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]>