Category: issues

The Canadian Library Association is wading into the debate about copyright with a warning to Ottawa not to forget the rights of consumers.

The guaranteed maximum price — revealed Friday by the center’s board — is $67 million higher than the previous estimate of $326 million in 2004.

“The case of Tariq Ramadan has become central to efforts by academic and civil liberties groups to challenge the denial of U.S. visas to foreign scholars. And on Thursday, a federal judge handed those groups a defeat by upholding the right of the government to deny a visa to Ramadan, a prominent Muslim scholar who has been unable to enter the United States to accept a position at the University of Notre Dame.”

National Endowment for the Arts would get $145 million, a 16 percent boost from last year. It would be the largest increase in the arts budget in 24 years.

“It seems extraordinary to me there could have been nearly 200 organisations that were worth funding this year, that aren’t next year. It looks like cutting for the sake of cutting. I don’t understand the rationale for it. We are very concerned that many organisations were given little or no forewarning and some have been cut by regional offices when they aren’t regional organisations. There seems to be no central policy.”

In New Orleans, historically valuable houses are being demolished. “In a city pummeled by government incompetence, the department’s intransigence has become surreal.”

“When 200 out of England’s 990 publicly funded arts organisations lose their public funding, the natural reflex is to cry foul.The real question is how best the Arts Council’s portfolio of support for the arts can be bravely refreshed, as it should be, without inflicting unacceptably arbitrary or destructive decisions on organisations or communities.”

“Visitors dropped to just over 4 million in the year to September, down from 5 million in its 2005-06 first year. Figures revealed in papers prepared for Legco, Hong Kong’s parliament, mean that the park has missed its target in both years of operation.”

Pankaj Ghemawat “found that the average level of globalization in investments, phone calls, tourism and immigration is just 10 percent. And some measures, like the international share of total Internet traffic, are actually decreasing. This calls into question the other common myth that even if the world isn’t quite flat today, it will be tomorrow.”

Is the ferment about Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” just Harry Potter vs. Fundamentalists redux, a clash that generates heat but no light? Probably not.