Charles Geschke, the co-founder of the software company Adobe who helped develop the Portable Document Format, or PDF, has died at the age of 81.
Geschke set up Adobe in 1982, giving the world the ubiquitous PDF software, among many other audio-visual innovations.
He made headlines 10 years later when he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom before being released unhurt after a four-day ordeal.
Geschke died in California on Friday.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said Geschke, widely known as Chuck, "sparked the desktop publishing revolution".
"This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades," he wrote in an email to the company's employees.
"As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed ground-breaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate," he said.
Geschke and Warnock were responsible for transformative software inventions, including PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop, Mr Narayen said.
In 1992, Geschke was kidnapped in an incident that made national headlines.
He was held at gunpoint in his office and taken to Hollister, California, for four days.
Geschke was freed after a suspect, found with $650,000 (£470,000) in ransom money, took police to the location where he was being held, Associated Press reported.
In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the National Medal of Technology.
"He was really a humble, humble man - I can say that, as his wife," Nan Geschke told Mercury News. "He was very proud of his success, of course, but he was very circumspect about how much he had to do with that."
The same discrimination could be suffered in the Spanish society (as well as in many other countries) as only some people who belong to certain age ranges and the so-called essential workers are receiving the jab at the moment. Imagine a couple of teachers who want to travel in summer with their children. They wouldn't be able to do it all together, as the young people will have to wait for a long while to get vaccinated! And it goes without saying the criteria that could be applied for candidates to be chosen to get a job...
Read this interesting Guardian article.
Covid-status certificates being considered by ministers to help open up society could amount to unlawful indirect discrimination, the government’s independent equalities watchdog has advised.
As ministers decide whether the documents should be introduced as passports to certain events later this year, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has told the Cabinet Office they risk creating a “two-tier society”.
The watchdog also said employers should not be allowed to hire workers on a “no jab, no job” policy until all young people had been offered a vaccine, and that plans to make them mandatory for care workers helping older people may not be lawful.
According to a submission seen by the Guardian, the EHRC said Covid-status certificates could be a “proportionate” way of easing restrictions, given the toll lockdown has taken on people’s wellbeing and livelihoods.
But it said they risked further excluding groups among whom vaccine take-up is lower – including migrants, those from minority ethnic backgrounds and poorer socio-economic groups – from access to essential services and employment.
“There is a risk of unlawful discrimination if decisions taken in this process disadvantage people with protected characteristics who have not received, or are not able to receive, the vaccine, unless they can be shown to be justified,” it said. “Any mandatory requirement for vaccination or the implementation of Covid-status certification may amount to indirect discrimination, unless the requirement can be objectively justified.”
The warnings emerged as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, gave the clearest indication yet that care workers would be required to have a vaccination or be refused deployment in care homes.
Launching a five-week consultation on the proposal, the government said the initiative could later be extended to the wider health and social care workforce. “Due to the importance of this issue, we intend to change the law quickly,” it added.
Despite care workers being in the highest priority category for jabs, Hancock said only around half of care homes in England had enough people vaccinated. Government scientific advisers believe 80% of staff and 90% of residents need to be vaccinated to provide a minimum level of protection against outbreaks of the virus.
Senior government figures had for months denied that any form of “vaccine passport” for domestic or international use would be introduced as the rollout of jabs got under way in the winter. But at the end of February, Boris Johnson announced a review would be launched into the idea to explore the complex ethical issues behind it. He touted the documents – that would be used to prove someone’s vaccine, test or antibody status – as a possible requirement to enter a pub or a theatre.
Since then, an interim report from the Cabinet Office review has ruled out the documents ever being necessary on public transport or in essential shops – though the government has declined to provide any definition of these. It has expanded access to testing in England this week, by offering everyone two lateral flow tests a week – a measure it would argue means the certificates would not just be available to those who have been vaccinated.
Johnson faces the prospect of a significant Tory rebellion if he pushes ahead with introducing the certificates and calls for a vote in parliament, with 41 Conservative backbenchers vowing to oppose them. Labour has previously vowed to vote against “vaccine passports” but has been less clear about its stance on a wider certificate scheme used to show someone’s vaccine, test or antibody status. It says it is still waiting for the government to formally present a firm proposal.
Marsha de Cordova, the shadow women and equalities secretary, said: “We share the EHRC’s concerns and hope the government will take note.”
Responding to the government’s call for evidence on Covid-status certificates, the EHRC said that if they were introduced, it should only be for a limited time and subject to regular review, along with “strict parliamentary scrutiny”.
Care home operators are divided over mandatory jabs. Barchester, one of the largest private operators, has already said it will make vaccines a condition of work, starting as soon as 23 April. Its chief executive, Pete Calveley, said: “It is a professional duty for care home staff to accept the vaccine unless there is a medical reason they should not.”
Other operators fear it will drive away staff in an already depleted workforce and that it is unreasonable to only make vaccines compulsory for care workers and not NHS staff.
The government has previously acknowledged the legal difficulty of mandatory vaccines. In February, the prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “Taking a vaccine is not mandatory and it would be discriminatory to force somebody to take one.” Robert Buckland, the justice secretary, has also said he believes making vaccines mandatory for existing staff is likely to require testing in the courts.
Employment lawyers said on Tuesday that the rule could breach the Human Rights Act and amount to indirect discrimination, if refusal was related to religious belief for example, and it was likely to be tested in the upper courts.
“There would have to be a very strong justification that mandating vaccines really does put a dent in the Covid case numbers,” said Ryan Bradshaw, an employment and discrimination lawyer at Leigh Day.
The government wants to make vaccination of carers part of the “fundamental standard” of providing safe care, enshrined in the Social Care Act. Care homes which fail to show their staff are vaccinated could, in the most serious cases, have their registration to operate cancelled.
Unison, a trade union representing health workers, described the plan as “the wrong approach” and called for persuasion – rather than coercion – of care workers, many of whom have cited fears, albeit so far unfounded, that the vaccine could affect pregnancies. Others have cited religious concerns, while practical issues of not being on shift when GPs arrived to deliver doses have also been highlighted.
With the vaccine programme in England now being extended to those in their late 40s and the government not promising to offer all those over the age of 18 a jab until the end of July, the EHRC said employers should not be able to discriminate when looking to hire only those who had been vaccinated. It advised: “The implementation of any policy would need to reflect the status of the vaccine rollout programme and ensure that it does not discriminate against younger people, who are unlikely to be vaccinated until later in the process.”
A government spokesperson said: “Covid-status certification could have an important role to play both domestically and internationally, as a temporary measure. We are fully considering equality and ethical concerns as part of our ongoing review.”
Read this interesting BBC article to know about the Queen's husband who has just passed away. He really led an extraordinary life: Prince Philip 1921-2021
"Our only distinction," he said, "was that we did what we were told to do, to the very best of our ability, and kept on doing it."
Area around Fuendetodos will recreate artists’ Black Paintings venue as it marks his 275th birthday
wo hundred years after he covered the walls of his house near Madrid with febrile visions of Saturn devouring his son, a witches’ sabbath and a slowly drowning dog, Francisco de Goya has been summoned home to help reverse the fortunes of the poor, remote and underpopulated Spanish region where he was born in 1746.
The painter, printmaker and fascinated, appalled chronicler of war, cruelty and reason’s frequent slumbers, studied in Italy and painted for the court in Madrid before dying in Bordeaux in 1828. But he was born on the other side of the Pyrenees in Fuendetodos, a small town 27 miles (44km) south of Zaragoza in the north-eastern Spanish region of Aragon.
Today, Fuendetodos and the 14 other towns and villages that make up the Campo de Belchite are invoking Goya’s name and legacy as they try to cling to the map.
The Territorio Goya association – a group of artists, curators, academics, residents, culture and tourism experts and specialists in depopulation – is attempting to stem the decline of a region where there are just 4.8 inhabitants per square kilometre and the annual per capita income is about €8,600 (£7,300).
“By using the name of Goya, who was born in this little town near Zaragoza, we’re trying to do something a little bit like what Stratford-upon-Avon has done with William Shakespeare, or what Eisenach has done with Bach, or what Figueres has done with Salvador Dalí,” says Julio Martínez Calzón, the president of Territorio Goya.
“Goya has a profound human, cultural and social pull because of the circumstances in which he created his works and because of his own capacity to reach people all over the world. We want to use that to empower the towns and villages in the Belchite region.”
The area’s plight is hardly unique. Last year Spain’s socialist-led government acknowledged the problem of la España vaciada – the hollowed-out Spain – by creating a ministry for what it termed “the demographic challenge”.
About 90% of Spain’s population – approximately 42 million people – are squeezed into 1,500 towns and cities that occupy 30% of the land. The other 10% (4.6 million people) occupy the remaining 70%, giving a population density of barely 14 inhabitants a square kilometre.
But not many corners of la España vaciada have a cultural figure as titanic as Goya to whom they can turn. By the end of the year, Territorio Goya hopes to have two cultural projects under way to mark the 275th anniversary of the artist’s birth, and the second centenary of the Pinturas Negras (Black Paintings) that he applied to the walls of the now demolished Quinta del Sordo estate near Madrid.
The first is a reconstruction of the two floors of the Quinta del Sordo, complete with full-scale images of the Black Paintings that were photographed in 1874 before being stripped out and transferred to canvas and ending up the Prado in Madrid.
“We’re hoping to produce a visceral, organic impact in visitors; a shock,” says Martínez Calzón. “The idea is to show them as they were.”
The second initiative has involved commissioning 15 contemporary artists from Spain, France, Italy, Mexico and the US to reinterpret the Black Paintings so that one of the reworked paintings can be exhibited in each of the 15 towns and villages in the region.
Eventually, Territorio Goya hopes the Quinta del Sordo installation will form part of a permanent, international centre for Goya studies in Fuendetodos.
Thetown’s half-built museum, one of the many casualties of Spain’s most recent boom-and-bust cycle – and a relic of a time when so many places dreamed oftheir own Guggenheim– would make the perfect venue and already has thousands of donated artworks that could be displayed.
While Martínez Calzón wants to see many more Spaniards and foreign visitors making the pilgrimage to Fuendetodos, the project is also about ensuring that Goya finally receives his dues in his home town and beyond.
“The idea is to look after the person that Goya was because of what he meant to Spain and to the world,” he says. “In his paintings, there’s a drive to capture the conceptual essence of what it means to be human and of what human society is. Before then, it was all kind of photographic and you didn’t get those incredibly intense expressions of people’s internal, unresolved passions and feelings.”
The artist Ricardo Calero, one of the founder members of Territorio Goya, moved to Fuendetodos 14 years ago after undertaking a commission to reinterpret Goya’s enigmatic and incomplete Follies series.
“I fell in love with the light of the place, with its rough, powerful landscape, with its skies, with its silence, and, of course, with its people,” he says.
But Calero is keenly aware of the Campo de Belchite’s problems and of the urgent needs to remedy them.
“Goya is a great lighthouse who could illuminate the region,” he says. “All this is about using culture as a tool for development in a really wide sense. It’s about using memory, education, nature and the landscape and raising awareness so that people can see the great value that this place and this land possess.”
Sam Jones in Madrid, The Guardian, -Sunday 4th April 2021
