Canberra Free Centenary Loop Bus

Route 100 - Centenary Loop is a free bus around Canberra's major cultural institutions. It leaves from platform 10 in the city at the Sydney Building every 30 minutes and goes to the Australian War Memorial, National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, Questacon, National Library of Australia, Museum of Australian Democracy, National Archives of Australia, Parliament House, National Museum of Australia, and the National Film and Sound Archive. This is a pleasant trip around the lake. The service is provided for all of 2013 for the Canberra Centenary.

War Crimes and the Law

Greetings from the Australian National University where Efraim Zuroff, Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is speaking on "Bringing Nazi criminals to justice: the domestic and international law parameters". He will then be speaking 16 June in Melbourne and Perth.

Dr. Zuroff argued that the passage of time does not diminish a crime, nor should old age excuse it. He argued that the current generation owes it to the victims of past crimes. Also he argued that this acts as a strong deterrent against future such crimes.

Dr. Zuroff lastly argued that holocaust denial was a form of anti-Semitism. He argued that the Prague Declaration, equates Communism and Nazis, in an attempt to excuse acts carried out in former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, by conflating it with acts under communism.

Currently I am reading Kerry Greenwood's book Trick or Treat. This is one of Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series, featuring a female baker and a her detective boyfriend. In this book they investigate treasure looted from the Jews of Thessaloniki in World War Two.

The question these issues raise for me is what role the International Criminal Court (ICC) will play in preventing possible future such crimes. However, the USA is concerned their military will be prosecuted and Israel objects to offenses of deporting population in an occupied territory. So these countries are not supporting the court.

Public Lecture
Bringing Nazi criminals to justice: the domestic and international law parameters

Efraim Zuroff is recognised as the world’s leading expert on tracking and bringing to justice the last remaining Nazi war criminals.
Following in the footsteps of the late legendary Simon Wiesenthal, Zuroff has earned the title of "The Last Nazi Hunter".

His research in the 1980s led to the discovery of hundreds of Nazi war criminals who fled Europe to the United States, South America, Australia, Canada, Great Britain and elsewhere.

In his latest book - Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice –Zuroff details the many cases he has worked on and the methodology he uses to bring alleged Nazi warm criminals and their associates to justice, particularly focusing on the challenges faced with many key witnesses long since having died. ...

Prototype Bushmaster On Display in Canberra

The Australian War Memorial opened its Treloar Conservation and Storage Annex today to the public. This featured a recently removed from services Caribou aircraft, a V2 rocket on the original transporter trailer, and prototype B3 of the "Bushmaster" Infantry Mobility Vehicles (used in East Timor).

Vale Michele Huston

Michele Huston, Director of Web Publishing at the National Library of Australia, passed away 2 September 2010 (as reported by Tony Barry and on the Australian Library and Information Association website). While perhaps best known as the wife of Australian Internet pioneer Geoff Huston, Michele Huston was one of the largely unacknowledged pioneers of the Internet to Australia. In the 1990s she worked at The Australian National University to connect schools in Canberra. As well as provide a service for education, this introduced many public servants, MPs and other decision makers in Canberra to the Internet through their children.

"The Australian Capital Territory Education Information Network (ACTEIN) program is a local university initiative to introduce the Internet to primary and secondary schools in the Australian Capital Territory. The physical connectivity is based on low cost accessible technologies, and most schools use IP dial-up as their access to the Internet. The program's main direction is not the provision of Internet access itself, but in attempting to address the issue of how the Internet can be put to work in the classroom, consequently the ACTEIN Program has a strong emphasis on technical and training support to accompany the Internet access."

From: "Introducing the Internet into Australian Schools, A Case Study: The ACTEIN Program", Michele Huston, Outreach Officer, Centre for Networked Information and Publishing, Australian National University, presented at Internet Society INET'95: Conference.

Michele was awarded a BSc (hons) in Physics and Maths from The Australian National University in 1979. She worked as a Project Officer at the ANU, on projects such as the ANU's Institutional repository. She was Web Manager at the Australian War Memorial (while continuing to teach Website Construction to the computer science students at ANU), before joining the National Library of Australia as Director of Web Publishing, a position she held until her death on 2 September 2010.

An slide show from Michele on her work at the NLA, with accompanying audio:

"Who are the people around me and what are they doing? This is not usually a question that you'd expect a library catalogue to be able to answer but users are coming to libraries with new skills and different expectations. Skills that they have learned on sites such as Flickr, eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon where you can interact with other people who share your interests.

This presentation will explore a niche for libraries in a networked world by drawing on examples from successful websites."

From: "Enhancing catalogues with user input", Michele Huston, Director, Web Publishing, National Library of Australia, for "Web 2.0 and its potential for the library community", 27 November 2007, National Library of Australia (and audio).