Einan blog

Getty to return Dutch painting looted by Nazis

The Getty Museum has said it is returning a 17th century Dutch painting looted by the Nazis during World War II to the heirs of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.

Goudstikker fled the Netherlands just before the Nazis invaded the country in 1940, leaving behind a splendid art collection that included "Landscape with Cottage and Figures," painted around 1640 by Pieter Molijn.

"The Getty acquired the painting in good faith at auction in 1972, and has never exhibited the work," the museum said.

"Working in cooperation with representatives of the Goudstikker heirs, the Getty's research revealed that the painting was in Goudstikker's inventory at the time of the invasion in 1940, and that it was never restituted after World War II," it said.

"Based on its findings, the Getty concluded that the painting should be transferred to the heirs," it said.

Marei von Saher, Goudstikker's heir, has fought for years in the courts to recover the family's collection, which had been dispersed throughout the world.

"It is always encouraging to see an important cultural institution like the Getty Museum decide to do the right thing for Holocaust victims and their heirs," she said.

In mid-March, the Getty returned to Italy the "Venus di Morgantina," an archeological jewel, after a 30-year legal battle.

Founded by oil billionaire John Paul Getty, the Getty Museum boasts of being the world's richest art foundation, with assets valued in 2009 at 4.5 billion dollars.

Vacation Remix and Instant Inc. Partner to Empower Vacationers to Name Their Price

owned and operated Instant Inc., the leading supplier of business management and online solutions for the vacation rental industry, to enable vacationers to name the place and price of their vacation rentals.

Pawleys Island, SC (PRWEB) March 24, 2011

Vacation Remix has partnered with HomeAway, Inc.® owned and operated Instant Inc., the leading supplier of business management and online solutions for the vacation rental industry, to enable vacationers to name the place and price of their vacation rentals.

Vacation Remix works with vacation rental property managers willing to discount their rates 10-to-50 percent. All the vacationers have to do is ask, and all the property managers have to do is accept or counter the offer.

Brady Stump explains the value of Vacation Remix’s unconventional approach to the vacation rental industry is both property managers get more weeks booked and vacationers get great deals on their terms. While some might argue property managers are just getting a trade off of more weeks but lower rates, it is important to realize the time and money saved by having Vacation Remix market their properties on their behalf.

“As the management software choice for hundreds of vacation rental managers, Instant Software is an ideal partner,” says Vacation Remix’s cofounder Brady Stump. “It is a great way for us to offer some of the world’s most desirable vacation rental properties.”

“It takes some balancing to make giving great deals a win for everyone. The hidden value for property managers is our strategic marketing that helps our property managers focus less on marketing and more on taking care of customers,” says Brady Stump. “It is a fresh approach to vacation rentals, and it has been fun to watch property managers and vacationers get as excited about it as we are.”

Vacation Remix launched in January and continues to expand into new regions each month.

Contact:Brady Stump, cofounderVacation Remix843-602-2451brady(at)vacationremix(dot)com

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Brady Stumpbrady@vacationremix.com843-602-2451Email Information

Libya: Why Western Forces Selectively Police the World

and] beatings of protestors."

This ruthless use of force against unarmed civilians was carried out not by Muammar Gaddafi, but by King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, the ruler of Bahrain, and backed up by troops from Saudi Arabia. And yet even as Western warplanes prepared to launch air strikes on Libya to stop Gaddafi's aggression, the U.S. and its allies barely registered even verbal condemnations of the crackdown in Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. "We've urged the government and the opposition parties to engage in dialogue," said William Burns, the U.S. Under Secretary of State. Washington's unwillingness to intervene to stop a bloodbath in Bahrain has led skeptics to wonder why the Obama Administration has committed U.S. military power to do so in Libya. As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes, "War in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standard we set for defiant ones."

This line of argument has surfaced in nearly every debate about Western military intervention since the end of the Cold War. The British even have a term for it: whataboutery. If you are prepared to go to war to protect Libyan civilians from their government, then what about the persecuted in Bahrain? If countering tyranny is the West's objective, what about Myanmar, whose military rulers are still in power despite massacring thousands of unarmed protesters in 2007? Or Ivory Coast, where government-sponsored violence has forced more than 700,000 people from their homes? Why did the U.S. undertake military action to prevent genocide against Muslims in Bosnia in 1995 but stand by a decade later in Darfur? If we are willing to use military force to help topple a tyrant like Gaddafi, then what about Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il?

The appeal of whataboutery arguments is that, from a pure moral standpoint, they are impossible to refute: it's certainly not evident that the Libyan regime is worse than North Korea's. And yet the resort to whataboutery is also deeply cynical. Insisting on moral consistency as a prerequisite for military action is a prescription for American paralysis and isolationism - which happens to be the goal of many proponents of whataboutery, on both the right and left. If we're going to police the world selectively, they would argue, we'd be better off not policing it at all.

Thankfully, most of the world rejects the idea of issuing free passes to tyrants. Even so, every intervention involves contradictions and moral trade-offs. The suffering of the Libyan people isn't any more extreme than that endured by millions living elsewhere under equally repressive regimes. The Libyan rebels don't necessarily deserve close air support any more than the demonstrators in Bahrain do. But doing something in Libya has proved better than nothing. It has prevented Gaddafi's forces from launching a full-scale assault on rebel-held cities and given the opposition time to regroup. Valid questions remain about the scope, duration and ultimate objectives of the NATO mission in Libya. But Operation Odyssey Dawn has so far succeeded in saving untold numbers of Libyan lives, and at less cost to the U.S. and its allies than even conservative military estimates had predicted.

So should we go further? What about places like Bahrain or Yemen or even Syria, where autocratic regimes have also used deadly force against their own people? Why not intervene there as well? The answer is that foreign policy isn't one size fits all - and in each one of those cases, the military and strategic risks of intervention would outweigh the potential humanitarian benefits. Ultimately, our reasons for intervening in other people's conflicts have little to do with either national security or the "responsibility to protect" civilians from slaughter. The world intervenes in places like Libya, and not in others, not because of any high purpose but for the simple reason that it is feasible to do so.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. As the war in Iraq showed, a crusading foreign policy can be just as dangerous as an inconsistent one. And yet we shouldn't dismiss every charge of Western hypocrisy as mere whataboutery. For years, the U.S. condemned the antidemocratic abuses of our enemies in the Middle East (like Iran), while overlooking those committed by our ostensible allies (like Egypt). Such double standards did more harm than good to American prestige - which is why the Obama Administration should now distance itself from the region's autocrats and side more openly with those struggling against them. The democrats of Sana'a and Damascus don't need the U.S. to stage armed interventions on their behalf. But they do expect America's policies to reflect American values. What about that?

Ratnesar, a TIME contributing editor-at-large, is a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War. His column on global affairs appears every Monday on TIME.com.

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Q+A: What is going on at Japan's damaged nuclear reactor?

Japanese engineers are struggling to gain control of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, which was seriously damaged by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Two of the six reactors at the plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), are considered stable but the other four are volatile.

Following are some questions and answers about efforts to end the world's worst nuclear crisis since the 1986 Chernobyl accident:

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Workers are struggling to restart the cooling pumps in four reactors damaged by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami and later drenched from desperate hosing operations to keep the reactors cool.

The immediate challenge is to pump out radioactive water flooding the basements in reactors No.1, No.2 and No.3 and hampering the restoration of electricity that would enable workers to cool the reactors and the fuel pools.

The No.2 reactor has posed especially nasty risks, emitting high levels of radiation at more than 1,000 millisieverts an hour in both the water and air in the basement of the turbine building. That is the highest reading seen in the crisis and compares with a national safety standard of 250 millisieverts over a year.

In the No.1 reactor, workers have been able to start running a circulatory system, used to capture released steam, to begin to clear contaminated water. But after four days of pumping, they have yet to clear the basement. The same systems in reactors No.2 and No.3 are flooded, so they can not handle the contaminated water, and TEPCO has said it needs to start thinking out of the box to find alternatives.

HOW LONG MIGHT THIS TAKE?

Nobody knows. The most likely scenario is a long, drawn-out fight, with incremental progress interrupted by emergency cooling measures and spikes in radioactivity.

Once the pumps and the residual heat removal systems are running, it would take only a couple days to bring the reactors to a cold shutdown. But engineers are literally working in the dark in most cases. Lights have only recently gone on in the control room, but electrically powered monitors and gauges -- workers' eyes and ears inside the reactor -- are still off. Radiation readings outside the reactors are still taken via a moving car, because the monitoring posts are not powered. Temperature and pressure readings from backup systems are all that workers have to "see" what is going on in the reactors.

Workers remain hampered by broken pipes, debris, flooded equipment and a scarcity of replacement pumps. Work has also been interrupted by hosing operations to lower rising temperatures in the reactor cores and spent fuel pools and spikes in radioactivity, as well as an occasional fire and radiation injuries.

Some experts suspect damage to the containment structure around the No.2 reactor, and said it may take as long as a few months to bring that reactor to a cold shutdown.

WHAT ARE THE RISKS?

The main risk comes from the radiation that will continue to seep, or burst, out each time a pipe leaks or rising pressure forces workers to vent steam. Leaking water from within the nuclear pressure vessels could enter the soil and the ocean, while spikes in radiation could contaminate crops over a wide area.

The risk that the spent fuel pools could reach recriticality seems remote, as long as there are workers and firefighters willing to douse the reactors with water each time temperatures start to rise.

But some experts say there is a small, theoretical risk of a corium steam explosion, particularly in the No.1 reactor, which is the plant's oldest and which is believed to have a weak spot, should nuclear fuel melt through the bottom of the reactor and fall into a water pool below. That would result in a high temperature and a sudden release of a huge amount of hydrogen in the containment vessel.

Should that happen, it could disperse high levels of radiation up to 20 km (12 miles) around the site, making it impossible to bring the reactors to a cold shutdown without great sacrifice.

WILL THE SITE BECOME A NO-MAN'S LAND?

Most likely, yes. Even after a cold shutdown there is the issue of tonnes of nuclear waste sitting at the site of the nuclear reactors. Enclosing the reactors by injecting lead and encasing them in concrete would make it safe to work and live a few kilometers away from the site, but is not a long-term solution for the disposal of spent fuel, which will decay and emit fission fragments over several thousand years.

The spent nuclear fuel in Fukushima has been damaged by sea water, so recycling it is probably not an option, while transporting it elsewhere is unlikely given the opposition that proposal would bring.

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

Where Will the Tsunami Orphans Go?

Americans clamoring to adopt children of the Japan tsunami's victims will likely be disappointed. Tony Dokoupil on what happens to orphans in a country where adoption is virtually unheard of.

Days after the earth heaved and waves pummeled northern Japan, Western comment boards and blogs lit up over the fate of the tsunami's most vulnerable victims: the newly orphaned. "I want to take 1 or 2 of these kids [home] with me," wrote a commenter on The Imperfect Parent. "I'm rich and I can afford it," another person posted on Yahoo! Answers. A prospective parent on CNN.com gushed that their "little orphan baby" would be brought up "with lots of love!" Even formal organizations, from the Kyrgyzstan government to the National Association of Japanese Canadians, explored the idea of temporary shelters, adding to a now familiar chapter in stories of war and natural carnage.

"The motif is in place," says Karen Dubinsky, author of the book Babies Without Borders, a study of child-lift operations in the Americas. "Oh, a disaster. We know what to do: go get the babies."

While an exact count of Japan's tsunami orphans is not yet available, more than 25,000 people are dead or unaccounted for in the island nation, and local experts predict that the toll may rise as high as 100,000. That's more than 10 times the number of fatalities caused by the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995, which left hundreds of children parentless, and many fear that this month's disaster could prove magnitudes more devastating to domestic order. It struck during school hours, after all, when many children were in relatively safe structures--and separated from their parents.

Now hundreds, if not thousands, of unclaimed children await aid in temporary shelters along the country's ravaged coastline, where, according to a British media report, the usual crayon and pencil sketches of youth have skewed toward eerie and macabre images of an angry sea. To the discontent of their caretakers, some children stack Legos only to topple them and shout "tsunami!" This week, in response to the burgeoning orphan problem, Japan's Health, Welfare and Labor Ministry launched an official review, dispatching 400 case workers to count what the ministry fears could be a parentless population greater than from any recent domestic disaster.

Foreigners hoping to adopt one of these youngsters, however, shouldn't count on success. "Japan isn't Haiti," says Adam Pertman, director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, referring to the Caribbean earthquake of 2010, when more than a thousand orphans were sent to America. He might have added that Japan is also not India--which shipped nearly 500 kids off to the States after a tsunami in 2004--or, for that matter, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Romania, Russia, Guatemala, or any of the nations where so-called disaster adoptions have spiked at some point since World War II.

Only about 25,000 children are classified as orphans in the country of some 127 million people.

One difference is economic: Japan is a wealthy, modern country with the resources to shelter its needy. But perhaps the biggest reason is cultural. Japan is among the most adoption-averse nations on earth, with extended families usually stepping in as surrogate parents when there is need. Only about 25,000 children are classified as orphans in the country of some 127 million people, according to the Joint Council on International Children Services (JCICS), and of those, fewer than 500 a year are adopted by another Japanese family. International adoptions are even more rare, occurring less than 50 times a year, according to Japanese government data. "It's just not culturally popular," says Tom DiFilipo, the president of JCICS.

By contrast, the United States is twice as populous as Japan but produces 50 times as many orphans--almost two million overall in 2009, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. The turnover is also immense. More than a million U.S.-born kids are adopted and or added to the foster care rolls each year. Not so in Japan. Only around 10 registered adoption agencies serve the nation and few, if any, of those are bracing for a tsunami-related influx. "I believe we'll see very few [new] orphans," says Tazuru Ogawa, director of the Across Japan adoption agency near Tokyo, because "we consider orphans as those with no other family at all." The water and rubble were deadly, in other words, but no match for the whole family tree.

The Japanese government, for its part, hasn't ruled out anything, telling the The Daily Beast that there is as yet "no official government position on adoption or a summer program for the affected children." If needed, there are nearly 400 existing public orphanages, most with beds to spare and a track record of raising children to adulthood. For Westerners set on helping the recovery one adopted child at a time, such a fate may not sound ideal. But there is solace. Japan has not only the record system to find relatives, but the reverence for bloodlines to inspire those relatives to take kids in. For most of the Tohoku orphans, that means home is perhaps not so far away.

Tony Dokoupil is a staff writer and editor at Newsweek.

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