Also today, another story about the USA Today fabricator Jack Kelley:<p>
[Linda] Mathews, who began editing the newspaper's daily front-page features, known as "cover stories,'' in April 2000, was one of the primary editors on his front-page account, in August 2001, of the bombing of a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem.
In its accounting of that article, the team of reporters investigating Mr. Kelley found that an early draft contained a description of three severed heads rolling down the street "with their eyes still blinking.''
By the time the article reached her computer, Ms. Mathews said, the description of the blinking eyes had been removed and she has no recollection of it. But she did let stand Mr. Kelley's account of the heads rolling down the street, as well as his description of having seen the bomber. None of those descriptions, the team of reporters found, are consistent with police accounts and photographs of the scene.
"It never crossed my mind to wonder whether he was embroidering,'' Ms. Mathews said.<p>***Surely someone on the copy desk rolled his eyes at that.***