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November 14, 2006

Links: Exiled Chinese poet; Lincoln Chafee: NYT op-ed; Toledo Blade: Coingate verdict; 'Paint' like Jackson Pollock

Looking for the Web 3.0 post? Here's the link.

Journal photos / Bob Thayer
Chinese exile Huang Xiang, a poet often compared to Whitman, reciting a poem last night at Brown University. His appearance was part of a weeklong series sponsored by Brown Amnesty International, Human Rights in China Awareness Week. Below, he describes a torture helmet being placed over his head. In America, Huang says during his lecture, "I feel the light dancing on my walls every day." He lives in Pittsburgh.

Huang Xiang stories:
Exiled Chinese poet has freedom to rage, in The Providence Journal today.

The right to write: City gives safe harbor to exiled Chinese poet and his work, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 16, 2004

Notes from a Chinese poet's Pittsburgh dream nest, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Oct. 23, 2005

Nine Poems By Huang Xiang

City of Asylum Pittsburgh "provides temporary sanctuary to creative writers under immediate threat of extreme persecution or death in their home countries," including Huang. It is one of five U.S. cities -- the others are Las Vegas, Ithaca, N.Y., Santa Fe, N.M. and, recently, Iowa City, Ia. -- in The North American Network of Cities of Asylum, founded by Russell Banks, Wole Soyinka and Salman Rushdie and other authors.

For those who missed this: Holding to the Center, Losing My Seat by Lincoln D. Chafee Sunday in the Times. Excerpt:

...Back in December 2000, after one of the closest elections in our nation’s history, Vice President-elect Dick Cheney was the guest at a weekly lunch meeting of a small group of centrist Republicans. Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and I were honored to have the opportunity to visit with him on the eve of a session of Congress in which, because of Republican defeats, the Senate would be evenly divided at 50-50.

As we sat in Senator Specter’s cozy hideaway office and discussed the coming session, I was startled to hear the vice president dismiss suggestions of compromise and instead emphasize an aggressively partisan agenda that included significant tax cuts, the abandonment of international agreements and a muscular, unilateral foreign policy.

I was incredulous. Instead of a new atmosphere of cooperation and civility which, after all, had been the promise of the Bush-Cheney campaign, we seemed ready to return to the poisonous partisanship that marked the Republican-Congress — Clinton White House years. ...

Noe verdict: Noe guilty of 29 felony counts; convictions include racketeering, theft, forgery. The Toledo Blade broke the story. Here's their report on the verdict:

Tom Noe, the once high-flying Republican financier who went from college dropout to millionaire coin dealer, was found guilty today of stealing money from the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation and using the cash to erase debts and buy and furnish million-dollar homes.

Noe was found guilty of 29 of 40 charges, including theft, corrupt activity, money laundering, forging records and tampering with documents. He was convicted on the chief charge that he engaged in a pattern of corruption in his management of Ohio's $50 million rare-coin fund investment with the bureau.

...With today's conviction, Noe's fall from grace is complete. Less than two years ago he was the toast of Columbus, a go-to Republican heavyweight who had snared respected appointments to prominent government boards.

In the end, after three weeks, 53 witnesses, and thousands of documents, jurors mostly agreed with the prosecutors' belief that Noe was a well-heeled crook who used his friends, family, and business associates to steal millions from the unorthodox $50 million investment in coin funds he managed on behalf of the bureau.

The money was showered on his three luxury homes and bought a boat and paid off hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Some of it was used to buy a hospitality tent at a golf tournament. None of it was spent on coins, prosecutors said....

Background:
The Tip That Toppled Tom Noe
• Part 1: Kidd's 'wrong choice' led to Noe's downfall
• Part 2: Allegation against Kidd came back to bite Noes

If Dilbert worked in news...: From John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro (N.C.) News-Record. The Editor's Log: How the newsroom works. Funny and true graphics compare management's view of news production with the staff's.

The Web jobs in the newsroom are different -- always on deadline, but the "presses roll" whenever when we finish making the page and put it up, so nobody's scowling about overtime for the delivery truck drivers.

Splatterware: "Paint" like Jackson Pollock. An online toy.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:00 AM | Permalink