Briefs

Local and VCU

Picasso exhibit is breaking records

Just one month into its three-month stay in Richmond, “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée NationalPicasso, Paris” is breaking museum sales records for tickets, memberships, restaurant fare and memorabilia.

“There’s not a person here who isn’t double-timing to try to keep up with the demands on all fronts thatPicasso has brought us,” said VMFA spokeswomanSuzanne Hall. More than 75,000 regular admission tickets have been sold, plus an additional 11,577 reserved tickets. As of Thursday, 73,840 people have visited the exhibit.

On top of that, museum memberships have spiked dramatically, Hall said. While memberships had been as high as 22,000 in the past, as of this week they had topped 31,000, she said, and many of those can be attributed to the interest in Picasso.

The Picasso exhibit is drawing visitors from all over Virginia and neighboring states because Richmond is the only East Coast stop on the U.S. leg of the touring exhibit. It started in Seattle in October, leaves Richmond in mid-May and is scheduled to go to San Francisco from June through September.

The exhibit features 176 pieces of Picasso’s private collection.

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Haynesworth granted parole, conditional release

Thomas E. Haynesworth has been unexpectedly granted parole in the midst of a court battle to clear his name and may return home to Richmond next week.

Haynesworth has been in custody since 1984 in a series of sex assaults. DNA has cleared him in two attacks and, backed by authorities, he is seeking exoneration in two remaining cases in the Virginia Court of Appeals.

In custody since he was 18 years old, Haynesworthturns 46 on Monday. His family and lawyers hope he will be released by Tuesday.

The crimes were committed before the 1995 abolition of parole. He was last turned down for parole on June 13 because of the “serious nature” of his crimes for which he remains convicted, including abduction and rape.

In a prepared statement, Gov. Bob McDonnell, who recently replaced four of five members of the parole board, said he asked the panel “to conduct an immediate review of this case in order to determine if Mr. Haynesworth is suitable for parole.”

Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the Mid Atlantic Innocence Project, said, “We’re ecstatic that the governor has moved on this. We know it’s not over for him yet, but it’s a really great start that he’s going to be able to be home with his family.”

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Mayor Jones appoints anti-poverty commission

With one in five residents living in poverty, Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones announced Friday a commission that will be charged with identifying strategies for increasing employment, educational achievement, access to transportation and healthy communities.

“We’ve got to do something because we’re living in a difficult time, a global community where we’ve got to promote economic parity and social justice,” he told an audience at VCU.

As part of the program, John V. Moeser, a senior fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond, presented census and other data to spotlight the longstanding concentrations of poor residents in Richmond, as well as some of their causes, plus the pockets that are emerging in the older suburbs around the city.

Moeser said the city’s concentrations of poverty disproportionately affect blacks and remain “deep canyons in the social landscape” as a result of the Civil War and public policies and private practices that were later outlawed through the civil-rights movement.

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

National and International

Giuliani mocks Obama as foreign policy weakling

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose drive-by approach to campaigning in New Hampshire drove his 2008 presidential campaign into the ground, is setting the stage for a do-over.

Giuliani, who says he hasn’t decided whether he’s running again, sounded a lot like a candidate when he spoke at a GOP fundraiser in Manchester on Friday night.

He came down hard on President Barack Obama, mocking him as a stuttering weakling when it comes to Libya. He declared that Obama has displayed the worst presidential decision making on foreign policy he’s ever seen.

As for his own decision-making, Giuliani said he should’ve spent more time in New Hampshire during his failed 2008 campaign. He finished a distant fourth there and folded his campaign soon after.

Brief by The Associated Press

Syrians fire on thousands of protestors, killing 1

Police fired live ammunition and tear gas Sunday at thousands of Syrians protesting in a tense southern city for a third consecutive day, killing one person and signaling that unrest in yet another Arab country is taking root, activists said.

The violence in Daraa, a city of about 300,000 near the border with Jordan, was fast becoming a major challenge for President Bashar Assad.

Protesters in Syria would face a tough time organizing an uprising along the lines of those that toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia. Assad’s Syria is a country that crushes political dissent, closely controls the media and routinely jails critics of the regime.

Despite political repression and rights abuses, Assad remains popular among many in the Arab world. He is seen as one of the few Arab leaders willing to stand up to Israel. It is not clear how much support an uprising would have within the country. A few earlier attempts to organize protests through social networking sites fell flat.

Confrontations in Syria began Friday when security troops fired at protesters in the city and killed five people.

Brief by The Associated Press

Gadhafi vows ‘long war’ after US, allies strike

Anti-aircraft fire erupted in the Libyan capital on Sunday, marking the start of a second night of international strikes as a defiant Moammar Gadhafi vowed a “long war.” The U.S. military said the allied bombardment so far, using a rain of Tomahawk cruise missiles and strikes by long-range bombers, had been successful in diminishing Gadhafi’s air defenses.

Libya’s rebels were jubilant after the first round of strikes on Sunday, which came as the overwhelming firepower of Gadhafi’s forces had threatened to crush their month-old uprising.

The strikes gave immediate relief to the besieged rebel capital, Benghazi, in eastern Libya, which the day before had been under a heavy attack that killed at least 120 people.

Airstrikes early Sunday, apparently from French aircraft, devastated a Libyan tank force 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Benghazi. At least seven tanks were demolished, alongside two charred armored personnel carriers and around a dozen damaged jeeps and SUVs.

Rebel fighters climbed the remains on the tanks, shooting assault rifles in the air in celebration. It was not known how many people were killed in the strike, but shredded boots, foam mattresses and tomato paste cans strewn around the scene suggested Gadhafi forces had been camped at the site when they were hit.

Brief by The Associated Press