Very interesting "person to person" note. It was published. I thought I would share some info with you and see what you think. Several years ago I subscribed to MSN. It was primarily for interaction with people on physical security issues related to art and collections. I was quiet at first and then began to share some thoughts. But, I had to be careful not to "stub my toe" on the professional who wanted everyone else to know they were "professionals". But I am not too thin skinned (maybe) and got over it, and learned to read and listen more than participate. You see, I am the insurance surveyor and damage assessment specialist from the western USA who occassionally asks for help or offers my thoughts. (Memories of the "Great Sprinkler Debate".) I too miss this type information or subject matter. It seems over the past 6 months or more MSN has concentrated on cultural inappropriate behaviors, and similar issues and has moved away from the types of conversation that got me started tuning into MSN. So I read and watch, with some hope that someone will break the ice and get us back to the old issues.
If you wish to ask a question about damage assessment, contingency planning and management or fire or water damage issues please ask me a question and I will try and help. I AM NOT A VENDOR. I have spent the last 20 years in insurance claims, loss control and safety. I am by no means an expert, but I have seen a lot of things that gives me some common sense solutions and/or resources to research answers.
Please write me with your thoughts or questions.
Robin Rogers (riskmgmt@lava.net)
PS: MSN has been a great help to me for no cost to me. I do not want to be too critical, but would like to share my thoughts also. MSN has been a great service and hopefully will continue to be.
RR
MOSCOW (AP) _ Copies of one of the world's rarest and most valuable books have been disappearing _ a rash of mysterious thefts that have perplexed police from the former Soviet Union to the United States. The first-edition copies of 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus' renowned treatise in Latin, ``De revolutionibus orbium coelestium'' (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) have vanished from collections across the globe. In Poland, a reader said he had to use the bathroom _ and made off with the treasured volume. A thief in Kiev, Ukraine, pilfered the book using a fake police ID. The latest theft of the book, published in 1543 and valued at up to $400,000, was discovered earlier this month in Russia. Russian police say they have appealed to Interpol for help in locating that book, which disappeared from the Academy of Sciences Library in St. Petersburg. Police would give no further details. At least seven of the 260 known copies of the 1543 edition of ``De revolutionibus'' have disappeared in recent years, including one copy each from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, according to Owen Gingerich, a professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Five copies remain missing. Some police have speculated that a ring of thieves and collectors is behind the rash of thefts or that the books may have been stolen on some collectors' orders. However, Gingerich says there is no evidence to suggest an international conspiracy to steal copies of the treatise, which describes Copernicus' then-revolutionary theory that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe. Gingerich has worked for a quarter-century compiling a list of all known copies of the first- and second-editions of the work, a quest that has taken him to cities and libraries worldwide _ and has helped him trace at least two stolen copies. While the book is a tempting target for thieves because of its value, it's also ``a very dangerous title to steal,'' Gingerich said in an Internet interview, noting that his census can help identify any known copy, making it risky to try to sell a stolen copy at auction or on the international antique market. Still, the disappearances continue. The theft in Poland occurred in November 1998 at the Polish Academy of Sciences' library in Krakow, where a man in his 40s asked to read a first-edition copy of ``De Revolutionibus'' valued at $320,000. Sometime later, the reader said he had to visit the toilet _ and disappeared. He left behind his belongings and the book's covers, said Krakow's deputy police head Eugeniusz Szczerbak. Three months earlier, a man walked out of the Ukrainian National Library in Kiev carrying a first-edition Copernicus. The thief had an apparently fake police ID and appeared to be well-acquainted with the library's security arrangements. Librarians said he requested six books, including the Copernicus. He then returned the books to secure a receipt, took a break and came back to request more books, including the Copernicus. The man vanished with the rare book just before closing time, apparently showing the guard the initial receipt to prove he had returned it. Gingerich has helped trace at least two stolen copies. One copy that surfaced on the book market in 1997 came from the Brno University Library in the Czech Republic. It had been returned by the library, which kept the book during Communist times, to the original owner, an Augustinian monastery, from where it disappeared. Another edition that turned up in Germany had come from the Pulkovo Observatory Library in St. Petersburg, Russia, Gingerich said. The library ``suffered a disastrous arson fire ... and apparently someone thought that the inventory of the library was now so incomplete that a missing book would be presumed lost in the fire,'' he said.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Nazis stole 600,000 pieces of art in Germany and the European lands they occupied during Hitler's 12 years in power, says the U.S. government's top expert in plundered art from that era. Some 200,000 works came from Germany itself, including paintings, sculpture, objets d'art and tapestries, Jonathan Petropoulose testified Thursday to the House Banking Committee. Petropoulose, research director on art for the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, estimated 100,000 objects came from Western Europe and 300,000 from Eastern Europe and parts of the Soviet Union, all occupied by German troops in the war. Ronald S. Lauder, chairman of the art recovery program of the World Jewish Congress, said the German government has agreed to take an active role with the U.S. commission in trying to return stolen art. He emphasized the complexity of that effort. "In art restitution," he said, "there are no `Swiss banks' that retained assets in the face of survivors' pleas, there are no insurance companies that demanded death certificates from the children of Jews who were gassed by the Nazis." Lauder, a former ambassador to Austria, noted that only last week the North Carolina Museum of Art agreed to return a 500-year-old painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder to a pair of aging sisters in Vienna. It had been stolen from their granduncle 60 years ago. Petropoulose, who teaches history at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and has recently published a book on the art world of Nazi Germany, said his estimates are based on research by himself and others, and the commission will publish its report later this year. He said 43 other governments also have commissions trying to find missing art. Former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, now head of an international commission on insurance money owed to Jewish families from Nazi-era insurance policies, said a program will begin next week to get started on the payments. The commission will come out Tuesday with a toll-free phone number and other details for families to claim payments never made after the policyholders were killed in the Holocaust. Eagleburger negotiated the program with Jewish representatives and five European insurance companies that now have subsidiaries in the United States. They are Assicurazioni Generali of Italy, Allianz of Germany, AXA of France, and two companies from Switzerland: Winterthur, and Zurich. He said there are more insurance companies that operated during the era that should participate: Aegon, CGU, Gerling, Munich Re, Sorema, Royal & Sun Alliance, Swiss Life and Prudential. Eagleburger did not release the number of claims he thought there would be, nor the total number of companies that have failed to pay Holocaust-era policies. But others have previously put the number of claimants in the hundreds thousands and the number of companies that may have not paid on policies at about 20.
related stories:
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/000211/03/holocaust-assets