Переводчик Дармостук Виктория Вячеславовна

Las Vegas is a casino empire with yearly revenues of over six billion dollars.
This is where America lets its hair down, and gambling has the status of an official religion. The industry greets you like a salesman the moment you step off the plane. Fruit machines in the Arrivals Hall, the sound of the handles, reels spinning, and the sound of dollars cascading into trays. And in Departures video poker as far as you can see, as people wait reluctantly for their planes. Downtown, in the suburban luxury, the dominance of the big casinos is absolute. If you don’t like gambling stay out of Vegas, is the clear message. The city, with its swelling population of more than 700,000 is built on the proposition that every American likes to chance his luck. The city centre is in fact a collection of casinos, motels, souvenir shops, and pawnbrokers. Occasionally a spire intrudes – the churches are usually well-attended – but the wise clergyman knows which subjects are best avoided on Sundays. Much of the city looks like a parking lot – areas of concrete which mock the meaning of its Spanish name: The Meadows.
Caesars Palace, the most famous theme-park, describes itself as an opulent Greco-Roman fantasy land and the 85 acre complex is, in appearance, a cross between a re-creation of the Roman forum, with Greek additions, and a multi-storey car park. It’s approached by moving walkways of white marble, overlooking fountains and palm trees. Throughout, there are enormous reproductions of classical statues – especially of Julius Caesar.

At its meeting in Mexico in 1993, the Round Table of the International Council on Archives (CITRA - Conférence Internationale de la Table Ronde des Archives) approved the establishment of a working party under the umbrella of the International Council of Archives, which was tasked with studying the archives of state security services in former repressive regimes. The group was asked to analyze the situation of archives dealing with political repression which had been produced and accumulated in those regimes in Europe, Africa and Asia, which were moving towards democratisation in the late 1980s. The international archival community thus aligned itself with those Human Rights organisations concerned with ensuring the survival of such documents, which are seen as essential in determining responsibility, in guaranteeing any eventual damages, in reconstructing social history or in preserving the collective memory; as well as in dealing with the implicit ethical questions raised by the custody and care of such documents. The Working Group was also tasked with producing a series of recommendations covering the steps to be taken with these documents throughout the process of transition towards democracy. The work, which took place between 1994 and 1995, was a collaborative venture between UNESCO and the International Council on Archives: I was Chairman of this group of experts.
The working group began work in January 1994, and aimed to include archivists with experience of this type of material or of archival ethics and experts in the defence of human rights, with the aim of ensuring that there was an equal balance of representation from countries in the process of transition from Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Western Europe (for example the Greek or Spanish dictatorships). Head of the Working Group was Antonio González Quintana, former Director of the Civil War section of the National Historical Archive of Salamanca from 1986-1994, while the rest of the group comprised: Dr Dagmar Unverhau, Director of the Stasi Archive in Berlin (Germany); Lazlo Varga, Director of the Municipal Archives of Budapest (Hungary); Vladimir Kozlov, of the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow (Russia); Alejandro González Poblete, President of the National Body for Reparation and Reconciliation in Santiago (Chile).