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(01/30/09 5:25am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Gov. Rod Blagojevich was bounced from office Thursday without a single lawmaker rising in his defense, ending a nearly two-month crisis that erupted with his arrest on charges stating he tried to sell Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat.Blagojevich becomes the first U.S. governor in more than 20 years to be removed by impeachment.After a four-day trial, the Illinois Senate voted 59-0 to convict him of abuse of power, automatically ousting the second-term Democrat. In a second, identical vote, lawmakers further barred Blagojevich from ever holding public office in the state again.“He failed the test of character,” said Sen. Matt Murphy, a Republican from suburban Chicago. “He is beneath the dignity of the state of Illinois. He is no longer worthy to be our governor.”Democratic Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn, one of Blagojevich’s critics, was promptly sworn in as governor.Blagojevich’s troubles are not over. Federal prosecutors are drawing up an indictment against him on corruption charges.Blagojevich, 52, had boycotted the first three days of the impeachment trial, calling the proceedings a kangaroo court. But on Thursday, he went before the Senate to beg for his job, delivering a 47-minute plea that was, by turns, defiant, humble and sentimental.He argued, again, that he did nothing wrong, and warned that his impeachment would set a “dangerous and chilling precedent.”“You haven’t proved a crime, and you can’t because it didn’t happen,” Blagojevich told the lawmakers. “How can you throw a governor out of office with insufficient and incomplete evidence?”The verdict brought to an end what one lawmaker branded “the freak show” in Illinois. Over the past few weeks, Blagojevich found himself isolated, with almost the entire political establishment lined up against him. The furor paralyzed state government and made Blagojevich and his helmet of lush, dark hair a punchline from coast to coast.Many ordinary Illinoisans were glad to see him go.“It’s very embarrassing. I think it’s a shame that with our city and Illinois, everybody thinks we’re all corrupt,” Gene Ciepierski, 54, said after watching the trial’s conclusion on a TV at Chicago’s beloved Billy Goat Tavern. “To think he would do something like that, it hurts more than anything.”In a solemn scene, more than 30 lawmakers rose one by one on the Senate floor to accuse Blagojevich of abusing his office and embarrassing the state. They denounced him as a hypocrite, saying he cynically tried to enrich himself and then posed as the brave protector of the poor and “wrapped himself in the constitution.”
(09/15/06 2:39am)
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- The story began 20 years ago in Kenya with one family's grief. It traveled halfway around the world, passed through Hollywood and came to a museum in the middle of America.\nNow it will end where it began, but this time with the family celebrating a small victory -- the return of a stolen memorial to a dead relative.\nThe Illinois State Museum sent the memorial, known as a "kigango," back to its original owners Wednesday. Kenyan officials say this is the first time a museum has ever returned a stolen African artifact to its rightful owners.\n"I commend them for this bold and unprecedented initiative, the first of its kind indeed," Suleiman Shakombo, Kenya's minister of national heritage, said at the transfer ceremony.\nThe kigango was one of two erected by Kalume Mwakiru to honor his dead brothers. Mwakiru's family had suffered a series of misfortunes -- the death of livestock, bad harvests, illnesses, nightmares -- and he believed honoring his brothers would end the family's problems.\nBut in 1985, two years after the memorials were erected, someone stole them.\nThieves can sell them to Kenyan souvenir shops for perhaps $50, experts say. The shops then sell them to art dealers for several hundred dollars. The dealers can get $5,000 from American collectors.\nThis particular kigango wound up in a California art dealership and was purchased by actor Powers Boothe, who donated it and seven others to Illinois State University, said anthropologist Monica Udvardy, who has traced the memorial's path.\nThe university closed its museum and transferred its collection, including the kigango, to the Illinois State Museum in Springfield in 2001.\nUdvardy and fellow anthropologist Linda Giles say nearly 300 of the memorials -- called "vigango" when talking about more than one -- are owned by American museums. There's generally no way to figure out where they originated or whether they were stolen or somehow obtained legitimately.\nBut Mwakiru's family got lucky.\nUdvardy, while doing research in Kenya, had photographed Mwakiru standing alongside the memorials just before they were stolen. She knew they had been taken and, years later, spotted one during a slide presentation at a conference on African studies.\nWith Udvardy's photo as proof they had once owned the kigango, Mwakiru's family stepped forward to ask the Illinois State Museum to return it.\nThe 4.3-foot-tall kigango is a post with a vaguely human shape, decorated with blue paint and strips of cloth.\nMwakiru, who died in 1987, was terribly upset when the two memorials were stolen, according to a letter the family wrote to the museum earlier this year. After they vanished, the family's fortunes declined. Calves were stillborn. People got sick. Jobs were hard to find.\n"We believe that all these troubles will improve if our vigango are returned to us," the family wrote.\nMuseum director Bonnie Styles said there was no real debate over whether to return the memorial once the rightful owners asked for it. "The decision for us was clear-cut and simple," she said.\nBut another museum sees it differently.\nThe Mwakiru family's other kigango has been traced to the Hampton University Museum in Virginia, which has not agreed to return the artifact. The university did not respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday afternoon.\nShakombo, the minister of national heritage, said he is saddened by Hampton University's position.\n"They keep on telling us they legally acquired it when the family at home is crying that kigango was stolen. Now whom are we going to believe?" he said.\nShakombo said he would like all vigango to be eventually returned to Africa, even if there is no record of the original owners.\nBut Styles, despite her support for returning the Mwakiru family's memorial, said the broader issue is not simple.\nMuseums around the world need foreign artifacts to educate visitors about different cultures, she said. The Illinois State Museum, for instance, has mounted several exhibits of African items during the past decade and is trying to get funding to put the collection on the Internet.\n"It is a very important collection to us in terms of increasing the diversity of our audience and our visitors," Styles said. "But I'm very supportive of working with museums in other countries to review any evidence they might have that a piece was illegally acquired"
(08/29/06 4:12am)
NAIROBI, Kenya -- Sen. Barack Obama urged Kenyans to take control of their country's destiny by opposing corruption and ethnic divisions in government during a policy speech Monday at the main university in his father's homeland.\nObama warned that Kenya and other African nations will never thrive if their citizens cannot count on the government to deliver services fairly, regardless of their tribal background or ability to pay bribes, Obama told about 600 people at the state-run University of Nairobi.\n"In the end, if the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists -- to protect them and to promote their common welfare -- all else is lost," he said.\nObama is winding down his trip to Africa, which began Aug. 18 in South Africa. On Tuesday, he will visit the world-famous Masai Mara game reserve in southern Kenya, followed by trips to Djibouti and Chad.\nThe Illinois Democrat has received the warmest welcome in Kenya, where the people have claimed Obama as one of their own even though he was mostly raised in Hawaii and did not know his Kenyan father well.\nThis is Obama's third visit to Kenya but his first since being elected the United States' only black senator in 2004.\nOn Monday, he acknowledged the irony of a politician from Chicago, known for its long history of public corruption, talking about good government. But while corruption is universal, he said in Kenya it amounts to "a crisis that's robbing an honest people of opportunities they have fought for."\nGovernment officials did not immediately respond to Obama's comments Monday. The senator had a closed-door meeting with President Mwai Kibaki last week.\nKenya has been roiled for years by widespread allegations of corruption. Kibaki won elections in 2002, promising to root out the corruption that had become endemic under the 24-year rule of his predecessor, President Daniel arap Moi. But now, Kibaki too is facing mounting pressure to respond to allegations of high-level corruption.\nA study by the watchdog group Transparency International found that Kenyans encountered bribery in nearly half their interactions with officials.\nKibaki's administration has pointed to its efforts to root out corrupt judges and ongoing investigations into high-level wrongdoing. Officials also have said that the government alone cannot fight corruption and asked individuals and companies to stop paying bribes.\nObama argued that corruption is not simply unfair, but it hampers growth of Kenyan businesses and discourages foreign investors. It weakens the nation's ability to respond to crises like AIDS, malaria and drought, he said, and it can feed fear and hatred within the country.\nLaw student John Kamau, who was in the audience, said he hopes Obama's message will get more attention because it comes from a wildly popular figure and someone with no stake in Kenya's political rivalries. But the message itself was nothing new.\n"It's like a song that has been sung before," Kamau said.\nObama said the Kenyan government must reduce patronage jobs and increase salaries for the remaining employees to reduce temptation for taking bribes. It also needs clear laws and regulations so that individual bureaucrats cannot twist the rules to their own ends, Obama said.\n"Finally, ethnic-based tribal politics have to stop," he said to applause from the audience of students, university staff, business leaders and others.\nObama said his father, a Kenyan government economist, butted heads with government officials over ethnicity and patronage and ended up losing his government job. Obama said his father also held outdated views about the roles of women, and, as a result, never enjoyed a strong family life.\nHis father died in a car crash in 1982, leaving three wives, six sons and a daughter.\n"In many ways, my family's history reflects some of the contradictions of Kenya and indeed the African continent as a whole," Obama said.\nAIDS prevention also has been a theme of Obama's visit. On Saturday, he and his wife, Michelle, underwent public HIV tests at a hospital in the city of Kisumu in an effort to reduce the public stigma associated with HIV testing.\nObama and his family also traveled Saturday to Nyangoma-Kogelo, a tiny village in the rural west where his father grew up. He stopped at his father's grave and visited his 85-year-old grandmother.
(04/11/05 4:28am)
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- In most museums, Abraham Lincoln is discussed in hushed voices and illustrated with sepia-toned photos and marble statues that give him a saintly air. The new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum doesn't buy into that reverence. It brings Lincoln to life with booming cannons, holographic ghosts and latex statues so lifelike the arms have freckles. It shakes visitors up and shows them all sides of the former president.\nThe Lincoln presented here is not the one-dimensional martyr for equality most museum-goers know. The museum, opening next week in Lincoln's hometown, shows the nation's 16th president as an awkward suitor, a grieving father and a wily politician. It points out his changing views on slavery and the limitations of his Emancipation Proclamation. Visitors hear complaints about everything from his looks, "the Illinois ape," some people called him -- to his restrictions on civil rights\n"We want to totally surround you, involve you in the emotions, in the triumphs and the tragedies of the Lincoln family and our nation," said Bob Rogers, whose company, BRC Imagination Arts, designed the museum's exhibits\nThe library portion of the $145 million complex houses the world's largest collection of Lincoln documents and artifacts, from letters he wrote as a young lawyer to an original copy of the Gettysburg Address. The museum side is geared toward the general public, and it grabs the attention of adults and children alike with myth-busting stories and special effects.\nAn introductory film uses smoke machines, vibrating seats and the roar of cannons to bring the Civil War to life while summing up both Lincoln's life and the nation's painful divisions. Another presentation mixes a living actor with holographic images of Lincoln and Civil War battle scenes. The four-day celebration wrapping up April 19 with the museum dedication follows nearly 25 years of effort to create a world-class institution to study Lincoln's life and explain it to the public. The result is called a presidential library, but it isn't operated by the National Archives, like the Clinton and Reagan libraries are, and it isn't the official repository of documents from Lincoln's presidency.\nThe federal government agreed to provide up to $50 million, but the bulk of the money is coming from the state, which owns and operates the institution. Lincoln was a crafty politician who knew how to cut deals and reward friends. So it's only fitting that political squabbling within his own Republican Party complicated efforts to get the museum up and running. First, U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald tried to block the library's funding because he wanted more safeguards to ensure Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a fellow Republican, did not award construction contracts to political cronies. Later, Ryan tried to shift control of the library away from the state's Historic Preservation Agency. Rumors flew that he wanted to appoint his chief of staff, a person with no experience in the field, to run the institution. At least two nationally known scholars withdrew as candidates for director.\nConstruction delays further plagued the project.\nThe library was originally scheduled to open in 2002 and Ryan even held a "ceremonial" opening complete with fireworks and jets flying overhead, but it sat empty for two years because of problems with the heating and cooling systems. The library side finally opened in October. The museum is opening more than a year late. People who have sneaked peeks inside say the museum was worth the wait. The holograms and rumbling seats are fun, they say, but the museum also drives home the reality of the Civil War and Lincoln's role.\n"It connects first emotionally and visually, then lets you dig deeper," said David Mosena, who runs Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. "I felt the pain of this conflict and the burden that rested on him."\nSpringfield resident Kate Rossi said her two-hour visit wasn't nearly enough. \n"Words fail me," she said. "It is amazing."\nThe driving force behind the museum's approach was Richard Norton Smith, one of the scholars who originally dropped his bid to direct the project. Once a new governor took office, Smith agreed to take the job. He is both a historian and an administrator who has run four other presidential libraries. He can debate scholars, schmooze with donors and talk to the public in television-friendly soundbites. The institution's goal, he repeats over and over, is to mix scholarship with showmanship.\n"This is a story that, literally, you experience in three dimensions," Smith said. "You're put inside this story, inside this life."\nThere are critics of that showmanship, however, and the museum's draw on resources. Maynard Crossland resigned as head of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, saying the library complex was overshadowing other historic sites and eating up scarce dollars. \n"It's just a big vacuum," he said.\nJohn Simon, a historian at Southern Illinois University, has complained bitterly about the museum's "Disneyesque" approach, particularly the life-size latex statutes. But other scholars feel just as strongly that the museum's glitz can work with the library's scholarship to tell Lincoln's story in a new way.\n"I think it really will be an important impetus to Lincoln studies and keeping the figure of Abraham Lincoln right out in front of American attention," said author Allen Guelzo.
(10/21/04 5:09am)
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- No one has ever accused Alan Keyes of being a RINO -- a Republican In Name Only. And you don't hear many people complaining that Barack Obama is a wishy-washy "Republicrat."\nThe two U.S. Senate candidates offer voters stark choices on everything from education to health care to gun control -- choices often stemming from two very different views of government. Obama argues government can be a tool to help people, while Keyes sees it as a hurdle that people must overcome.\nTake their positions on education.\nKeyes accuses public schools of "politically correct brainwashing of our children" and calls for organized prayer in schools and giving parents more choice in how to educate their children. He supports issuing vouchers to pay for education at any school, public or private, secular or religious.\nHe also criticizes sex education in schools, saying that should generally be left to parents.\nWhen Obama discusses education, it's usually to criticize President Bush for not coming up with more money to help schools meet the tough requirements of the president's "No Child Left Behind" Act. He promises to fight for more funding.\nAnother Obama proposal is a series of academies that would train 5,000 new teachers a year. The teachers would agree to serve six years in troubled schools and in exchange would get $30,000 a year and a master's degree.\nObama also wants the government to stop issuing some college loans through banks, which costs the government money because the lenders get a guaranteed rate of return. Obama says if the government issued all loans itself, costs would drop $4.5 billion and that money could be used to help more would-be college students.\n"We need more money for public schools because the classes are too big and the students need too much help. But what is also true is that that money will not make a dime's bit of difference unless we change attitudes about the importance of learning, especially in minority and low-income communities," he said at one appearance.\nWhen it comes to health care, Keyes favors creating tax-deductible savings accounts that people could use to set aside money. Those would be combined with health insurance to protect people against the cost of catastrophic illness or injury.\nKeyes endorses letting people buy cheaper prescription drugs from other countries and says overall health care costs could be reduced by limiting awards in malpractice lawsuits. He also argues costs would drop if people were encouraged to pay more attention to diet and exercise.\nObama suggests making sure more people have health insurance by expanding existing federal programs, such as Medicare and the Children's Health Insurance Program. The expansions would provide coverage for 25 million of the nation's 44 million uninsured, Obama says, and should cost $68 billion. He would pay for it by reversing some of Bush's tax cuts for the most wealthy.
(09/22/03 5:12am)
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- The state's next official poet could be a 38-year-old single mother of a son with Down syndrome.\nOr a nationally known force behind the popularity of poetry slams.\nOr a soft-spoken minister and Champaign County board member.\nIllinois hasn't had a poet laureate since late 2000, when Gwendolyn Brooks died. But that's about to change.\nTwenty-five people have been nominated for the job. A search committee is paring down the list of candidates, and Gov. Rod Blagojevich plans to pick a new poet laureate next month.\nIt's a job with no pay and no real authority, but it carries a certain amount of prestige. After all, the last two were Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Carl Sandburg, a legend.\nWord of the search prompted the nomination of poets of every kind.\nDonna Biffar works in the graphics department of a community college in southern Illinois. After work she cares for her two teenage children including 16-year-old Mike -- who has Down syndrome -- studies for her bachelor's degree, helps run a small poetry publishing house and writes her own poems.\nShe used to get up at 4 a.m. on weekends to find writing time. Biffar says she had to write poetry.\n"I think that is life. Everybody needs it, like water. It's communication in its purest form," she said.\nMarc Smith helped create poetry slams, high-energy competitions among poets back in the 1980s. They mix poetry with standup comedy, rap and theatrics in a way that has proven extremely popular, at least in the world of poetry.\nSmith doubts he'll be chosen for poet laureate but said his experience organizing slams and exciting audiences would help him use the post to promote poetry.\n"Whether the people in the establishment world want to admit it or not, they're all gravitating toward performance poetry because it works," Smith said. "If you're going to excite people about poetry, it's got to be out loud. That's where it came from."\nSteven Shoemaker is a minister who runs the University YMCA in Champaign and also a member of the county board. Shoemaker, 60, has been writing poetry since high school. He says his work, published in magazines such as Anglican Theological Review, often deals with religious and moral themes.\n"It was a total surprise to me that I was nominated. I was pleased, of course," Shoemaker said. "I think it would be a lot of fun."\nThe other nominees are just as diverse.\nThere's the federal government employee who doubles as a motivational speaker and self-published poet. There are the two men who co-edited an anthology of Illinois poetry. There's the woman who works for the state attorney general and often writes about violence and abuse.\nThe poets say they are thrilled by both their nominations and the chance to reach more people.\n"I might tell them what it is to live a simple life. Simple lives have ways of being full of unexpected turns and adventures," said poet John Knoepfle of Auburn.\nKenneth Clarke, director of the Poetry Center of Chicago, argues that poets can't showcase their work at galleries or concert halls as painters and musicians can. So it makes sense for the state to help out by naming a poet laureate.\nThe search committee, led by first lady Patti Blagojevich, is reviewing the nominations and selecting a few poets to interview for the job. Then the committee will give the governor a couple of selections from which to choose.\nBlagojevich said she is looking for someone whose work is accessible -- "no wild, funky poetry" -- and who will do a good job promoting the art.\n"We don't want a reclusive genius who will never come out of their study," she said.\nTo be eligible for the post, poets are supposed to have critical acclaim, a track record of getting their poems published and a history of activity in the arts community.\nThe job is no longer a lifetime appointment. Instead, it's for a term of four years. Blagojevich said that could translate into more poets reaching more people and getting them interested.\n"Poetry can inspire and encourage people and give them hope," she said. "It's good for people not to be so intimidated by poetry"