Award-winning Mexican journalist to join Bard College faculty

BY PHIL HALL Phall@westfairinc.com

Bard College has announced the appointment of award-winning Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Division of Languages and Literature.

Guillermoprieto began her Englishlanguage career in journalism in 1978 and broke the story of the 1981 El Mozote mas- sacre by the army in El Salvador. She has written extensively about Latin America for the Spanish-language media and her writing has been published in the “New Yorker,” the “New York Review of Books” and “National Geographic Magazine.” She is the author of eight books, including “The Heart That Bleeds” and “Looking for History.” She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a George Polk Award and an International Womens’ Media Foundation Lifetime Achievement

Award.

As a teacher, Guillermoprieto taught the inaugural journalism workshop at the Foundation for New Journalism in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1995, at the request of Gabriel García Márquez and was on its staff through 2010. She has been a visiting professor in both Latin American history and journalism at Chicago University, Harvard, USCBerkeley and Princeton. She will begin her tenure at the Annandale-on-Hudson school in New York in the fall semester.

No

BY BILL HELTZEL Bheltzel@westfairinc.com

Two alleged Chinese agents have been charged with bribing an undercover federal agent who they thought was an IRS official helping them sabotage the Falun Gong spiritual movement in Orange County.

They were tripped up by the undercover agent posing as an IRS official, a paid informant, recorded conversations and court-ordered wire taps that exposed a plan to challenge the tax-exempt status of a Falun Gong charitable organization.

The criminal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court, White Plains, does not identify the charity. But Dragon Springs Buddhist Inc. is the nonprofit organization that runs a 393-acre compound in Cuddebackville, near Middletown, where Falun Gong and the Shen Yun dance company are headquartered.

The compound is a refuge for Falun Gong practitioners who were persecuted,