Rampage by Dictator Trump overshadows deaths of two prominent local residents

A little after 7 on Wednesday morning, the rush-hour NJ Transit train I boarded at Anderson Street in Hackensack, below, was standing room only to Secaucus, an old story that has been ignored by The Record's transportation columnist, who continues to obsess over potholes and signs obscured by foliage.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Readers of The Record can be forgiven if they missed the obituaries of two prominent Teaneck residents amid all of the coverage of how President Trump is trampling people's rights and trying to destroy the environment to create jobs.

The first was award-winning jazz photographer Chuck Stewart, 89, an African-American whose death was reported last Wednesday.

"Texas-born and Arizona-raised, Stewart made money the first day he snapped a picture [at 13 years old]," Staff Writer Jay Levin wrote.

Richard A. Green, the peripatetic Gannett editor now running the Woodland Park newsroom, decided that instead of running the Stewart obit on Page 1, he needed that space to promote a boring Sports feature on "North Jersey players to reach the Super Bowl."

The second important Teaneck resident was Stephen P. Cohen, 71, whose obituary was published on Friday.

Cohen "for decades served as a back-channel mediator between Israel and its Arab neighbors," Levin said.

There certainly was room on Page 1 for Cohen's obit, if Green hadn't gotten so excited over conversion of the ferry boat Binghamton into a restaurant barge.

Just two more examples of the awful news judgment exhibited by a clueless out-of-state editor who swooped into New Jersey to run a once-great local daily newspaper.

Refugee ban

Trump, who has been acting more like a dictator than a president, suffered his first setback late Saturday, when a federal judge in Brooklyn prevented some refugees who were detained at airports from being deported (1A).

A sidebar with today's main story on protests over Trump's refugee ban notes "a Rutgers Ph.D. student who went to visit her ill mother in Syria was stopped on her way back during a Paris layover and barred from returning to Newark" (1A).

At the bottom of Page 1 today, a news story tries to guess at what was said during Trump's hour-long phone call on Saturday to his BFF, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is believed to have been behind Russian meddling that helped Trump in the Nov. 8 presidential election, and he's been called a war criminal for unleashing his military on innocent civilians in Aleppo, Syria.

Food coverage

Petite Soo Chow, one of restaurants promoted in a Chinese New Year feature on Saturday, has been closed down at least twice by Cliffside Park health inspectors.

We stopped patronizing the restaurant after we saw a male waiter picking his nose in the dining room.

Staff Writer Sophia F. Gottfried also recommended Aquarius Seafood Restaurant in Fort Lee, even though its Chinese New Year menus "start" at $688 (Saturday's Better Living section).

Gottfried ignored Lotus Cafe, a BYO in Hackensack that is offering a special four-course Chinese New Year Menu for $29.95 per person.