jen

The UK Independent has a story about teachers objecting to pre-teen girls reading magazines such as Cosmo Girl due to sexual content.

Ralph Surman, deputy headteacher of Cantrell primary school, Nottingham, said young children were being exposed to “a high level of continuous harm”.

Representatives of the magazines said they were aimed at 14-year-olds and above. They could not be responsible for policing who bought them.

An Anonymous Patron sent in this azcentral.com story about a huge transfer of materials from the National Archives to the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace.

With the stroke of President Bush’s pen, possibly as early as this month, archivists will begin the long and arduous task of preparing every last bit of Nixon materials – a cache that could fill 13 swimming pools – for shipment to the private Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif.

A new identity theft scam sends an email accusing the recipient of violating the PATRIOT Act and then threatens to revoke her FDIC Insurance.
CNN has the story.

The fraudulent message appears to be from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and asks people to verify their identity by clicking on a bogus Web link.

It goes on to claim that the person’s deposit insurance will be suspended until certain private information, such as a bank account number, is submitted.

First, there was the story about an Congressional investigation into fraud claims surrounding use of e-rate funds by the Chicago public school system.

With a public hearing looming in February, the probe is centering on approximately $5 million of equipment supplied by telecom carrier SBC to the Chicago school system that is still sitting in a warehouse.

On the next day, there’s another story about SBC returning almost $8 million in e-rate money.

An Alternet article by
Monte Paulsen of the Dragonfly Review of Books discussing the impact of publishers not using recycled paper.

Ninety-five percent of the paper on which U.S. books are printed is made from virgin fiber. That added up to almost a million tons of paper in 2001, according to the American Forest and Paper Association.

This shameful story brightened just a bit during 2003, when one edition of “Harry Potter and the Order Of the Phoenix” was released on recycled paper. British author J.K. Rowling asked that her bestselling novels be produced on recycled paper. Her American publisher, Scholastic Inc., ignored her request. (Apparently, Scholastic’s mission to “educate, entertain and motivate children” does not include enlightening them about real-world woodlands.) But Rowling’s Canadian publisher behaved like a wizard. Vancouver-based Raincoast Books released “Order of the Phoenix” on 100-percent post-consumer recycled paper.

Anonymous Patron writes “A man who says he sells books and magazines on the street was rescued after being trapped for two days under a mountain of reading material in his apartment.”
More from the
Toronto Star.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Officials at tiny Judson College, an evangelical Christian school in Elgin, hope a $7.5 million federal grant for a new “environmentally friendly” library and academic center will bring the institution recognition for energy-efficient architecture.

Judson President Jerry Cain believes the 80,000-square-foot building will set the standard for environmentally friendly buildings. “This will raise our profile and will position us as a leader in environmental architecture,” he said.

Fang-Face writes “The First Amendment Center has an article about banning six of George Carlin’s dirty words, and one substitution. In place of using the word XXXs (mammaries), the bill proposes to outlaw the anglo-saxon basic word for the anus instead. Either as a complete word or in a hyphenated or disjointed sequence. The language of the bill is here, including the specific words being banned by fiat. So we may yet see a world with Seven (Or More) Words You Cannot Say On Television.

Note to the hypersensitive: you are forewarned that the bill includes “bad” language. If you are easily offended, then don’t read that bill. It’s that simple.“

A NY Times story about the “Spoken Word” CD series from the British Library’s sound archives which features writers reading their books. Some of the writers recorded are J.R.R. Tolkien, Virginia Woolf, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

One of the great surprises is finding which writers actually do voices and which don’t. When A. A. Milne reads from “Winnie-the-Pooh,” his creations sound like Victorian gents — soothing, paternal Victorian gents reading a bedtime story, it’s true, but rather Victorian nonetheless.

Two sad articles about the state of libraries in Ghana.

From:allafrica.com
and: Ghanaweb

The MP for Hohoe South, Mr. Kosi Kedem has appealed to government and parliament to go to the rescue of public libraries whose state he described as “extremely alarming and an embarrassment to the country.”