Category: issues

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama state capital, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.

After The Chronicle spent more than a week trying to verify Drew Cloud’s existence, the company that owns The Student Loan Report confirmed that Cloud was fake. “Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education,” wrote Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU. Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published.

“The answer, just to relieve any suspense, was no, monkeys can’t own copyrights or bring copyright infringement suits, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled Monday, upholding a lower court. That outcome was no surprise. What was unusual was that the appeals court chose to rule on the case at all and the criticism it leveled at PETA in the course of doing so.”

“The Philadelphia History Museum, the city’s institutional attic of art and artifacts previously known as the Atwater Kent museum, has entered into talks with Temple University about a possible merger or partnership, according to city and museum officials.”

It’s the first time since 1998 for a mass shift to the public domain of material protected under copyright. It’s also the beginning of a new annual tradition: For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.

“The sprawling 1.5-million-square-foot National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, designed by Dutch firm Mecanoo Architects, was recently completed in the southern port city of Kaohsiung … Slated for an October opening, the futuristic-looking mega space, called ‘Weiwuying’ for short, incorporates five performing spaces – including a 2,260-seat opera house, 2,000-seat concert hall (boasting a 9,085-pipe organ) and a 470-seat recital hall.”

This wasn’t a fast decision about the man who didn’t use anesthesia when he performed experimental surgeries on the women. “The removal of his 80-year-old statue comes after eight years of protests, activism and the local community collecting more than 26,000 signatures.”

Cuyahoga Arts and Culture CEO and executive director Karen Gahl-Mills has resigned, effective June 7, according to a press release sent this morning, April 18.  In a challenging atmosphere of funding cuts, the leader of one of the nation’s largest public funders of the arts became embattled on several fronts: first in an attempt to address racial inequity in grantmaking to individual artists, and subsequently by  choosing to  significantly reduce operating support to nonprofit organizations all at once, rather than gradually, in the hope of keeping grant amounts stable for a period of years despite a projected continual decline in cigarette tax revenue.

“For Saddam, the ruined city of Babylon had always held a special fascination. He ordered an ambitious reconstruction of the city’s walls, costing millions of dollars at the height of the Iran-Iraq War. … When archaeologists told him that ancient kings like Nebuchadnezzar had stamped their names on Babylon’s bricks, Saddam insisted that his own name be stamped on the modern bricks used in the reconstruction. … In 1981, Babylon was where celebrations took place to commemorate the first anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Iran, with officials using the slogan, Nebuchadnasar al-ams Saddam Hussein al-yawm (yesterday Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein).”