[Photograph by RAY SKWIRE]
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Spielberg was inspired by his 1993 Holocaust epic “Schindler’s List” to establish the Shoah Foundation, which gathers video testimonials from Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses to use as teaching tools for current and future generations. Shoah is the Hebrew word for Holocaust. Today, the foundation’s Visual History Archive is one of the world’s largest video libraries, with nearly 52,000 testimonials from 56 countries and in 32 languages. Its goal is to provide the videos to scholars and educators as a way of educating young people about the suffering caused by xenophobia around the world. Roberts, 
who first met Spielberg shortly after Comcast’s bought a controlling interest of NBCUniversal in January, said it was “an easy ’yes’ to want to help.” Comcast has made survivor testimonials available free to subscribers through its on-demand, online and iPad services. The company also is providing technical assistance for an application called IWitness, which will deliver lesson plans and online access to 1,000 of its video testimonials when it launches by the end of this year, Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith said. MORE
RELATED: Free speech online has come under withering attack from the astroturf lobby — corporate front groups that are determined to hand control of the Internet to companies like AT&T and Comcast. They’ve joined the forces of the Tea Party with pro-corporate attack groups like Americans for Prosperity to urge weak members of Congress to betray the public interest by voting to strip the Federal Communications Commission of its ability to protect our basic freedom to access an open Internet. And 
betray us is exactly what House representatives did earlier this month, passing a “Resolution of Disapproval” (H.J. Res. 37), which is designed to let phone and cable companies block any speech they don’t like, charge users anything they can get away with, and hold innovation hostage to their profit margins. The aim of the front groups supporting this industry agenda is to stoke partisan rancor and fear over a principle called Net Neutrality — a basic rule that keeps service providers from deciding what content we get to see and share via digital networks. A favorite line of theirs is to portray Net Neutrality as part of a Marxist conspiracy, dismissing the vast coalition of people of every political stripe who believe that an open Internet is a basic requirement of a healthy, modern democracy. MORE