National Archives Celebrates 75th Anniversary
| Washington 15 June 2009 |
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| Before the National Archives was founded, many governmental records were kept in poor conditions. |
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| A visitor to the National Archives examines the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution |
Every day, visitors fill the rotunda of the National Archives to get a glimpse of the documents that are the foundation of the United States government: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. But there is much more to the National Archives than just the so-called Charters of Freedom.
More than 9 billion records preserved
Since 1934 it has been responsible for all official governmental historical records: judicial, legislative and executive. Of course, not every government document is saved. Only one to three percent are deemed valuable enough to permanently archive. But, as Kurtz explains, that still adds up to more than nine billion records. While the paper records are vast, there are records in other formats as well including video, film, and digital.
"You have wikis and blogs, digital e-mail, all capturing government business," says Kurtz. He notes they present new challenges to the Archives. "Preserving them is not like having temperature- and humidity-control vaults for paper records, which will ensure the paper records last for hundreds of years. Digital media is much more fragile."
On the other hand, Kurtz says, the digital age has presented some opportunities for the National Archives, which can provide access to holdings to people who will never be able to come to the National Archives in person.
Basketball shoe and bathtub on display
The National Archives is celebrating its 75th anniversary with lectures and panel discussions, screenings of films, and an exhibit called "Big!," featuring some of its more unusual holdings.
"The original premise was to showcase some unique items that normally don't get displayed because of their size," says exhibits specialist Jennifer Johnson.
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| A replica of the "pond-like" bathtub created for President Taft |
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| When the exhibition, Big!, closes next January, Shaq's shoe will go to the George W. Bush presidential library. Presidential libraries are also part of the National Archives |
There are also more conventional records in the exhibit, illustrating big events and big ideas in American history, like the lunar landing and D-Day, the Normandy invasion that led to the Allied victory in World War Two.
Exhibits like "Big!" give visitors a glimpse of the vast holdings of the National Archives, but the stars of the collection remain the Charters of Freedom
Murphy's Law Rules Vegas Bachelor Party in 'The Hangover'
| Hollywood 22 June 2009 |
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It's a road trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas where best friends Stu and Phil along with future brother-in-law Alan plan to give Doug a rousing celebration just before he gets married.
It starts with the promise of fun and maybe even a bit of debauchery as they raise their glasses in a toast to the groom; but things are quite different the next morning. Their hotel suite looks like a tornado has ripped through it: broken furniture, torn curtains, holes in the wall and, for some reason, a chicken cackling and strutting about.
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| Justin Bartha,Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms in scene from The Hangover |
So now they have to retrace their steps, figure out what happened, find Doug and get him back home in time for the wedding, which is to take place that afternoon.
The ensemble cast of The Hangover features Justin Bartha as the misplaced groom and he says the comedy gets more and more outrageous as the friends learn about their wild-and-crazy night.
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| Justin Bartha as groom, Doug Billings in The Hangover |
Ed Helms plays Stu who is a dentist so when he wakes up with a tooth missing he knows strange things must have gone on.
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| Ed Helms as Stu Price in The Hangover |
Among those pieces: Stu, who has a fiancée back in Los Angeles, has somehow married a cheerful exotic dancer named Jade played by Heather Graham.
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| Heather Graham as Jade in The Hangover |
Bradley Cooper is Phil, the groom Doug's best friend and organizer of the bachelor party, which turns into a frantic mystery.
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| Bradley Cooper as Phil Wenneck in The Hangover |
Rounding out the quartet is Zach Galifanakis as the groom's quirky future brother-in-law. A veteran improvisational comic, Galifanakis says some of the funniest scenes were not originally in the script.
"The outline of the movie was a very good blueprint, but any comedy director wants you to improvise and we did improvise a lot," he says. "There were a lot of lines that were fine in the script but things change when you shoot so you kind of go with the flow."
The director is Todd Phillips, whose previous films include the hit Old School - another 'buddy' comedy - and he says it was important to make the real Las Vegas environment part of "The Hangover" story.
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| Director Todd Phillips on the set of the movie |
The Hangover also features a cameo by boxer Mike Tyson along with several prominent Las Vegas celebrities.
China Arrests Prominent Dissident on Subversion Charges
| Beijing 24 June 2009 |
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| Liu Xia, the wife of prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo, wipes away tears at a lawyers office in Beijing, 24 Jun 2009 |
Police took Liu Xiaobo away on December 8, on day before the public release of a manifesto - called Charter 08 - which called for sweeping reforms to China's rigid political system. He was among more than 300 Chinese intellectuals who signed Charter 08. The document called for a new constitution guaranteeing human rights, election of public officials, freedom of religion and expression and an end to the Communist Party's hold over the military, courts and government.
Liu helped draft and revised the document. His lawyer, Mo Shaoping, has said he believes police detained Liu a day ahead of the manifesto's release because they considered him a key organizer.
China's official Xinhua News Agency quotes a Beijing police statement as saying Liu is charged with agitation activities aimed at subverting the state and overthrowing the socialist system. The statement also accuses him of spreading rumors and defaming the government.
Fifty-three-year-old Liu is a former university professor. In his writings, he has called for civil rights and political reform.
In an interview with AP Television last July, Liu urged the Chinese government to provide a legitimate way for Chinese people to protest.
Liu says, if the government does not set up places to protest, then it will have to face the prospect of protests happening at any time, anywhere, without any control - especially in what he describes as sensitive areas. He says the government knows it will be bad for China's image to crack down violently on protests.
Liu had spent 20 months in jail for joining the 1989 student-led protests in Tiananmen Square. In the 1990's, he also spent three years in a labor camp and eight months under virtual house arrest.
US Lawmakers React to Obama Statement on Iran
| Capitol Hill 23 June 2009 |
After almost two weeks of nearly constant criticism from minority Republicans who said he wasn't speaking out strongly enough, President Obama received some praise from the Republican leader in the House of Representatives.
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| House Minority Leader John Boehner (r) and Republican Representative Mike Pence, 23 Jun 2009 |
"I think the president did step up his criticism of the Iranian regime," said John Boehner. "I congratulate him for that, and we need to keep up the pressure on them."
In a 405 to 1 vote last week, the House approved a compromise resolution largely crafted by Republicans condemning ongoing violence by the Iranian government and pro-government militias against demonstrators, and the suppression of independent electronic communications through interference with the Internet and cell phones.
Appearing Tuesday on the Public Broadcasting System's The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called President Obama's remarks strong. But Graham described as unpersuasive the president's continuing assertion that the U.S. must avoid being seen to be meddling in Iran so Iran's government will not use this as an excuse to intensify its crackdown on the opposition.
On the same broadcast, Democratic Senator John Kerry said the president has been absolutely correct in his statements about Iran, asserting that tough rhetoric against the Iranian government would be counterproductive.
In his remarks on Tuesday, President Obama paid tribute to Neda Agha Soltan, the young woman whose shooting death, recorded on a camera phone just after it occurred, was seen worldwide, calling it heartbreaking and fundamentally unjust.
The killing continued to reverberate in Congress. As the House Appropriations Committee voted to send a State Department and foreign aid funding bill to the full House of Representatives, Democrat Nita Lowey voiced congressional solidarity with demonstrators in Iran.
"While this bill is not related to the ongoing post-election events in Iran, we would be remiss to not express our solidarity with the protesters persuing electoral freedom in Tehran, consistent with our democratic values," said Nita Lowey.
Saying she fully supports President Obama's diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, Lowey supported an amendment to close a loophole in U.S. law regarding sanctions targeting Iran's energy sector.
The amendment would prevent the U.S. Export-Import Bank from entering into any deals with foreign companies that significantly contribute to Iran's refined petroleum resources, part of efforts to pressure Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program.
Speaking for the amendment, Republican Mark Kirk referred to the killing of Neda Agha Soltan and post-election events.
"I think it is very important that the U.S. taxpayer not subsidize a project which will help [President] Ahmadinejad out of his gasoline shortage problem," said Mark Kirk. "We saw this weekend the video of the death of Nada, a young girl on the streets of Tehran, as well as about a dozen others [and] reports even by the Governing Council of Iran that the votes in 50 Iranian cities were more than the number of people that lived in those cities."
In other Iran-related statements, Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said the Obama administration should order U.S. embassies around the world to rescind invitations for Iranian officials to attend July 4 Independence Day Celebrations.
Iranian attendance at the events, Ros-Lehtinen said, could be equated to fraternizing with the oppressors of people in Iran who yearn to live free.
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Tech-Savvy Protesters Battle Iranian Government in Cyberspace
| Washington 18 June 2009 |
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| Picture of Mousavi supporters in Tehran 17 Jun 2009 posted on photo-sharing site Twitpic by user 'madyar' via AFP. |
Iranians have seized the world's attention through gripping, first-hand people-to-people reporting. Surf the Internet, and you will find countless uploaded videos depicting defiance, as well as chaos and violence on the streets.
At the same time, messages disseminated through Web-based services like Twitter and appearing on social networks like Facebook have helped demonstrators coordinate activities, warn each other of danger, and keep the world informed on a minute-by-minute basis.
It is precisely the global outreach of ordinary Iranians that impresses Virginia-based social media entrepreneur and author Geoff Livingston.
"To see it happen in Iran and to see the global community embrace it and pick up on it and watch it as it happens - we have never seen anything like this before," he said.
With foreign journalists either forced to leave Iran or confined to their hotels, major news organizations have come to rely heavily on Iran's fledgling crop of citizen journalists.
"There are no reliable [official] sources right now in Iran," said VOA Persian News Network television anchor Hamideh Aramideh. "People are the reliable sources. They are not just one, two, three hundred. They are thousands."
Aramideh's Facebook page has added thousands of new Iranian contacts in recent days.
Iran's demographics help explain the country's post-election dynamic, according to Alex Vatanka, Senior Middle East Analyst for Jane's Information Group.
"It is a reflection of the youthfulness of the country," he said. "A country of 70 percent being under the age of 30. It is youthful, it is technologically-savvy, it is able to use the latest gadgets."
But Vatanka adds that the use of technology is not limited to Iranian demonstrators.
"Authorities also can use Facebook and other social networking services as their own as a way of rallying support," he said. "And, they can monitor what is being said in cyberspace. Monitor who is saying what."
Iran's authorities have limited options when it comes to blocking communication, according to blogger and author Daniel Drezner, who teaches international politics at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
"The obvious option is to try to disrupt the means of communication," he said. "But it is worth recognizing that, even if you shut down Twitter, word-of-mouth still works, just as it did over a century ago."
Drezner says Iran is only the latest country in which technology has facilitated a popular uprising.
"Democratic movements have undoubtedly benefited from this," he said. "We have had a whole series of 'color revolutions' where we have seen this kind of thing. That said, there are two caveats. The first is: it is a dynamic process where you do have governments over time learning how to thwart these things. For example, while you had an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the government in Belarus was very quick to crack down on any possibility of a social movement. The second [caveat] is that sometimes things happen through these technologies that would have happened anyway. It is simply that we would not have observed them otherwise."
Geoff Livingston says authoritarian governments stifle their citizen's ability to communicate at their own peril.
"That really puts them in a dangerous spot, because in order to prevent this [information sharing] from happening, they have to stunt their own technological development," he said. "Which means they have to stunt their own economic development and their own welfare. Do you become North Korea - walled off from the world with no technology? Or do you embrace this and start moving towards democracy?"
Web-based services have taken special measures in response to developments in Iran. Twitter delayed scheduled maintenance that would have disrupted the service. YouTube is relaxing restrictions to allow videos from Iran that contain scenes of violence, saying the images are "important" for the world to see.
Mobile Money Democratizes Uganda's Banking Sector
| Kampala 22 June 2009 |
A growing number of Ugandans are starting to utilize a service called "Mobile Money" to transfer millions of dollars via text message on their mobile phones. The phenomenon is democratizing banking in Uganda and changing the country's socioeconomic landscape.
Like the majority of Ugandans, Margaret Okello has never had a bank account. But thanks to an incident involving her mother's cow, the Kampala housewife recently learned that she could use her mobile phone to transfer cash.
Okello says the cow was crossing the road in the Bukwali village in Western Uganda when a motorcyclist crashed into it and damaged his bike. With zero savings, Okello says her mother was stuck in a serious legal predicament.
"According to the regulations the owner of the cow has to pay because the cows don't have right of way, so the owner of the cow has to pay," said Okello.
Moments after the accident, Okello visited a MTN service center in the capital, Kampala, one of 600 service centers the regional telecom giant operates in Uganda. There, an agent converted Okello's $20 into electronic funds. In less than 5 minutes, Okello's mother received a text message listing a special pin code which she used to retrieve the funds at a MTN service center in her village.
In east Africa, the mobile banking system was first introduced in Kenya a few years ago. Now, one out of every six Kenyans uses the service to transfer money. In the past two months, telecom providers such as MTN, Uganda Telecom, and Zain have cooperated with local banks to expand this service into Uganda.
In the case of MTN, Ugandans are using their phones to send allowances to their aging parents in outlying villages. Others use it to pay off their children's' school fees, and more than 20 percent of subscribers are using their mobile phones as a substitute for a savings account.
Uganda has only three million bank account holders, but close to 10 million mobile phone subscribers. Traditional banks are sparse in most parts of rural Uganda. MTN's Mobile Money head, Richard Mwami, says mobile phones have created a new "battleground" for banking.
"The power of the mobile phone [is] we have taken our financial services to people who before have not been exposed to these services. In fact, what we see happening is a lot of growth has been registered in the central part of the country," said Mwami.
Mwami says subscribers are sending an average of $35 each transfer, which he says means low-income people are using the service most. He attributes this to the minimum 40 cents MTN charges per transfer as compared to the $5 charged by traditional banks.
Although it is too soon to weigh the full economic impact of mobile money on rural Uganda, the ease of the service has inspired people like Kampala tour guide operator Timothy Sekanwagi to do something he would not have considered doing before.
Sekanwagi recently bought property in the Ugandan countryside. The businessman saved himself a 90-minute drive each way to the village and high fuel charges by using his mobile phone to transfer a payment to a local contractor.
"I bought a piece of land so I'm trying to put up a structure there so instead of going there I can just send the money, so it is very cheap and convenient," Sekanwagi said.
Mwami adds that this is only the start of an emerging money transfer culture that could significantly boost economic development in Uganda in the coming decade.
Mobile money transfers are popular in several other African countries as well, including South Africa and Nigeria. Telecom operator Zain is now piloting projects across the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Statistics indicate the developing world will use their mobiles to transfer more than $5 billion in the next three years. Some analysts are already dubbing mobile companies like Zain the "biggest bank in East Africa."
Robotic Mission Dives to Deepest Part of Ocean
| Washington, D.C. 19 June 2009 |
Prior to the test run of a new robotic vehicle last month, underwater research vehicles operated no deeper than 6,000 meters. Nereus changed that.
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| The newly developed hybrid ROV Nereus is launched from the RV Kilo Moana during a test cruise in 2007 off Hawaii |
"Nereus is a tool which we hope the scientific community will use to make important discoveries about that final 4,000 meters of the ocean," he says.
Bowen says the hybrid design allows Nereus to be operated remotely while tethered to its mother ship or to run as a free-swimming craft controlled by onboard computers.
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| Nereus's specialized manipulator arm samples sediment from the deepest part of the world's ocean - the Mariana Trench |
Using these maps, scientists onboard the surface ship direct Nereus in its tethered mode through a fiber-optic cable. Bowen explains this lighter cable replaces the steel reinforced copper wire cables used by traditional robotic systems.
"We are able then to go in with a mechanical arm and high-quality cameras and actually interact directly with the sea floor under human control."
Because the 40-kilometer-long tether is so light - it weighs less than a kilogram and is nearly as thin as a human hair - it does not snap under its own weight and can withstand the crushing pressure of the deep ocean. The cable uncoils from both ends - a canister onboard the robot and one attached to the surface vessel.
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| WHOI biologist Tim Shank (at right) and Patty Fryer (left), a geologist with the University of Hawaii, examine the samples retrieved from the Mariana Trench |
Nereus weighs 3 tons and is just over 4 meters long and 2 meters wide. It is powered by 4,000 lithium batteries. The craft carries ballast weights in its descent to 11,000 meters, diving at 20 to 30 meters a minute for eight hours. The weights, Bowen says, are dropped on the sea floor.
"It really neither sinks or floats and using its propulsion system, which is a series of small propellers, we can actually drive the vehicle around near the sea floor much in the same way you might think of a helicopter. And that driving is done by a pilot 7 miles [11 kilometers] away on the surface vessel through a joystick."
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| The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is located near the island of Guam in the west Pacific. It is the deepest abyss on Earth at 11,000 meters |
"Certainly, the role, for example, of the trench in the carbon cycle; how carbon is recycled within the [earth's] crust. Things such as earthquakes, various other chemical processes are an important part of coloring in a picture about the ocean that is critically important to our understanding of the global environment."
During its 10-hour dive to Challenger Deep, Nereus sent back high-quality video, gathered rocks and samples of deep ocean sediments and returned with microbes and small worms that live in extreme depths. But, Bowen says, Nereus has barely scratched the surface of the ocean floor, and he expects a research team to mount an expedition with Nereus within a year.
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