NEW YORK (AP) – A human rights group’s senior military analyst has been suspended after a pro-Israel blog reported that he collects Nazi memorabilia, an official said Tuesday.
Marc Garlasco is being suspended by Human Rights Watch “pending an investigation,” said Carroll Bogert, associate director of the New York-based organization. The suspension was first reported Monday by the New York Times.
“We do know he collects German and American World War II memorabilia, but we have questions as to whether we’ve learned everything we need to know,” Bogert said.
Garlasco’s collection was revealed last week on Mere Rhetoric, a pro-Israel blog. A blog posting said his hobby reflected an anti-Israel bias and showed he was “obsessed with the color and pageantry of Nazism.”
Human Rights Watch has no evidence that Garlasco’s hobby affected his analysis, and he “has never expressed any anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi statements,” Bogert said.
Human Rights Watch has released reports suggesting that Israel committed war crimes during its three-week military offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip last winter. Garlasco, a weapons expert for the group, has contributed to some of these reports.
Israel has accused Human Rights Watch of paying a disproportionate amount of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while playing down rights violations in Arab countries.
In an essay Friday on the liberal political Web site The Huffington Post, Garlasco described himself as a “military geek” whose hobby stemmed from his family history. He noted that his German grandfather was conscripted into the Nazi army.
“I’ve never hidden my hobby, because there’s nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren’t fascinated by military history,” he wrote. “Precisely because it’s so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things.”
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
At 4.5 billion years old, this anorthosite from the moon’s surface is approximately the same age as the moon itself. Made mostly of plagioclase feldspar, it is thought to be a sample of the Moon’s early feldspar crust. Collected by Apollo 16 near the Descartes Crater and currently on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
AMSTERDAM (AP) – Attention, countries of the world: Do you know where your moon rocks are?
The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands’ national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later.
Nearly 270 rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration. But according to experts and research by The Associated Press, the whereabouts of some of the small rocks are unknown.
“There is no doubt in my mind that many moon rocks are lost or stolen and now sitting in private collections,” said Joseph Gutheinz, a University of Arizona instructor and former U.S. government investigator who has made a project of tracking down the lunar treasures.
The Rijksmuseum, more noted as a repository for 17th century Dutch paintings, announced last month it had had its plum-sized “moon” rock tested, only to discover it was a piece of petrified wood, possibly from Arizona. The museum said it inherited the rock from the estate of a former prime minister.
The real Dutch moon rocks are in a natural history museum. But the misidentification raised questions about how well countries have safeguarded their presents from Washington.
Genuine moon rocks, while worthless in mineral terms, can fetch six-figure sums from black-market collectors.
Of 135 rocks from the Apollo 17 mission given away to nations or their leaders, only about 25 have been located by CollectSpace.com, a Web site for space history buffs that has long attempted to compile a list.
That should not be taken to mean the others are lost – just that the records kept at the time are far from complete.
The AP reviewed declassified correspondence between the State Department and U.S. embassies in 1973 and was able to locate ten additional Apollo 17 rocks – in Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Barbados, France, Poland, Norway, Costa Rica, Egypt and Nepal.
But the correspondence yielded a meager 30 leads, such as the name of the person who received them or the museum where they were to be initially displayed. Ecuador and Cyprus are among several that said they had never heard of the rocks. Five were handed to African dictators long since dead or deposed.
The outlook for tracking the estimated 134 Apollo 11 rocks is even bleaker. The locations of fewer than a dozen are known.
“NASA turned over the samples to the State Department to distribute,” said Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, a NASA historian, in an e-mailed response to questions. “We don’t have any records about when and to whom the rocks were given.”
“The Office of the Historian does not keep records of what became of the moon rocks, and to my knowledge, there is no one entity that does so,” e-mailed Tiffany Hamelin, the State Department historian.
That may seem surprising now, but in the early 1970s, few expected Apollo 17 would be the last mission to the moon. With the passage of time, the rocks’ value has skyrocketed.
NASA keeps most of the 382 kilograms (842 lbs) gathered by the Apollo missions locked away, giving small samples to researchers and lending a set of larger rocks for exhibitions.
Apollo 11 gift rocks typically weigh just 0.05 grams, scarcely more than a grain of rice. The Apollo 17 gift rocks weigh about 1.1 grams. Both are encased in plastic globes to protect them and ease viewing.
Each U.S. state got both sets of rocks, and Gutheinz said he and his students have accounted for nearly all the Apollo 17 rocks, though some are in storage and inaccessible. They have only just begun researching Apollo 11 rocks in the states. In one known legal sale of moon samples, in 1993, moon soil weighing 0.2 grams from an unmanned Russian probe was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $442,500.
Gutheinz, the former U.S. investigator, says ignorance about the rocks is an invitation to thieves, and he should know. In 1998, he was working for the NASA Office of the Inspector General in a sting operation to uncover fake rocks when he was offered the real Apollo 17 rock – the one given to Honduras – for $5 million.
The rock was recovered and eventually returned to Honduras, but not before a fight in Florida District Court that went down in legal annals as “United States vs. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch By Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque.”
The case is not unique.
Malta’s Apollo 17 rock was stolen in 2004. In Spain, the newspaper El Mundo this summer reported that the Apollo 17 rock given to the country’s former dictator, Francisco Franco, is missing.
Franco died in 1975. The paper quoted his grandson as denying the rock had been sold. He said his mother had lost it, but claimed it was the family’s personal possession, to sell if it wished.
Gutheinz says Romania’s Apollo 17 rock disappeared after the fall and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. According to Gutheinz and other reports, Pakistan’s Apollo 17 rock is missing; so is Nicaragua’s, since the Sandinistas came to power in 1979. Afghanistan’s Apollo 17 rock sat in Kabul’s national museum until it was ransacked in 1996.
In fact, the Netherlands is one of the few countries where the location of both the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 gift rocks is known. Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are others – though none has rocks from both missions on permanent public display and some have been kept in storage for decades.
The Amsterdam case appears to be not fraud but the result of poor vetting by the Rijksmuseum.
Spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder said the museum checked with NASA after receiving the rock in 1992 from the estate of the late Prime Minister Willem Drees. NASA told the museum, without seeing it, that it was “possible” it was a moon rock. But it weighed a whopping 89 grams (3.1 ounces). In addition, its gold-colored cardboard plaque does not describe it as a moon rock.
The U.S. ambassador gave Drees the rock during an Oct. 9, 1969 visit by the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Netherlands.
Drees’s grandson, also named Willem, told the AP his grandfather had been out of office for more than a decade and was nearly deaf and blind in 1969, though his mind was still sharp.
“My guess is that he did not hear well what was said,” said the grandson. “He may have formed his own idea about what it was.”
The family never thought to question the story before donating the rock, to which it had not attached great importance or monetary value. ___
AP researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this story from New York. Reporters Menelaos Hadjicostis in Cyprus, Marianela Jimenez in Costa Rica, Monika Scislowska in Poland, Gonzalo Solano in Ecuador, Andrew Whalen in Peru, Doug Mellgren in Norway, Paul Schemm in Egypt, and Binaj Gurubacharya in Nepal also contributed.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Actor/director Michael Imperioli in a picture taken on June 10, 2007. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
NEW YORK (AP) – Michael Imperioli, who played Tony Soprano’s nephew Christopher Moltisanti on the TV series The Sopranos, has taken on a new role: first-time film director.
His new movie, The Hungry Ghosts, premieres Sept. 15 in Manhattan.
The evening will be something of a cast reunion for actors from The Sopranos. Steve Schirripa and Sharon Angela star in Imperioli’s film, and Vince Curatola and Lorraine Bracco are expected to attend the screening. The hit HBO series ended in 2007.
Ticket sales for the screening at the Rubin Museum will benefit Tibetan refugees and elderly Buddhist monks led by the Dalai Lama.
Imperioli says Buddhism is an antidote to the torments of the movie’s characters, who float like ghosts through life, wrestling with drugs, alcohol and sex in search of something spiritual.
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HEMPSTEAD, Texas (AP) – Archaeologists are combing through a site about 50 miles northwest of Houston that nearly two centuries ago became Texas’ largest plantation and then a staging area for Gen. Sam Houston’s troops before the decisive Battle of San Jacinto.
The project that started this summer seeks to detail and preserve remains of Bernardo, a plantation established along the Brazos River in 1822 by Jared Ellison Groce II, one of the “Old Three Hundred” settlers of Stephen F. Austin’s colony who received land grants from Spain.
“If you read any of the early documents about the fight for Texas independence, this plantation site figured prominently in that,” said Jim Bruseth, director of the Texas Historical Commission’s archaeology division. “Anybody of any importance came through here.”
Archaeologists from the commission last week brought in supersensitive ground radar and magnetic detection devices that resemble high-tech baby strollers to scan the property and make electronic underground pictures of what now is a pasture used primarily for grazing horses and cattle.
The buildings at Bernardo have long disappeared. An old cistern – out of which a tree has grown for years – is the only visible evidence of long-ago generations.
Preliminary findings from the electronic tests show signs of what’s believed to be building foundations.
So far, the remote sensing work is indicating there’s some really good intact deposits,” Bruseth said.
The original structures included a 1 1/2-story log house known as the “Big House,” quarters for travelers, a detached kitchen and dairy, and a home for an on-site physician who may have been the first doctor in Texas. The Groce family also had a schoolhouse, stables and other structures. Slave quarters included multiple cabins, a kitchen and nursery, a cotton gin and blacksmith shop, and a home for their overseer.
Groce, a native Virginian, had moved to Georgia and then Alabama when Austin’s plans for a new colony in Texas – and maybe some angry creditors – persuaded him to relocate his family, livestock, 100 slaves and some 50 wagons to the east bank of the Brazos, just south of Hempstead in Waller County.
He arrived in January 1822 and selected a site that for centuries had been a river crossing, a kind of interstate roadway of the time. During low water periods, a sandstone ledge allowed people to walk across the river or cross easily on horseback.
Evidence of even prehistoric inhabitants dots the riverbank.
Greg Brown, who about nine years ago bought the 1,500-acre ranch that includes the plantation site, has a meatloaf-size tooth from a woolly mammoth – one of two he’s found along the river.
“I think the interest in Texas history is important for everybody, and if we find something here significant that contributes to that – and we know there are some historical things that happened here – I think it’s very important to citizens of Texas and historians of Texas,” said Brown, publisher of Cowboys & Indians, a magazine about the American West, and owner of a Houston television station.
“This is where plantation history began in Texas,” said Light Cummins, the state historian. “This is the first major plantation and, in number of slaves, remains the largest plantation in the Republic of Texas.”
It also became the last major cotton plantation established in the South and marked the old planting South’s farthest expansion to the West, he said.
“In terms of early history of Texas, this is where the South became the West,” Cummins said.
Bernardo is credited as the site of the first cotton production in Texas, and for historians is significant for its role in the battle that gave Texas independence from Mexico.
By April 1836, Groce had turned over day-to-day running of Bernardo to his son, Leonard, who allowed Houston to camp with his army in the days preceding the battle just outside the city that now bears his name.
Bernardo also was home to some refugees of what became known as the Runaway Scrape, colonists who fled after the Mexican army led by Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna prevailed in the siege at the Alamo in San Antonio and then marched east, setting up the pivotal San Jacinto battle.
According to the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas, while Houston was at Bernardo, he took possession of the Twin Sisters, a pair of cannons – made in Cincinnati and paid for by Ohioans sympathetic to the Texans’ cause – used at San Jacinto. It was the only artillery in Houston’s army.
Bernardo was inhabited through the end of the Civil War. In 1866, the main building was dismantled and the timbers were used to build another home elsewhere.
“From an archaeological standpoint, that’s wonderful,” Bruseth said, explaining that abandonment of the site makes identifying artifacts easier. “What we have here is like a time capsule. Everything is going to be related to the Groce plantation Bernardo.”
Once the electronic scanning is completed, other researchers headed by the nonprofit Houston-based Community Archaeology Research Institute will begin painstaking digging based on the electronic maps. Depending on what’s found, Bruseth speculated the dig could go on for years.
Researchers also have maps drawn around 1930 by Sarah Ann Groce Berlet based on information she remembered from her father, who was Leonard Groce’s son. Her great-grandfather, plantation founder Jared Groce, died in late 1836. Originally buried on the property, his remains and those of other family members later were removed to a cemetery in nearby Hempstead when ownership of the place changed hands.
But the property still includes a cemetery with tombstones marking deaths in the 1840s, making them among the oldest identified gravesites in Texas.
“The artifacts of significance, I certainly don’t want to keep them in boxes,” said Brown, who legally would own whatever is found. “Anything they think is suitable for the public to see, we probably can make a deal with a museum. We certainly want people interested in this type of artifacts to view them somewhere where it’s appropriate.”
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Café des Artistes. Wikimedia Commons photo taken Oct. 4, 2008 by participant/team Team Boerum as part of the Commons:Wikis Take Manhattan project.
NEW YORK (AP and ACNI) – The owners have closed Manhattan’s Café des Artistes, citing the economy and a union lawsuit.
Jenifer Lang, whose husband, George, has owned the French restaurant since 1975, calls it “a death in the family.”
Bill Granfield, president of Local 100 of Unite Here, said the restaurant – which he described as “great” – had fallen behind on its payments for medical insurance and welfare funds.
The Café des Artistes was located in the lobby of Hotel des Artistes, at 1 W. 67th Street. The part-Gothic, part-Tudor-Revival co-op building designed by George Mort Pollard was opened as artists’ studios in 1916. The restaurant opened a year later.
It was a popular spot for many celebrities because of its privately secluded yet hip atmosphere.
The restaurant’s famous murals were the work of Howard Chandler Christy. There were six panels of wood nymphs – the first of which was completed in 1934. Other Christy works on display included paintings such as The Parrot Girl, The Swing Girl, Ponce De Leon, Fall, Spring, and the Fountain of Youth. Among the 36 nudes was a painting of a man possibly modeled after the actor Buster Crabbe.
In the 1960s, a dispute arose between the outgoing tenant and the landlord over who had rights to the murals. Under common law, assuming the parties had not agreed otherwise, fixtures, i.e., accessions that had inured to the realty so that their removal would cause material harm to the freehold, would become property of the landlord upon the termination of the lease.
The parties settled the dispute, each presumably unwilling to run the risk of receiving nothing because of an adverse judgment. In any case, per the settlement terms, the tenant was allowed to take and keep several of the murals, but the majority of the murals remained in the restaurant, and the landlord replaced with mirrors those sections that had housed artworks the tenant took.
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Information from: The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com. Auction Central News contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
SARANAC, Mich. (AP) – A golf course groundskeeper recently stumbled onto something unexpected on the greens: A tooth from a 10,000-year-old mammoth.
Groundskeeper Patrick Walker found the 10-pound tooth Tuesday when he was on the greens about 30 miles east of Grand Rapids at Morrison Lake Country Club.
The recent high school graduate tells The Grand Rapids Press he knew the tooth exposed by recent rains was from an extinct elephant because he paid attention in his science classes.
Research assistant Scott Beld from the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology visited the course and confirmed that Walker’s find was a mammoth tooth.
He also visited the site the tooth was found and discovered bones and a portion of a tusk – fossils that will remain in place pending further study.
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Information from: The Grand Rapids Press, http://www.mlive.com/grpress
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CHICAGO – The International Society of Appraisers, based in Chicago, will offer a six-day course titled “Appraisal of Fine Art” from Sept. 10-15at the Hilton Garden Inn Chicago Downtown. Geared for the professional appraiser and the advanced soon-to be-appraiser, the course, which is credited for ISA members, will be taught by Cathy Peters, ISA. Peters is a professional appraiser and is certified in Fine Arts Appraisal with a background in history and art history.
This wide-ranging and in-depth course will emphasize the primary categories of fine art frequently encountered by appraisers and dealers, such as paintings, sculpture, works on paper, frames, photography, animation art, Russian icons and Spanish Colonial art. The major areas of focus will be art history, looking at artworks properly, identifying and researching fine-art works, properly describing artworks, correctly employing specific vocabulary, and art conservation.
The course will encompass required pre-course reading, and in addition to the classroom instruction, will include a written assignment and a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago to provide students with close exposure to the property categories being studied. The course will conclude with a written examination on the afternoon of the last class day. Classes will be conducted from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Thursday Sept. 10 through Monday, Sept. 14. The closing session on Tuesday, Sept. 15 will conclude at 4:30 p.m.
Enrollment is available to all appraisers and those interested in becoming appraisers. The course provides 45 ISA Professional Development Credits that may transferable to other appraisal organizations. Appraisal of Fine Art is being offered only once this year, and class size is limited, so early registration is encouraged.
Cost of the course is $1,200 for ISA members and $1,470 for non-members. A group discount rate is available for accommodations at the Hilton Garden Inn Chicago Downtown.
Registration deadline for the course is September 7. For more information, call the ISA office main office at 312-891-6778.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – State Auditor and Inspector Steve Burrage has found no wrongdoing in connection with an undeposited $71,185 check found in the desk of a former Oklahoma County commissioner’s chief deputy.
The check was from auctioneer Mike Graham of Marlow for the proceeds of a District 2 surplus property auction in 2007. It apparently was never deposited and sat for nearly two years in the desk of Jim Marshall, the former deputy of ex-Commissioner Brent Rinehart.
Burrage released a special audit report Wednesday that outlines his findings. The audit found no collusion between the auction company and Rinehart. However, it recommends the county implement procedures to make sure payments are deposited in a timely manner.
The audit says the company issued a second check that was deposited.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
1950 photo of Georgia O’Keeffe by Carl Van Vechten. Library of Congress photo.SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) – The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and an Albuquerque school named after the artist have patched up their differences over the use of her name.
Museum officials had e-mailed Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School with concerns about possible trademark infringement, but the matter was resolved at a meeting with the school principal.
“The museum does not object to the elementary school’s use of Georgia O’Keeffe’s name, nor do we object to the selling of T-shirts that feature the school’s name for fundraising purposes,” interim director Carl Brown said in a statement Monday.
The statement said Brown had conveyed the museum’s “regret over the misinterpretation of issues” in the correspondence with the school.
Ryan Stark, a spokesman for the museum, said Tuesday officials had no comment beyond the statement.
It said the museum was “pleased and proud” that the school is named after O’Keeffe and praised its academic record and accomplishments.
“They were just very kind and said, ‘Let’s work together and make it a win-win situation,'” Principal Lucinda Sanchez said of the July 31 meeting.
The school and museum will work together on art projects for students, she said.
“I just think, especially for our kids, that they need to see adults collaborate and come to some solutions,” she said.
Sanchez said museum officials made it clear the school does not need permission to put the school’s name on items given to students or pay a fee when such items are sold.
The principal and PTA president had been so alarmed by the apparent flap that they raised the possibility of changing the school’s name.
The school was named after the artist when it opened in 1988. One of the foremost American painters, O’Keeffe lived for 40 years in northern New Mexico. She died in Santa Fe in 1986.
The school has been operating in portable buildings, and permanent facilities are being built. Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
A replica of Copenhagen’s original Little Mermaid statue shown here will remain in Michigan, now that a copyright challenge has been dropped.
GREENVILLE, Michigan (AP) – A replica of Copenhagen’s famed “Little Mermaid” statue appears safe in a western Michigan community after a transatlantic copyright claim was dropped.
The Daily News reports the Artists Rights Society in New York last week notified the government of Greenville that the estate of Edvard Eriksen, who sculpted the original, has dropped its claim.
Eriksen’s estate wanted $3,800 for use of the duplicate statue, which is about 30 inches (76 centimeters) tall. The original in Copenhagen stands 5 feet tall and is one of Denmark’s biggest tourist attractions.
City Manager George Bosanic says he wants to thank any “Danish rat” who may have informed on the city’s statue because of all the publicity the case garnered for Greenville.
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Information from: The Daily News, http://www.thedailynews.cc/
