TimeSocket

Holocaust Museum Shooter

An anti-Semitic 88-year-old man opened gunfire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009. The shooting resulted in the fatal wounding of a security guard. The gunman, James Von Brunn was shot by other officer and was  hospitalized in critical condition.

Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier said the gunman was “engaged by security guards immediately after entering the door” with a rifle. “The second he stepped into the building he began firing.”

Law enforcement officials said James W. Von Brunn, a white supremacist, was under investigation in the shooting and that his car was found near the museum and tested for explosives. The weapon was a .22-caliber rifle, they added. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss the investigation just beginning.

Stephen T. Johns was identified as the dead guard by museum officials. He was a six-year veteran of the facility. In an e-mail, director Sara Bloomfield said he “died heroically in the line of duty.”

James Von Brunn has a racist, anti-Semitic Web site and wrote a book titled “Kill the Best Gentiles,” alleging a Jewish “conspiracy to destroy the white gene pool.”

This wasn’t the first tiem Von Brunn has had issues with the law. He was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board and served more than six years in prison in 1983. He was arrested two years earlier outside the room where the board was meeting, carrying a revolver, knife and sawed-off shotgun. At the time, police said von Brunn wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties.

Writings attributed to von Brunn on the Internet say the Holocaust was a hoax and decry a Jewish conspiracy to “destroy the white gene pool.”

“At Auschwitz the ‘Holocaust’ myth became Reality, and Germany, cultural gem of the West, became a pariah among world nations,” it says.

The museum, which opened in 1993 and has drawn nearly 30 million visitors, houses exhibits and records relating to the Holocaust of more than a half century ago in which more than six million Jews died at the hands of Nazis. Its Web site says the museum “teaches millions of people each year about the dangers of unchecked hatred and the need to prevent genocide.”

The museum was crowded with school children and other tourists at the time of the attack, but they all escaped injury in the outburst of violence.

Ashley Camp, 14, of Forsyth, Ill., on a field trip with more than 40 other students, said she heard two or three gunshots. Soon after, she recalled, a security guard ordered the group to run to the exit.

“We had to sprint as fast as we could out the door,” she said. “I thought it was the movie (part of a museum exhibit), but then everyone started screaming and running.”

The attack was the third in a recent wave of unsettling shootings that appeared to have political underpinnings.

A 23-year-old Army private, William Andrew Long, was shot and killed outside a recruiting office this month in Arkansas and a fellow soldier was wounded. The suspect, a Muslim convert, has said he considers the killing justified because of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East.

Late last month, abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was shot to death in his church.

At the White House a few blocks away from the museum, press secretary Robert Gibbs said he informed President Barack Obama of the events and the chief executive was “obviously saddened by what has happened.”

Only last week, Obama visited the site of a German concentration camp at Buchenwald in Germany where he noted, “There are those who insist the Holocaust never happened.” He added, “This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”

In a statement from Israel’s government, Information and Diaspora Minister Yuli Edelstein said the shooting was “further proof that anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial have not passed from the world.”

And the Council on American-Israeli Relations, a prominent American Muslim organization, said in a statement, “We condemn this apparent bias-motivated attack and stand with the Jewish community and with Americans of all faiths in repudiating the kind of hatred and intolerance that can lead to such disturbing incidents.”

Within minutes after the attack, federal agents were dispatched to von Brunn’s home in Annapolis, Md., to check his computer. Joseph Persichini, assistant director in charge of the Washington FBI field office, said the shootings were being investigated as a possible hate crime or a case of domestic terrorism.

According to a relative, von Brunn attended Washington University in St. Louis and is an artist.

He was commissioned as a naval officer decades ago, and discharged from the Navy in 1956. A cousin, Virginia Gerker of St. Louis, said in an interview she hadn’t seen him in 50 years. She said her family had “disowned” him believed him to be mentally ill.

About a dozen years ago, he applied to have his art shown at a gallery in Easton, Md., according to two of the owners. Laura Era and Jennifer Wharton said they rejected his work and he stomped out.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said von Brunn’s Web site has long been listed as a hate site.

The Rev. David Ostendorf, executive director of Center for a New Community in Chicago, a national civil rights group, said von Brunn has described in his own writings a long relationship with Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, the Spotlight Newspaper and a well-known white supremacist and anti-semite.

PROLIX is a 48 months research and development integrated project co-funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme, Priority 2 “Information Society Technologies” started on 1st December 2005.
The objective of PROLIX is to align learning with business processes in order to enable organisations to faster improve the competencies of their employees according to continuous changes of business requirements.
To reach this goal, PROLIX develops an open, integrated reference architecture for process-oriented learning and information exchange.

PROLIX supports a complete learning process life cycle

1. the analysis of complex business situations;

2. the identification of individual and organisational learning goals;

3. the analysis of competencies and their matching with individual skills;

4. the definition of appropriate learning strategies and the simulation of competency-oriented processes;

5. the execution of improved learning processes;

6. the monitoring of learners’ performance according to the goals defined.

Vision
PROLIX vision is to make people and organisations more competitive by reducing the time to fill competency gaps and to build proficiency according to the business needs and daily work processes. The delay between identification of a learning need and the actual learning should not be large. Furthermore, the learning material must be targeted to the learner’s individual learning style and behaviour. In some cases, learning must also be ‘ad hoc’ available in order to improve the performance of the employee at his workplace significantly. Organisations need to understand that providing the necessary means to learning at the workplace is mandatory for employees and organisation alike to react quickly, cost – effective and successfully in nowadays ever-changing markets. PROLIX will therefore couple business processes with learning processes in corporate environments. The vision of PROLIX is a system that allows for business process driven learning at the workplace, taking into account the single learner and their needs as well as the corporate requirements. In addition, the learner will be able to initialize a learning task himself enabling self-guided learning in corporate environments.

Overall and seen from an organizational point of view, PROLIX will significantly contribute to the change management within companies that needs to develop into a holistic learning organization enabling the integration of learning into the daily working tasks. Corporate culture requires the provision of strategies, methods and concepts to satisfy heterogeneous learning needs. Mechanisms and concepts for the organizational introduction of TEL in corporations have to be co-ordinated with its philosophy and company vision.

Objectives
PROLIX will research, analyze and develop a process-oriented learning approach and a flexible and adaptive service-oriented architecture system which is capable of aligning training and knowledge product ion of people faced with so-called “complex situations” such as work and business process changes, or other complex multivariable learning environments, which cannot be solved with traditional eLearning or knowledge management approaches. Often, such situations also require a mix of individual and organisational learning, and of learning and knowledge acquisition/production.

PROLIX objectives are:

1. PROLIX aims to enable an organisation to close the learner’s life cycle
2. PROLIX aims to make it easier to define Learning Goals based on business needs and business processes
3. PROLIX aims to deliver a methodology for matching of needed competencies with “as-hoc” profiles
4. PROLIX aims to provide competence oriented process decision support through simulation
5. PROLIX aims to integrate Learning Technology Solutions with Business Information Systems
6. PROLIX aims to monitor Learner ’s Performance according to Business Needs
7. PROLIX aims to provide an Open Business Enterprise Learning and Information Systems exchange Reference Architecture (OBELIX)
8. PROLIX will develop a repository of Didactical Learning Models to enable the identification of Learning scenarios for process- oriented learning

Please click here for a detailed description of PROLIX objectives.

Test bed
In order to demonstrate its concept, PROLIX sets up three test beds in different fields of application. In the first 18-month period, PROLIX will specify, design, implement and start to demonstrate its tools and services in more mature eLearning-aware and, therefore, lower risk environments, i.e. the “Government test bed” with UK Government Care Programme (Social Care Institute for Excellence), the “Telecom test bed” with British Telecom (BT) learning, and the “Educational Publishing test bed” with publishing houses Klett and EDITIS.

The Red Sox will honor popular television analyst and former player Jerry Remy during tonight’s game at Fenway Park. The following press release excerpt from NESN runs down tonight’s pregame ceremonies:

NESN and the Boston Red Sox celebrate Jerry Remy Day today at Fenway Park. In recognition of his 20 years as NESN’s Red Sox analyst, Jerry will be honored in a special pre-game ceremony before tonight’s game against Arizona.

The on-field ceremony will be hosted by NESN’s play-by-play announcer Don Orsillo and carried live on NESN. Jerry will be joined on the field by members of his family, former teammates and coaches, Carlton Fisk, Dennis Eckersley, Rick Burleson, Dwight Evans, Walt Hriniak and Bob Stanley. Also present for the ceremony will be Red Sox chairman Tom Werner and former broadcast partners Bob Kurtz and Sean McDonough.

The ceremony consists of a series of videos highlighting Jerry’s career as an analyst, and a special gift presentation to Jerry by NESN president Sean McGrail. The ceremony will conclude with Jerry throwing out the ceremonial first pitch to Carlton Fisk.

In addition to the on-field ceremony, Mayor Tom Menino will visit Jerry in the broadcast booth during the game to proclaim June 24th as Jerry Remy Day in the city of Boston. NESN and NESN.com are also running congratulatory recorded messages from some celebrities who are Red Sox fans including Ben Affleck, Michael Chiklis, Lenny Clarke, Stephen King, Denis Leary, Conan O’Brien, Mike O’Malley, Matt Siegel and Jack Welch.