Almanacs “The Almanac - Dec. 15 - Post Chronicle” plus 4 more

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• The Almanac - Dec. 15 - Post Chronicle
• Pa. newspaper general manager dies from swine flu - Denver Post
• On Native Ground - American Reporter
• The Almanac - Dec. 15 - Post Chronicle
• Small businesses stand to benefit from proposed health care bills - Sacramento Bee

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

The Almanac - Dec. 15 - Post Chronicle Posted: 15 Dec 2009 04:56 AM PST Today is Tuesday, Dec. 15, the 349th day of 2009 with 16 to follow. The moon is waning. The morning stars are Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter and Uranus. Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include the Roman emperor Nero in 37 A.D.; Polish linguist Ludwik Zamenhof, creator of the international language Esperanto, in 1859; French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, builder of the Paris tower that bears his name and engineer of the Statue of Liberty, in 1832; playwright Maxwell Anderson in 1888; billionaire oilman J. Paul Getty in 1892; bandleader Stan Kenton in 1911; pioneer rock 'n' roll disc jockey Alan Freed in 1921; comic actor Tim Conway in 1933 (age 76); rock musician Dave Clark in 1942 (age 67); and actors Don Johnson in 1949 (age 60); Helen Slater in 1963 (age 46) and Garrett Wang ("Star Trek: Voyager") in 1968 (age 41). On this date in history: In 1791, the Bill of Rights, comprising the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, took effect. In 1890, Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull was killed in a skirmish with U.S. soldiers along the Grand River, S.D. In 1939, the film version of "Gone with the Wind" premiered in Atlanta. In 1943, the Battle of San Pietro between U.S. forces and a German panzer battalion left the 700-year-old Italian town in ruins. In 1948, a federal grand jury in New York indicted former U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss on perjury charges. In 1954, what may be considered TV's first mini-series premiered. "Davy Crockett" aired in a series of five segments on Walt Disney's "Disneyland" show. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer regarded as the architect of the World War II Jewish Holocaust, was condemned to death by an Israeli war crimes tribunal. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reversed its longstanding position and declared that homosexuality is not a mental illness. Also in 1973, Jean Paul Getty III, grandson of U.S. billionaire J. Paul Getty, was found alive near Naples, five months after his kidnapping by an Italian gang. In 1982, Teamsters Union President Roy Williams and four others were convicted in federal court of conspiring to bribe Sen. Howard Cannon, D-Nev. In 1989, Panamanian lawmakers designated Gen. Manuel Noriega head of state and declared that a "state of war" existed with the United States. In 1990, in a landmark right-to-die case, a Missouri judge cleared the way for the parents of Nancy Cruzan to remove their daughter from life-support systems. In 1991, more than 400 people drowned when a ferry headed from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Egypt sank in the Red Sea. Some 150 people were rescued. In 1992, the governor of Michigan signed a bill making assisted suicide a felony on the same day two chronically ill women killed themselves with the help of "Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian. Also in 1992, Salvadorans celebrated the formal end to their country's 12-year civil war. In 1993, British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds issued a "framework for lasting peace" in Northern Ireland. Also in 1993, the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ended with agreement on new global-trade regulations. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Defense ordered all 1.4 million men and women in uniform to be inoculated against anthrax. Also in 1997, 85 people were killed when a Tajik charter airliner crashed in the United Arab Emirates. In 2000, first lady and senator-elect Hillary Clinton signed an $8 million book deal to write a memoir of her years in the White House. In 2003, as Iraqi leaders urged that a war crime tribunal try Saddam Hussein, U.S. President George W. Bush said he favored "ultimate justice" and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the trial must meet international standards. In 2005, as many as 11 million Iraqis turned out to select their first permanent parliament since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 2006, Al Jazeera English, the world's first English-language news TV channel based in the Middle East, was launched in Doha, Qatar. In 2007, at the end of a two-week conference on climate change in Indonesia, delegates from 187 countries, including the United States, agreed to negotiate a new accord on global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008, the Illinois state legislature began impeachment proceedings against Gov. Rod Blagojevich, accused of trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Also in 2008, national records indicate that unemployment was a chief culprit in the rise of U.S. foreclosures, triggering 46 percent of all 90-day delinquencies in the first half of 2008. A thought for the day: the title of a poem by Stephane Mallarme is "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance." (c) UPI fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Pa. newspaper general manager dies from swine flu - Denver Post Posted: 07 Dec 2009 09:48 PM PST WASHINGTON, Pa.—The general manager of a weekly newspaper in suburban Pittsburgh has died of complications from swine flu. Forty-nine-year-old Liza Northrop Beale was the general manager of The Almanac and the editor of a pair of magazines published by the Observer Publishing Company of Washington. Company officials say Beale died Saturday. She is the fourth person to die of complications related to the H1N1 virus in Washington County. Beale had been serving as the vice president of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association Foundation. ——— Information from: Observer-Reporter, http://www.observer-reporter.com fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
On Native Ground - American Reporter Posted: 15 Dec 2009 05:24 AM PST	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 - Dec. 15 - Post Chronicle Posted: 15 Dec 2009 04:56 AM PST Today is Tuesday, Dec. 15, the 349th day of 2009 with 16 to follow. The moon is waning. The morning stars are Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter and Uranus. Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include the Roman emperor Nero in 37 A.D.; Polish linguist Ludwik Zamenhof, creator of the international language Esperanto, in 1859; French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, builder of the Paris tower that bears his name and engineer of the Statue of Liberty, in 1832; playwright Maxwell Anderson in 1888; billionaire oilman J. Paul Getty in 1892; bandleader Stan Kenton in 1911; pioneer rock 'n' roll disc jockey Alan Freed in 1921; comic actor Tim Conway in 1933 (age 76); rock musician Dave Clark in 1942 (age 67); and actors Don Johnson in 1949 (age 60); Helen Slater in 1963 (age 46) and Garrett Wang ("Star Trek: Voyager") in 1968 (age 41). On this date in history: In 1791, the Bill of Rights, comprising the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, took effect. In 1890, Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull was killed in a skirmish with U.S. soldiers along the Grand River, S.D. In 1939, the film version of "Gone with the Wind" premiered in Atlanta. In 1943, the Battle of San Pietro between U.S. forces and a German panzer battalion left the 700-year-old Italian town in ruins. In 1948, a federal grand jury in New York indicted former U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss on perjury charges. In 1954, what may be considered TV's first mini-series premiered. "Davy Crockett" aired in a series of five segments on Walt Disney's "Disneyland" show. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer regarded as the architect of the World War II Jewish Holocaust, was condemned to death by an Israeli war crimes tribunal. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reversed its longstanding position and declared that homosexuality is not a mental illness. Also in 1973, Jean Paul Getty III, grandson of U.S. billionaire J. Paul Getty, was found alive near Naples, five months after his kidnapping by an Italian gang. In 1982, Teamsters Union President Roy Williams and four others were convicted in federal court of conspiring to bribe Sen. Howard Cannon, D-Nev. In 1989, Panamanian lawmakers designated Gen. Manuel Noriega head of state and declared that a "state of war" existed with the United States. In 1990, in a landmark right-to-die case, a Missouri judge cleared the way for the parents of Nancy Cruzan to remove their daughter from life-support systems. In 1991, more than 400 people drowned when a ferry headed from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Egypt sank in the Red Sea. Some 150 people were rescued. In 1992, the governor of Michigan signed a bill making assisted suicide a felony on the same day two chronically ill women killed themselves with the help of "Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian. Also in 1992, Salvadorans celebrated the formal end to their country's 12-year civil war. In 1993, British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds issued a "framework for lasting peace" in Northern Ireland. Also in 1993, the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ended with agreement on new global-trade regulations. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Defense ordered all 1.4 million men and women in uniform to be inoculated against anthrax. Also in 1997, 85 people were killed when a Tajik charter airliner crashed in the United Arab Emirates. In 2000, first lady and senator-elect Hillary Clinton signed an $8 million book deal to write a memoir of her years in the White House. In 2003, as Iraqi leaders urged that a war crime tribunal try Saddam Hussein, U.S. President George W. Bush said he favored "ultimate justice" and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the trial must meet international standards. In 2005, as many as 11 million Iraqis turned out to select their first permanent parliament since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 2006, Al Jazeera English, the world's first English-language news TV channel based in the Middle East, was launched in Doha, Qatar. In 2007, at the end of a two-week conference on climate change in Indonesia, delegates from 187 countries, including the United States, agreed to negotiate a new accord on global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008, the Illinois state legislature began impeachment proceedings against Gov. Rod Blagojevich, accused of trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Also in 2008, national records indicate that unemployment was a chief culprit in the rise of U.S. foreclosures, triggering 46 percent of all 90-day delinquencies in the first half of 2008. A thought for the day: the title of a poem by Stephane Mallarme is "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance." (c) UPI fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Small businesses stand to benefit from proposed health care bills - Sacramento Bee Posted: 15 Dec 2009 05:17 AM PST L.D. Schmidt is a working man who arrives, in sickness and in health, at his small midtown Sacramento electronics shop to repair audio equipment. Schmidt lacks health insurance, and hopes that the health care overhaul being debated in Congress will get him affordable coverage without driving up his costs of doing business. Schmidt's shop is among the tens of thousands of mom-and-pop firms scattered across America, enterprises whose proprietors often can't even afford health insurance for themselves, let alone their workers. "I just have to keep coming back to work, unless I get so sick and just can't get out of bed," said Schmidt, who operates Ray's Auto Stereo. His only employee, a 20-year-old who was kicked off his parents' health plan last year, is paid minimum wage and can't afford to buy his own health coverage. About three in 10 of the state's self-employed don't have health insurance, and nearly 43 percent of those working in the state's smallest firms – those that employ fewer than 10 people – are uninsured, according to the annual Health Care Almanac produced by the California HealthCare Foundation. Nearly two in five of the state's 7 million uninsured are either self-employed or work for some of California's smallest companies, the foundation reported. While large companies have the clout to negotiate lower premiums with insurers, individuals and small businesses aren't accorded the same deals. But pooled together under a proposed insurance exchange, this group would be better positioned to put pressure on insurers to provide lower prices, according to proponents of overhaul legislation. Part of the pressure would come from government, which would oversee the exchange. Both Senate and House versions of the bill would allow small businesses with fewer than 10 employees to write off as much as half of what they contribute to their workers' health premiums. That would help Joann Mizutani, who has been providing health insurance to her only employee despite running huge losses on her gift shop, Joann's Elegant Gifts, across from the state Capitol. "Profit is not always my bottom line," said Mizutani, who has run the business for 29 years with her husband's financial backing. "If I ever worked for a small business, I'd like to have insurance. I live by the golden rule – you do unto others what you want done unto you." When Monica Garcia, 38, began working at the shop 13 years ago, she was thrilled at the prospect of getting health coverage. "I couldn't believe it," she said. "I always tell her, because I know she's struggling, that she doesn't have to give me health insurance," Garcia said of her employer. "But then what's she going to do?" Mizutani asked. Garcia replied she would probably just go without health coverage. Many small-business owners such as Schmidt have yet to delve into the mind-numbing specifics of the health care proposals. They frame their views by relying on the broad sweeps used by partisans to shape the politically driven discussion. Schmidt doesn't know quite what to think. He needs affordable health care, but expresses ambivalence over new taxes the government would impose on businesses to help finance the largest expansion of government health care since the 1960s. Large business groups such as the U.S. and California chambers of commerce are lobbying hard against pending health care legislation. But the vast majority of small businesses would benefit from the proposals, according to health advocates. Most small businesses would be exempt from new payroll taxes and other potential penalties levied against larger firms that choose not to offer health coverage to their employees. At the same time, these small businesses could benefit from subsidies and the new exchange by allowing their uninsured workers to buy insurance from the exchange. "They're going to do better. Nobody can be turned down for insurance, and that's going to help any self-employed person. An exchange that levels the playing field will give small businesses the bargaining power enjoyed by big businesses," said John Arensmeyer, CEO of Small Business Majority, a think tank based in Sausalito. Call The Bee's Bobby Caina Calvan, (916) 321-1067. fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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