“U.S., Russia share notes on defunct Oregon charity - KPNews.com” plus 4 more

---

• U.S., Russia share notes on defunct Oregon charity - KPNews.com
• On Native Ground - American Reporter
• The Almanac - Oct. 12 - Post Chronicle
• Eau Claire School District Changing School Closings - WSAW
• Web revs up U.S. tradition of political incivility - Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

U.S., Russia share notes on defunct Oregon charity - KPNews.com Posted: 11 Oct 2009 09:39 PM PDT December, federal prosecutors Charles Gorder and Chris Cardani met with agents from Russia's Federal Security Service and gave them copies of computer hard drives from Al Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc., the Oregonian newspaper reported. The Federal Security Service was looking for information about Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya, The Oregonian newspaper reported. Pete Seda, who founded the Ashland charity 10 years ago, is charged with conspiracy and tax fraud, accused of diverting money overseas for foreign Islamic fighters. His attorneys say prosecutors had no business giving the Russians the data. They argued in court records that the move was an "outrageous intrusion" into Seda's privacy and asked a judge to bar the government from using the computers as evidence. Gorder and Cardani, assistant U.S. attorneys, said in the new filings that the arrangement was legal under international treaty. They said they brought home evidence that Al Haramain wasn't the humanitarian organization it claimed to be. A judge has yet to rule on the competing claims. The prosecutors declined to comment on recent events, as did Seda's lawyers, federal defender Steve Wax and Portland attorney Larry Matasar. Seda, 51, and three Saudis formed Al Haramain as the American arm of huge Saudi Islamic charity. Al Haramain distributed religious material to U.S. prisons and operated a prayer house before falling under suspicion of federal terrorism investigators. Seda went overseas after a visit from the FBI in 2003. The following year, federal authorities designated Al Haramain a supporter of terrorism. Prosecutors subsequently charged Seda with illegally using a $150,000 donation to support mujahedeen, the Islamic fighters. Seda, a one-time arborist born in Iran as Pirouz Sedaghaty, returned to Oregon in 2007 to deny tax and conspiracy charges. He has consistently maintained he opposed terrorist acts and worked instead to promote interfaith peace. He was freed pending his trial, which was set for next month but has been postponed, in part because Seda wants time to consider the new Russian information. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.
On Native Ground - American Reporter Posted: 12 Oct 2009 05:24 AM PDT	On Native Ground MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS by Randolph T. Holhut American Reporter Correspondent Dummerston, Vt. Back to home page Printable version of this story DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass. News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out. Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s. Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business. The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac. They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials. In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone. Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek." There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink. That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce. One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades. Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle. The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s. The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead. The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments. Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job. Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute. And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies. Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business. The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive. Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation. I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed. What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age? My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see. Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com. Copyright 2009 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
The Almanac - Oct. 12 - Post Chronicle Posted: 12 Oct 2009 04:56 AM PDT Today is Monday, Oct. 12, the 285th day of 2009 with 80 to follow. This is Columbus Day in the United States. The moon is waning. The morning stars are Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter and Uranus. Those born on this date are under the sign of Libra. They include Elmer Sperry, who devised practical uses for the gyroscope, in 1860; English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1872; comedian and activist Dick Gregory in 1932 (age 77); opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti in 1935; TV correspondent Chris Wallace in 1947 (age 62); singer/actress Susan Anton in 1950 (age 59); actors Adam Rich in 1968 (age 41) and Kirk Cameron in 1970 (age 39); and track star Marion Jones in 1975 (age 34). On this date in history: In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached America, making his first landing in the New World on one of the Bahamas Islands. Columbus believed he had reached India. In 1899, the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in southern Africa declared war on the British. The Boer War was ended May 31, 1902, by the Treaty of Vereeniging. In 1915, British nurse Edith Cavell, 49, was executed by a German firing squad in Brussels for helping Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I. In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev removed one of his shoes and pounded it on his desk during a speech before the United Nations. In 1964, the Soviet Union launched Voskhod 1 into orbit around Earth, with three cosmonauts aboard. It was the first spacecraft to carry a multi-person crew and the two-day mission was also the first flight performed without space suits. In 1973, U.S. President Richard Nixon nominated U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Gerald Ford, R-Mich., for the vice presidency to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned two days earlier. In 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped injury in the bombing of a hotel in Brighton, England. Four people were killed in the attack, blamed on the Irish Republican Army. In 1991, Iran agreed to withdraw its 1,500 Revolutionary Guards from Lebanon. In 1992, more than 500 people were killed and thousands injured when an earthquake rocked Cairo, Egypt. In 1998, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard died five days after the 21-year-old gay man was beaten, robbed and left tied to a fence. In 1999, the elected government of Pakistan was overthrown in an apparently bloodless military coup. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and several other leaders were arrested. In 2000, 17 sailors were killed when an explosion rocked the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen. U.S. President Bill Clinton blamed the attack on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. In 2002, a bomb exploded near two crowded night clubs on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people. Also in 2002, the terror continued for Washington area residents as the weeklong death toll from a mysterious sniper reached eight. In 2003, Uganda said its army rescued more than 400 children held captive by rebels in a remote village north of Kampala. In 2004, a report of the CIA's top weapons investigator said Saddam Hussein thought U.S. officials knew he had no weapons of mass destruction before the invasion. In 2005, newly released documents charged that the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles allegedly shielded priests accused of sexual abuse by moving them from one parish to another. In 2006, a London man admitted helping plan terrorist attacks in Britain and the United States, including at the New York Stock Exchange. In 2007, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to publicize a man-made climate change and explain how to counteract it. Also in 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the United States against installing missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. In 2008, the 15 countries of the Eurozone agreed on an emergency deal to guarantee financial debt for five years and to take a direct stake in banks if needed. The countries also agreed to shore up interbank markets to jump-start lending. A thought for the day: Chinese educator, writer and diplomat Tehyi Hsieh said, "The key to success isn't much good until one discovers the right lock to insert it in." (c) UPI This content has passed through fivefilters.org.
Eau Claire School District Changing School Closings - WSAW Posted: 12 Oct 2009 02:40 AM PDT With winter around the corner, one school district is changing the way it handles school closings. The Eau Claire School District is switching from closing schools all day to delaying the start by an hour or two when there's bad weather. Parents talked to say they think it's a good idea. Kids piling on buses Tuesday probably weren't thinking about snow days but the Eau Claire School District is. "What do we do on foggy days? What do we do on days where at 6:30 A.M. the roads are snow covered but the sun and crews are out so by 9-10 A.M. roads could be clear?," says Dr. Ron Heilmann. Superintendent Dr. Ron Heilmann says this year the district will start school an hour or two later depending on the conditions, instead of canceling school like they have in the past. "I tend to use one hour for fog and two hour late start would more likely be reserved for those mornings where there was snow fall the previous night and you see a lot of snow on the ground or a combination of snow and rain," says Dr. Heilmann. Some parents say they like the idea. "I don't like it when they cancel the whole day of school when it only takes an hour or so to clear the roads," says parent Diane Schermann. "It's nice having them going to school when they can and not making it up at the end of the year," says parent Brenda Thalacker Dr. Heilmann says the district has two days to use as snow days but anything after that is tacked onto the end of the school year. "Knock on wood we have been lucky, the middle and the east got more, our luck might be running out. I didn't check the Farmers Almanac for this winter yet," says Dr. Heilmann. Heilmann says the switch won't just help keep kids in the class room but it will help keep them safe on their way to school. "As a parent and from a safety perspective I would really like to see that where they delay school instead of having the whole day off but I'm not going to get any points from the kids on that comment," says Diane Schermann. Dr. Heilmann says school will still be canceled if the conditions are bad enough but he says the late start gives the district more options. http://www.weau.com/home/headlines/56775462.html This content has passed through fivefilters.org.
Web revs up U.S. tradition of political incivility - Fort Wayne Journal Gazette Posted: 12 Oct 2009 12:38 AM PDT WASHINGTON – It has been nearly a year since Barack Obama, running as a uniter and not a divider, was elected president by the largest margin in 20 years. The loop on cable news of thousands of beaming faces in Chicago's Grant Park has given way to a summer and fall of thousands of other faces contorting in defiance and fear. A congressman yelled "You lie!" at the president on national TV. A liberal bit off the finger of a conservative during a confrontation over public health insurance. On Friday, after Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Republicans and Democrats were at their battle stations again. The nation's political discourse seems sour, angry, even dangerous; "uglier than it's ever been" is a phrase often volunteered – as if President George W. Bush had never been depicted as Hitler, declared a dunce and heckled by Code Pink during his second inaugural address. Raucous rhetoric against presidential power is a tool of both ends of the political spectrum, of course, most vociferously used by the party out of power. "In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude. Every man will speak as he thinks," George Washington wrote, "or more properly, without thinking." And that quote is on one of Glenn Beck's Web sites. "There are enough good people who believe in the flag and the Bible to seize and control the Government of America! … We must make our choice in the presence of atheistic Communistic influences! It is Tammany or Independence Hall! It is the Russian primer or the Holy Bible! It is the Red Flag or the Stars and Stripes! It is Lenin or Lincoln – Stalin or Jefferson!" That rousing call to action against a president could be stripped straight from the Web sites of today's Tea Party protesters, and it brought lusty cheers from 10,000 Americans outraged over what they perceived as invasive federal power. It was the summer of 1936, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was seeking his second term as president. He had closed the banks in an effort to pry the country out of the Depression and established the sweeping safety net of the New Deal. Gerald L.K. Smith, the minister who delivered that jeremiad at a third-party convention in Cleveland, was merely a warm-up act for the invective to come from the Rev. Charles Edward Coughlin, who depicted Roosevelt as a tool of the devil in weekly radio addresses that reached 40 million people. Still, Roosevelt won by a landslide. "From time to time, I go back to find the golden age of civility," said Michael Barone, lead author of the authoritative Almanac of American Politics, "and it has proved elusive." A supporter of Thomas Jefferson once called John Adams "a hideously hermaphroditical character." Former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton called Vice President Aaron Burr "bankrupt by redemption except by the plunder of his country," an attack so heinous that the men dueled, and Hamilton died. The spread of the Internet in the mid-1990s, along with the rise of conservative talk radio and 24-hour cable news programming, added a new dimension, however. "The thing that is really important now is the way the Internet has changed the relationship between the elite and the non-elite. Everybody has the opportunity to be a great communicator for 15 minutes," said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who studies modern political theory. That level of participation is a good thing for a healthy democracy, Allen and other scholars agree. Red-faced and blue-faced insistence online and on television "brings us to this very wobbly sense of where we are right now: Is this a sign we are falling apart, or that people are just participating again? Or both?" asked Thomas Benson, a professor of rhetoric at Pennsylvania State University. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

You are subscribed to email updates from Almanacs - Bing News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610