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This project consists in creating a virtual art theft within the Manchester Art Gallery. The user will play the role of a thief that had stolen an art masterpiece and is being interrogated by a police detective. During the interrogation the thief remembers the heist through several flashbacks allowing the player to experience the heist in first person.
Ton Cremers toncremers@gmail.com has invited you to join the Museum Security
Network group with this message:
Dear (former)Museum Security Network subscribers,
(APOLOGIES FOR POSSIBLE CROSS POSTING)
Following my recent decision to cease running the Museum Security Network, I
am pleased to inform you that I have this week passed the moderation of the
Museum Security Network Google Group to Dr Tom Flynn, a London-based art
historian, writer on museums and cultural heritage, and a long-time subscriber
to the previous list.
As a result, the list has been re-launched at http://groups.google.com/group/
museum_security_network and is now open for new members. Tom has plans to
develop the Museum Security Network and list over the coming weeks and months,
including launching a news digest and an associated website, and can be
contacted at tomflynn@btinternet.com.
I'm also happy to confirm that Jonathan Sazonoff has kindly agreed to continue
as the Museum Security Network's North American contributing editor.
YOU NEED TO RESUBSCRIBE IF YOU WANT TO JOIN THIS RESTART OF THE MUSEUM
SECURITY NETWORK MAILING LIST.
Ton Cremers
Here is the group's description:
Dedicated to all aspects of cultural property security and safety matters, and
to the collection and dissemination of information about incidents in cultural
property institutions. Founded 1996 by toncremers@museum-security.org
seeks a more comprehensive overview of the licit and illicit markets and their multiple interconnections. The service eschews attention to closed circuit television systems, fire blankets and other physical security technologies in favour of a clearer focus on the underlying commercial structures of the international art and antiquities markets. Please join.
Despite the morning's drama, life was back to normal at the famed café by early afternoon. Marcello Scofano, the assistant manager, who has worked there for 26 years, said the current owner appeared to be an upstanding businessman. "This has already been a bad year," Scofano said, citing the economic crisis' impact on tourism. "But I've seen good times and bad times here. We serve it all: espresso and cappuccino, dinner or snack, $1,000 bottles of wine and $40 bottles." But investigators are alleging that Scofano wasn't the only one keeping tab.
Here's what I discovered, when I booked in:
1, The room rate is at least 30% over that quoted in the guides—now 139 euros. This happens, of course. Not necessarily sinister. Though quite a jump in one year...a year of recession...especially, with swine flu, in the travel business...
2. I seemed to be the only guest. In peak season, on a Friday night, during the Plovdiv Folklore Festival. Other hotels seemed to be full or close to full. This was downright eerie, especially given the top billing Hebros is given by all the big-name guides. Even eerier was the fact that
3. There was nobody at the front desk. Nobody when I arrived, and nobody for six or seven hours of periodic checking. I did get checked in; once I rang the front door bell, a woman appeared from the restaurant outside and showed me to my room.
4. The check-in procedure was very strange. She did not ask for a name; she just took my passport and ushered me to a room, saying they had been expecting me. This was creepy to the max, and suggested they were not anticipating any other guests.
5. To make things worse, the woman who checked me in did not return my passport. She disappeared with it. This was especially troublesome because it is actually illegal to be on the streets of Bulgaria without some form of official ID. I was then trapped in the hotel, for some hours, in a strange city, with no services, no sources of information, and no apparent way of contacting hotel staff.
It is sheer speculation, but I know something of the hotel business, and have a guess at what has happened to the Hebros. The same thing has happened to many hotels even in Canada, where organized crime is much less of a problem than in the Balkans.
My hunch is that its great reputation—not just the hotel, but the restaurant--made it overwhelmingly attractive to local individuals lacking just that particular commodity. It may serve as a respectable front for laundering large sums of money the provenance of which might otherwise be awkward to explain. The restaurant, which I did not have the opportunity to sample, may well still be legit—harder to disguise that, since locals probably patronize it. But a hotel that reports itself as always full can claim a lot of revenue; so long as real guests do not too often foul up the accounting.
Along these lines, a report of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international body focused on anti-money laundering and combating terror finance, found that while financing any singular attack may be relatively inexpensive compared to the damage incurred, “maintaining a terrorist network, or a specific cell, to provide for recruitment, planning, and procurement between attacks represents a significant drain on resources. A significant infrastructure is required to sustain international terrorist networks and promote their goals over time.” Creating and maintaining such support and facilitation networks, FATF concluded, requires significant funds.
it was necessary to avoid a situation in which "the only way to find credit is by way of usury". He said there was a danger of "organised crime replacing the banking system". Confindustria is pressing for measures to ensure that Italian business gets continued access to credit.
Central bank figures show that the flow of loans to business has fallen drastically in the past 18 months. By May, the volume of credit made available to companies of all sizes had shrunk to less than a quarter of what it had been in December 2007.
Last week’s Archdruid Report post built on one of E.F. Schumacher’s more trenchant insights to propose a controversial way of making sense of modern economics. Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful, drew a distinction between primary goods produced by natural processes, and secondary goods produced by human labor, and pointed out that secondary goods can’t be produced at all unless you have the necessary primary goods on hand.
This is quite true, though it’s a point often missed by today’s economists. There is at least an equal difference, though, between either of these classes of goods and a third class produced neither by nature nor by labor. These are tertiary or, more descriptively, financial goods; they form the largest single class of goods in the world today, in terms of dollar value, and the markets in which they are bought and sold dominate the economies of the industrial nations. To call this unfortunate is a drastic understatement, because the biases imposed on our societies by the domination of financial goods are among the most potent forces dragging the world to ruin.
In ancient societies that I studied, for example the Roman Empire, the great problem that they faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo. Invest very high amounts in solving problems that don't yield a net positive return, but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.
