there to retrieve his minor-age daughter from a dorm room.

Assault charges were filed against Vice Chief Eddie Sam and subsequently dropped in the March 31 incident at East Mississippi Community College in Scooba, according to Kemper County authorities.

Sam contacted The Neshoba Democrat in an effort to set the record straight after reports he characterized as malicious attacks appeared in another publication.

A Tribal Council resolution earlier this month to remove Sam based on the allegations failed.

The Democrat article reports that when Sam made an appeal to the other publication, the upstart Philadelphian newspaper, he had to make his case not only before the editor of that paper, but also to the mayor of Philadelphia and the local economic development agency head.

Tom Collins, owner of Tupelo Engraving and Rubber Stamp and a former executive for Hancock Fabrics, has accepted the position as general manager of The Pontotoc Progress. He succeeds Lisa Bryant, who moves to the Daily Journal mother ship as advertising director…Renae Alexander is the new advertising director of The Meridian Star…Heather Freret has returned to the Stone County Enterprise in Wiggins as publisher after leaving the paper in 2007.

From the AP: “Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said he’s unhappy about corporate ownership of news organizations in the United States.

“Something that worries me more so than the war and Iraq and money in politics is freedom of the press,” Hood said. “Is our press free anymore? The corporate ownership of the press nationally is a concern to me.”

From The Mississippi Press newspaper in Pascagoula: “An experiment in government transparency conducted by the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson yielded a not-so-surprising result.