Turkish and Armenian Rapprochement: A Region Grows Up

Given the players and the history, a deal is still a long shot. But that traditional antagonists Armenia and Turkey have continued their talks this far — at least by appearances, they are within three days of an accord re-establishing diplomatic relations and opening their borders — is already a sign of an until-now missing maturity in the deeply suspicious region.

The main flashpoint between the two countries has been Turkey’s 1915 massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Turkey refuses to acknowledge responsibility for the carnage, and permits pseudo-scholarly denials of the well-establish history itself. A second issue is the two-decade-long dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the status of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkey, which supports Azerbaijan in the dispute, has insisted that the issue be settled as part of the rapprochement with Armenia.

Continue Reading at Steve’s blog Oil And Glory

It all sounds so interesting. Looking to the near future and our where our profession might be headed as soon as next year. The website Gizmodo is proclaiming that the

Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines

They start out by saying that  Apple recently approached a number of newspapers, magazines and other print media describing putting their products for sale on iTunes via a new piece of hardware. The report cited people familiar with The New York Times, publishers McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press, and a trip that “several executives from one of the largest magazine groups” took to the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

The Apple tablet project has apparently been through a number of different iterations, and the project has been reset numerous times by company co-founder Steve Jobs. The report said that Jobs was presented with a tablet device that ran a modified version of OS X years ago, but the device was shelved because the company could not determine what use people would have for the hardware. Read  more at  O’Grady’s Powerpage

According to Paul Melcher…”Apparently Apple is working very hard with publishers to digitize their content for their upcoming tablet ( release date : January 2010). But what is extremely interesting here is that, apparently Apple is hard at work redefining what print magazine might soon look like and , by being the first, set a standard.” Go to Paul’s blog Thoughts of a Bohemian to continue reading.