The Leddy Library at the University of Windsor has received a donation of nearly 40 years of the local French-language newspaper Le Rempart, marking a significant step towards preserving and making accessible the cultural and historical records of Southwestern Ontario’s francophone community. 

publication makes it especially valuable, as it tracks the unfolding history of the community it serves during decades of major social and cultural change.”

You can read more in an article at: https://tinyurl.com/5xwm56sv.

The following is announcement written by the Colorado Supreme Court and Colorado Court of Appeals:

Published opinions issued by the Colorado Supreme Court and Colorado Court of Appeals dating to 1864 are now easily available free of charge through a new website.

The Judicial Department, through a competitive bidding process, hired a vendor in 2022 to comply with the terms of House Bill 22-1091. The bill called for the Judicial Department to build a website to allow public access to all Supreme Court opinions and all published opinions of the Court of Appeals, or those opinions selected by that court as setting precedent in case law. Later this year, all Court of Appeals unpublished opinions will be added to the site, https://research.coloradojudicial.gov/.

“This new website, offering free and easy access to every opinion by both of Colorado’s appellate courts, provides anybody with important information as they make decisions about their own legal matters or simply seek to study the law,” said Supreme Court Chief Justice Brian D. Boatright. “We were happy to work with the sponsors of this important legislation to make this valuable service available.”

Chief Justice Boatright also said he was pleased with the choice of the bill’s short title: the “Justice Gregory Hobbs Public Access to Case Law Act” to honor the memory of the former Colorado Supreme Court justice who was a passionate advocate for improving Coloradans’ access to justice through the courts.

The website will be updated within a day each time new opinions are issued: Mondays for the Supreme Court and Thursdays for the Court of Appeals.

Unesco has published a list of 343 cultural sites verified to have suffered damage since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

The list includes 31 museums, along with 127 religious sites, 151 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 19 monuments, 14 libraries and one archive.

The list has grown by nearly 100 since Unesco published a previous assessment in spring last year. 

The damage is worse in regions that have seen the heaviest fighting; the Donetsk region, on the frontline of the war, has suffered the most damage to its cultural sites, with 88 listed, following by the Kharkiv region with 56 and the Odesa region with 49.  

The country's capital Kyiv and its surrounding region have also suffered significant damage, with 39 sites listed, as has the Luhansk region, with 34 sites listed.

Among the museums and galleries on the list are the Memorial House-Museum and Estate of Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi in the Chernihiv region, the Ivankiv Museum and the Kyiv Art Gallery in the Kyiv region, as well as Kharkiv Art Museum and Odesa's art, maritime, archaeological and literary museums.

The list does not detail the extent of damage to each site; media reports indicate that many have suffered extensive damage, such as Odesa Fine Arts Museum, which was hit by a missile strike last November, while a number have been completely destroyed.

Unesco carries out preliminary damage assessment for cultural properties by cross-checking reported incidents with multiple credible sources. The international body says it is also working with partners organisations to develop a mechanism for "independent coordinated assessment of data in Ukraine, including satellite image analysis". 

The cost of rebuilding Ukraine’s culture and tourism sectors is estimated at $9bn, up from a projected $6bn last year. Unesco has pledged $10m towards the eventual rehabilitation of the country's cultural sector.

You can read more in an article written by Geraldine Kendall Adams and published in the museumsassociation.org web site at: https://tinyurl.com/mwv8fpt6.

Here is an article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I believe it is important for everyone to recognize the need for online privacy. I consider online privacy to be a basic human right worldwide:

The backlash against the encryption-busting Online Safety Bill continues to grow, suggesting the United Kingdom could soon face a looming exodus of secure messaging apps.

First drafted in May 2021, the Online Safety Bill would allow the U.K. government to compel backdoor access to any end-to-end encryption system. While the government claims the complex legislation would make the internet safer by requiring social media giants to remove illegal and harmful content online, such as revenge porn and hate speech, the bill has been met with widespread criticism from tech giants, security experts and privacy advocates.

The criticism largely centers around an amendment to the bill that would allow Ofcom, the U.K.’s communications regulator, to require that tech giants scan for child sex abuse material (CSAM) in end-to-end encrypted messages. One more privacy-minded way of doing this is through the use of client-side scanning, where images are inspected on a user’s device before being encrypted.

Apple — which attempted to introduce a similar feature in iMessage in 2021 before reversing its decision — on Tuesday became the latest tech giant to speak out against the proposed legislation. In a statement given to the BBC, the iPhone maker called for the bill to be amended to offer protections for end-to-end encryption.

“End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats,” Apple’s statement said. “It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk. Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all.”

Messages sent between two iPhones are always end-to-end encrypted, which means no one else, including Apple, can read them.

It’s not clear whether Apple would comply with the bill’s requirement to weaken end-to-end encryption, and the tech giant did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Companies that fail to abide by the bill’s requirements could face hefty fines of up to 10% of global turnover and the threat of prison time for law-breaking senior execs under recently expanded criminal liability.

Apple’s warning comes after other end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, including Signal and Meta-owned WhatsApp, spoke out against the upcoming Online Safety Bill.

Despite mounting backlash, the Online Safety Bill is expected to pass into law this summer.

You can read more in an article by Carly Page published in the TechCrunch web site at: https://tinyurl.com/3f2ctdsc.

Are you old enough to remember daytime TV being pre-empted for the Senate Watergate Committee hearings? Or young enough to wonder why every scandal seems to end in “-gate”?

The University Libraries’ new digital-only exhibition, “A Southern View of Watergate: Tar Heels’ Impact on a Nationwide Scandal,” appeals to both. It provides a valuable record of events from the 1970s and a resource for today’s discussion about presidential immunity.

The digitized collection became available online March 1. On that day 50 years ago, a grand jury indicted seven aides and advisers to then-President Richard Nixon and named the president as an unindicted co-conspirator. The exhibit spotlights key documents that all came to be housed in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library: two Nixon subpoenas, Nixon’s written refusal to comply and a copy of the president’s infamous “enemies list.”

Many point to the Watergate scandal as the beginning of American distrust in public institutions. That makes the preservation of artifacts related to the scandal particularly relevant.

“Archivists are always there in the background saying primary sources are how we’re going to get at the truth,” said Biff Hollingsworth, collecting and outreach archivist for the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library.

The Watergate scandal began with the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building. The burglary’s coverup by the Nixon administration led to a Senate investigation and charges of obstruction of justice. With impeachment looming in 1974, Nixon became the only U.S. president to resign from office.

Over the years, UNC-Chapel Hill acquired what Hollingsworth called several “national treasures” related to the scandal. They were among the papers donated by Tar Heels who were also key Watergate investigation figures, Sen. Sam Ervin ’17, chair of the Watergate Committee, and Rufus Edmisten ’63, Ervin’s deputy chief counsel. The archive also includes the personal diary of the hearings and other papers from journalist and author Jim Reston ’63, whose book “The Conviction of Richard Nixon” was the basis of the play and movie “Frost/Nixon.”

You can read more in an article by Susan Hudson  available at: https://www.unc.edu/posts/2024/03/04/library-develops-all-digital-watergate-exhibit/ 

Taylor Swift and iconic American poet, Emily Dickinson, are distant cousins.

According to new data from Ancestry.com released Monday, "The Tortured Poets Department" singer and Dickinson are sixth cousins, three times removed. With family trees, "removed" means you and a cousin are one generation higher or lower. So three times removed means three generations apart.

"The remarkable connection between Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson is just one example of the incredible things you can discover when you explore your past," Jennifer Utley, the director of research for Ancestry, said in a press release Monday. "Even if we don't know it, our pasts can influence our present."

The for-profit American genealogy company used its vast records to find that Swift and Dickinson are both descendants of Jonathan Gillette, a 17th century immigrant and early settler of Windsor, Connecticut (Swift's ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson's sixth great-grandfather).

Here is an article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it is important and I suspect it will be of interest to many readers of this newsletter.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Thursday announced the creation of Fact-checking PA-related Election Claims​, a new website to provide voters with accurate election information and curb the spread of misinformation and disinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election in November.

Voters can search the website for nonpartisan information on upcoming elections, election security, state voting systems, post-election audits, as well as fact-checked claims about previous elections. 

“Pennsylvania is the birthplace of American democracy, and we are working to continue defending Pennsylvanians’ fundamental freedoms and ensure we have a free, fair, safe, secure election this November,” Shapiro said in a statement.

You can read more in an article by Sophia Fox-Sowell  published in the statescoop.com web site at: https://statescoop.com/pennsylvania-fact-checking-website-2024-election/. 

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

Today's lifestyles often mean that families are separated by hundreds of miles, if not thousands of miles. Grandparents and grandchildren may live in different parts of the country or even different parts of the world. The U.S. Department of State estimates 6.3 million Americans live abroad, and more than 65 million travel overseas each year. Indeed, many people travel frequently for business or pleasure, resulting in them being separated for days, weeks, or even months at a time from family members. Yet today's technology allows distant parents and grandparents to read their children or grandchildren bedtime stories, to draw with them, and to be with them—virtually.

For instance, I spend winters about 1,200 miles from my grandchildren, and yet I video conference with them frequently. A few years ago, I did the same while I was in Singapore, about 10,000 miles from the grandchildren. Doing so is easy and free. Well, you do have to have an Internet connection and some hardware that you probably already own. I guess that it is not free technically but is available "at no extra charge," using equipment that most of us already possess. Add in a bit of free software and you, too, can be (virtually) with your loved ones daily.

The following is a list of applications that will allow you talk with, and even see, anyone else in the world who has a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Many of these services are hardware agnostic. That is, Windows and Macintosh computers and Android tablets and phones and Apple iPhones and iPads may all communicate with each other with no issues at all.

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article beginning at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/13323437.

MyHeritage is announcing new services hand-over-fist at this week’s RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City. Here’s the latest:

We’re delighted to announce the release of OldNews.com, an innovative website for historical newspapers, by MyHeritage. OldNews.com enables genealogists, researchers, and history enthusiasts to search, save, and share articles about people and events throughout history. At launch, OldNews.com includes a huge repository of hundreds of millions of historical newspaper pages from around the world, with millions more added monthly. The website features easy navigation and consists of a diverse range of high-quality publications, from major international newspapers to small-town journals and gazettes.

At launch, OldNews.com more than doubles the amount of historical newspaper content that was previously available on MyHeritage. The website includes all the historical newspapers from MyHeritage, plus new, unique content.

OldNews.com is available on desktop and via mobile web browser.

Visit OldNews.com

OldNews™ is good news

Historical newspapers are a treasure trove of stories that are rich in detail. In the past, you didn’t need to be famous to appear in the newspaper; anyone could be found in them, which makes them of tremendous value to genealogists, historians, and educators. Moving forward, OldNews.com will serve as MyHeritage’s focal point for historical newspapers. This release is just the beginning; we have an incredible pipeline of additional content and features, and ambitious plans to make OldNews.com the number one online repository of international historical newspapers beyond the English-speaking world.

Integration with MyHeritage

Existing MyHeritage users can log in to OldNews.com with their MyHeritage account credentials, and new users registering via OldNews.com can use the same login credentials to access MyHeritage. OldNews.com supports Two-Factor Authentication, for enhanced security.

Newspaper content on OldNews.com

OldNews.com offers a wide range of publications from local, national, and international news, with extensive coverage of the 1800s and 1900s. At launch, the website includes newspapers from across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Austria, Germany, Czechia, the Netherlands, and Australia. Millions of newspaper pages are added each month, and content from additional countries will be added in the future. The OldNews.com website is available in 11 languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. More newspapers in some of these languages will be added soon.

The new content on OldNews.com was scanned using best-in-class optical character recognition (OCR) technology and enhanced with sophisticated algorithms developed in-house by MyHeritage. The website also offers optimized performance through a new technical implementation where the content is served from a Content Distribution Network, through a point of presence closest to the user. This means that users from all over the world can access OldNews.com at an extremely fast speed.

How to use OldNews.com

To get started, visit OldNews.com. If you already have a MyHeritage account, click “Log in” on the top right of the page and use the same credentials you use to log in to MyHeritage. If you don’t have an account yet, no worries! You can search OldNews.com anonymously, and you can create an account later to view the newspapers you’ve found.

The full announcement is much longer and offers more details. You can find it on the MyHeritage blog at: https://tinyurl.com/5n742kz8.