Records/Archives in the News r990408b There are 6 stories in this posting London Evening Standard 4/8/99 'Immigration service sinks under backlog' New York Times 4/8/99 Prosecutor Says Indictment of Austin Schools Will Help Deter Test Tampering Akron Beacon Journal 4/8/99 State audit will include county files Chicago Tribune 4/8/99 TRACING SCHOOL'S PAST TURNS INTO A LESSON IN PERSISTENCE, ARCHEOLOGY South China Post 4/8/99 Internet must be controlled, advise police AP 4/8/99 U.S. Asking China to Help Account for Americans Lost in Korean War ________________________________________________________________ London Evening Standard 4/8/99 'Immigration service sinks under backlog' by Martin Delgado <SNIP> Mountains of paperwork waiting to be dealt with by immigration officers are now so large that rats have been seen nibbling at stacks of files, it was claimed today. Problems with a new computer system have sentenced international business executives and foreign travellers to lengthy delays. The backlog of casework means some people are trapped in Britain because their travel documents cannot be located. Now the Home Office and its main computer supplier Siemens have authorised "any action that is required" to tackle the chaos, according to today's edition of Computer Weekly. The magazine says there are now more than 71,000 cases waiting to be dealt with and Stephen Boys Smith, head of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, has admitted in a memo that "despite careful planning, the roll-out (of new IT systems) has been a great deal more difficult than we had hoped". The immigration service has admitted that 22,000 foreign nationals are "trapped" in Britain for up to six months while waiting for their passport and visa applications to be sorted out. Under the original £77 million Private Finance Initiative contract, post and documents would be scanned into electronic files - but the work is up to 18 months behind schedule. The chaos has been described as "worse than a Third World country" by City solicitors acting for business clients. Mail was unanswered and no one responded to telephone calls, they said. Long queues build up outside the building each morning while inside, staff struggle to get through their work, using paper files. After complaints from MPs and business leaders, Home Secretary Jack Straw made an emergency visit to the headquarters at Lunar House, Croydon, in February to assess the scale of the problem. <SNIP> ______________________________________________________________ New York Times 4/8/99 Prosecutor Says Indictment of Austin Schools Will Help Deter Test Tampering By BARBARA WHITAKER <SNIP> HOUSTON -- The county attorney in Austin, Tex., said Wednesday that indictments against the city's school district and a top administrator for manipulating statewide assessment tests scores were a hard but necessary measure to prevent tampering. Ken Oden, the Travis County Attorney, said the indictments handed up by a grand jury on Tuesday were the first against a Texas school district. A nationwide school coalition said the charges were believed to be the first in the country against a major school district. "The reality is that as we rely more on standardized testing and standardized ratings for schools there is greater and greater pressure and emphasis on obtaining the best possible rating for your school and school district," Oden said. "That provides greater temptation to manipulate the data in a way to create the most favorable image for your school, your district or your state." In Austin, he said, district officials succumbed to that pressure last spring, when they scored the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test, which is used to rate the performance of both students and schools. The rankings provide a gauge for how schools are performing, and poor performance can be an embarrassment to a district, and a temptation to manipulate data, Oden said. In two separate 16-count indictments, a grand jury charged that the district and a deputy superintendent, Margaret Kay Psencik, were involved in altering government records. A third district employee, Ricky Arredondo, who Oden said worked in the district offices and actually changed the records, pleaded no contest to charges of altering government documents prior to his appearance before the grand jury. The indictments say changes were made in identification numbers on results from the spring 1998 Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test. Typically, Social Security numbers are used, but when those are not available, numbers are assigned. According to prosecutors, there was a one-week period when, if an identification number was changed, the test score was not recorded because it was viewed as invalid. The indictments say the I.D. numbers of 16 low-scoring students were changed so their scores would be invalidated. <SNIP> <SNIP> Roy Minton, the lawyer representing Ms. Psencik, said the deputy superintendent maintained that identification numbers were changed as a matter of course in recording data and said she had done nothing wrong. <SNIP> <SNIP> A conviction for tampering with governmental records could result in a fine of up to $160,000 to the school district and Psencik faces up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. <SNIP> ________________________________________________________________ Akron Beacon Journal 4/8/99 State audit will include county files Summit officials agree to cooperate with auditor; attorney general may drop lawsuit over V Group papers BY MARGARET NEWKIRK <SNIP> Almost a full year after launching a special audit of Summit County, state Auditor James Petro's investigators will be allowed to inspect county records firsthand. Under an agreement reached Tuesday in Summit County Common Pleas Court, state auditors can start going through county files this week. The agreement could settle a lawsuit by Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery, who sued the county last month in an effort to force it to comply with a state subpoena. Or it might not. According to county General Counsel Lewis Adkins, there will be no settlement with the state unless the state agrees that the county cooperated all along. The lawsuit against the county is one of three filed by Montgomery's office, as a special audit investigation of Summit County moves into its second year. Investigators have been frustrated by a lack of cooperation by county officials and contractors. <SNIP> <SNIP> The county record review ordered yesterday will begin today or tomorrow, according to Davey. The auditors will have until April 23 to review county files. The attorney general's office will meet with county officials for a settlement conference on May 5 to decide the future of the suit. Adkins said the county has always complied with the state auditor's subpoenas. ``The issue isn't access,'' said Adkins. ``They've always had access. The real issue will be the settlement agreement.'' Nobody will be settling anything, he said, unless the agreement ``accurately reflects the efforts this county has made in cooperating with this investigation.'' <SNIP> ________________________________________________________________ Chicago Tribune 4/8/99 TRACING SCHOOL'S PAST TURNS INTO A LESSON IN PERSISTENCE, ARCHEOLOGY By LeAnn Spencer, Tribune Staff Writer. Freelance writers Brian Cox and Janet Messenger contributed to this report. <SNIP> At first the idea seemed simple enough: Pull together some historical photos and documents in time for this spring's 75th anniversary celebration of the founding of Sunset Ridge School District 29. What the surprised organizers discovered, however, was that there was no historical record of events in the small village of Northfield. There were no archives at the school district, the town has no historical society and nothing was housed at the library. "As we began to make plans for the celebration, we realized that there was not a lot of recorded history. This turned into an opportunity to learn more about the community as well as our district's history," said Linda Vieth, assistant superintendent for District 29 and the principal of Middlefork School. As a result, parent volunteers spent months combing attics, writing letters and tracking down and interviewing former residents who retired and long since moved away. "There was just a shoe box--yes a shoe box--in the Village Hall with pictures from the '50s and '60s," said resident Mary Rhodes, who did most of the work. Luckily, Rhodes found some papers and notes from an old high school project she had done on Northfield's history that she was able to incorporate. The result is a book compiled by Rhodes that chronicles the lives of some of the area's first settlers and the leading citizens who were instrumental in seeing the tiny farm community get a school. The citizens also created a video that chronicles the past and are busily putting together a CD-ROM. That first school--described by one resident as a one-room shack--opened in 1892 on a quarter-acre of land donated by farmer John Brown. <SNIP> <SNIP> "It was like an archeological dig, finding all this stuff," Rhodes said, "in this world where everything is so high-tech, but then you peel back the layers and find that not that long ago we were just a small farm town." And, by the way, she added, the village will soon have its own official historical society, guaranteeing that the artifacts of the next 75 years won't be shelved in attics. <SNIP> ________________________________________________________________ South China Post 4/8/99 Internet must be controlled, advise police ASSOCIATED PRESS in Hanoi <SNIP> Police in Ho Chi Minh City have asked the central Government to give full control over Internet activities to the local people's committee. The newspaper Youth reported yesterday that in a briefing to former prime minister Vo Van Kiet on social order in the city on Tuesday, police said hostile forces abroad had abused the Internet to bring in documents with bad and reactionary content. The people's committee is composed of the police, the Department of Culture and the Department of Science and Technology. The paper quoted police as saying many state secrets have been leaked through the Internet. Critical pieces written by Vietnamese dissidents had also been posted, the police said. Police said some people stole subscribers' passwords to illegally log on, causing losses to the state and individuals. They proposed fines be meted out for those kinds of violations. The Government fears its inability to control the inflow of information through the Internet may threaten its one-party rule. It allowed the use of the Internet in December 1997 and so far the number of subscribers has reached nearly 30,000. <SNIP> __________________________________________________________________ AP 4/8/99 U.S. Asking China to Help Account for Americans Lost in Korean War <SNIP> WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Clinton administration wants China to open its Korean War-era records in search of clues to the fate of several missing Americans, including two pilots apparently killed when their unmarked plane was shot down on a CIA covert mission in Manchuria in November 1952. The administration also has requested information on three missing corporals -- Roger Dumas, William Glasser and Richard Desautels -- who were held in a Chinese-run POW camp in North Korea. Several repatriated American prisoners reported seeing the three alive and well at the close of the war in 1953. <SNIP> <SNIP> Pentagon officials have been pressing the Chinese communist government for more than a year to open its wartime records, but with little result. The People's Liberation Army has insisted that war losses are a closed issue, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has declared wartime records to be classified. Chinese soldiers intervened in the Korean War in October 1950 after the American-led U.N. force, propelled by the Marines' famous Inchon landing the month before, fought their way to the Yalu River on China's border. Later, the Chinese army ran the prisoner of war camps in North Korea, and it moved some American prisoners into China to be interrogated, according to declassified U.S. records. Defense Secretary William Cohen raised the matter in general terms when he visited Beijing in January 1998, but it has not moved higher on the administration's policy agenda because other matters such as alleged Chinese stealing of U.S. nuclear weapons secrets have complicated relations. <SNIP> PETER A. KURILECZ CRM, CA [log in to unmask] A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List! To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>