Category: issues

“The former Smithsonian inspector general who launched an audit of high-ranking officials and their business practices said yesterday that Secretary Lawrence M. Small tried to pressure her to drop the inquiry shortly after she announced it last year.”

“London, says the report, is becoming more attractive to companies because of the US’s stricter immigration policies. It also says the US regulatory framework is ‘a thicket of complicated rules’ and pinpoints the 2002 Sabanes-Oxley Act (which tightened up accounting practices in the States) and a litigious environment as further discouraging companies setting up in the US. The result of this is that hedge fund assets in the UK are growing at 63% annually, compared to just 13% in the US.”

Afraid that the high cost of college and crushing debt of school loans, “many colleges are rethinking their aid and loan policies. Just last week, Hamilton College, for example, announced that it was eliminating all merit scholarships and shifting the funds to need-based aid. Among the reasons Hamilton cited was a belief that demographics in the years ahead would require greater support for need-based financial aid.”

“The content industry was a big supporter of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Viacom is apparently less of a supporter today. It complains that YouTube has not done enough ‘to take reasonable precautions to deter the rampant infringement on its site.’ Instead, the Viacom argument goes, YouTube has shifted the burden of monitoring that infringement onto the victim of that infringement — namely, Viacom. But it wasn’t YouTube that engineered this shift. It was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

“A Tallahassee museum on Friday rejected a request by the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to remove an exhibit the group considers disrespectful of the Confederate flag. The group, which has 56 members locally and about 1,500 statewide, asked the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science to remove ‘The Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag’ by John Sims. The work depicts a Confederate battle flag being lynched from a 13-foot-high wooden gallows.”

Arts funding in Vermont is woefully inadequate says arts supporters. So it’s time for a bosst in the state arts budget. “According to the Arts Council, more than half of Vermont’s arts organizations have operated at a deficit for the past three years. During that time, the state’s general fund has increased by 30 percent while support to the Arts Council has increased just 3 percent.”

Major arts institutions in New York go to the City to protest cuts in their funding. The testified that “if not restored, the shortfall would necessitate cuts in education programs, security staff, or operating hours.”

President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act has been praised for making public schools more accountable for the quality of education they provide, but there’s no question that the act’s renewed focus on the basic building blocks of education has put the squeeze on subjects that aren’t reading or math-related. Even though NCLB designates the arts as one of five core learning areas, “schools are so concerned with making the grade in math and reading that they’ll pull resources away from the arts, physical education and foreign languages to make it happen.”

“As top private institutions grow richer, public universities have found themselves unable to compete on the resource front, and so the competitive edge enjoyed by private institutions has ultimately spilled into research and all that results (journal articles, grants and books).”

China and England are getting close-ups of one another’s culture. “The First Emperor exhibition may well be the biggest eye-opener London has ever seen, and it is just the tip of a momentous trip of mutual discovery that Britain and China launched together last week in Beijing. The end of that process cannot be foretold, but the beginning is nothing less than historic.”